Maude: The Abortion Story

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HomeschoolDad

HomeschoolDad

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After 47 years, I finally watched these episodes (it was a 2-part story). I watched them on DailyMotion; it’s a pain navigating the ads.

Has anyone else seen it, and what was your reaction?

My takeaway on this: there is no way this is going to come out right, but it was far more tastefully done than I expected. I never want to see ANY pro-abortion propaganda come out, but it was much more even-handed than I thought it would be. Maude was determined to have the baby until almost the very end of the story, and the pro-abortion arguments were pretty much confined to “it’s legal now” (in New York State).

I would have been much more pleased to see the following episode begin something like this: Maude waking up with Walter the next morning and telling him “Walter, I had the strangest dream last night… oh, never mind!” (thinking of Newhart or Dallas here…)

A personal note: I was 11 or 12 years old when this first aired, and I did not see it, though I was aware of it. My parents took me to a department store in Cincinnati around that time (we weren’t Catholic yet) and someone had put a small sticker on the glass door — “abortion is murder” with a silhouette of a fetus. This made an impression on me.
 
The silence here makes me think that I must be dating myself. I have been on this earth just shy of 60 years (and I am counting womb time). I just realised that anyone who was 21 when that show came out would now be 68 years old.

Seems like yesterday.

This dawned on me when I reflected on the fact that some people might ask “What’s ‘Maude’?”.

Life passes fast.
 
My mom used to love that show…until that episode aired…she never watched it again. Maude was before my time but I’ve seen reruns. I’ve never seen that episode though and don’t think I could.
 
I was a little young for the original run, but I have seen the episode in reruns. I think it’s a reflection of the time and what was happening across the country with new laws. Although I do agree with the outcome, I think the episode was well written and acted.
 
I am old enough to remember it, but I was pretty young when it was on the air. I was probably still watching Sesame Street and Mister Rogers, or maybe I had graduated to the Electric Company by then. Although, I do remember watching All in the Family, so maybe Maude just didn’t stick.
 
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I never saw this because our pastor made a point of announcing from the pulpit when it came out originally that we should not watch it (very rare for those days, I can’t remember another time when a TV show or movie was denounced in that way ever) and my mother, who didn’t watch that show anyway, made a point of being doubly sure not to watch it from then on, ever.

Later we did watch and enjoy “Golden Girls” with Bea Arthur, but not Maude.

I saw a couple episodes as an adult here and there (not the abortion one) and honestly didn’t find it that funny or entertaining.
 
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Tis_Bearself said:
Later we did watch and enjoy “Golden Girls” with Bea Arthur, but not Maude.
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I LOVE the Golden Girls! Now that I think about it, that show also had a lot of controversial topics especially in the later seasons…they never did do an abortion show though even when they had the teen pregnancy episode.

(To this day my mom always refers to Bea Arthur as Maude…no matter what lol!)
 
My mother had a “best friend” for 60 years who actually drove her up a wall but for various reasons, like my mother having no family in the city where my dad’s job was, she was kind of stuck with this person. Their interactions were often just like Bea Arthur and Betty White on the show. Her ditsy friend was Betty as “Rose”.
 
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I liked that show. Didn’t see that episode, though. Just thought I’d say somebody else is old enough to remember it. Actually, I think they occasionally show an episode on one of the tertiary channels, even now.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
I never saw this because our pastor made a point of announcing from the pulpit when it came out originally that we should not watch it (very rare for those days, I can’t remember another time when a TV show or movie was denounced in that way ever) and my mother, who didn’t watch that show anyway, made a point of being doubly sure not to watch it from then on, ever.

Later we did watch and enjoy “Golden Girls” with Bea Arthur, but not Maude.

I saw a couple episodes as an adult here and there (not the abortion one) and honestly didn’t find it that funny or entertaining.
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I don’t remember hearing any guidance on that show - the only guidance on popular media I remember was when our parish bulletin told us to throw anything by Chick Publications in the garbage or in the fireplace. 🙂
 
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Fortunately we never heard that so I can still get a chuckle out of Chick Tracts. Some of the ones that don’t blast Catholics are pretty good and may have brought some people to Jesus.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
Fortunately we never heard that so I can still get a chuckle out of Chick Tracts. Some of the ones that don’t blast Catholics are pretty good and may have brought some people to Jesus.
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I remember the Chick book The Next Step when I was younger- seemed benign to me compared to his loony anti Catholic conspiracy theories.
 
The two most recent I read were “Kitty in the Window” and “Gomez is Coming.” Both quite good. I also liked “Holy Joe”. I think all of us sometimes either feel like Holy Joe or feel like the sergeant.
 
Of course I remember ‘Maude’ the tv show (that was Bea Arthur who was also one of the Golden Girls if I’m not mistaken) but more because it was a popular culture touchstone and not because I, a child at the time, actually watched it. I also have vague recollections of some controversy towards the end of its run - must be the episodes you’re talking about - but again because of my age I probably didn’t fully understand what it was about. Or I just forgot.
 
The other thing with that show Maude is it bore zero resemblance to the lives of anyone I knew growing up. I probably met dozens of Archie Bunker types. But my family didn’t know anyone or have anyone in the family who had been married four times. We had some widows and a tiny handful of divorced people but they were divorced like, once, not repeatedly, and you didn’t talk about it. Almost everybody got married and stayed married for life.
 
Norman Lear was a liberal propagandist who crafted some better-than-average situation comedies with strong main characters and decent scripts. The shows have not aged particularly well, in that they dealt with 1970s social issues that are mostly lost on the present generation.

What he didn’t foresee is that Archie Bunker would become a much-beloved character rather than the despicable one he was supposed to be.

In our home, MeTV and Antenna TV are just about all we ever watch on broadcast television. Johnny Carson last night was a class act all the way. The old rerun networks are a Godsend.
 
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I saw those episodes (in reruns) many years ago and remember being quite shocked. Understand this was somewhere around 2000 or so and still, it really caught me off guard that such a frank discussion of abortion would take place on a network program. I struggled with it — if I remember correctly, it was full of the typical women’s lib rhetoric of the day.

I always found Maude as a character annoying. Did like the theme song though.
 
Theme songs/ opening credit sequences are almost always my favorite parts of all TV shows.
Especially vintage shows, the theme songs were better then.

 
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