Norman Lear, the writer and producer behind the first scripted abortion on American primetime television, has died at age 101.
In 1972, just months before Roe v. Wade was decided, Lear pushed for the title character of his show “Maude,” played by Bea Arthur, to undergo an abortion after becoming pregnant at age 47. Americans were as deeply divided on abortion as ever in 1972 and the two-part episode, “Maude’s Dilemma,” was celebrated by abortion advocates as “groundbreaking.”
But the idea didn’t come to the writer’s room based on a desire to promote women’s so-called “rights.” The idea came from the notion of population control.
Abortion has never, at its core, been about the ‘freedom to choose.’
The synopsis
Maude learns she is pregnant and tells a couple of friends, her husband, and her daughter. Her daughter tells her that abortion is completely legal in their state of New York and that she should have one. Her husband has never fathered a child of his own but tells Maude that he will support whatever she decides to do. (It’s the classic line that men are now conditioned to say, but in reality, it leaves women feeling alone in the pregnancy.) Maude decides to abort their child.
After overcoming a last-minute panic by CBS, the episodes featuring Maude’s pregnancy and abortion aired on all but two of CBS’s nearly 200 affiliates. The abortion prompted nearly 7,000 letters in protest. By the time the episodes were rebroadcast in August 1973, a campaign had been organized against them by the United States Catholic Conference. This time around, about 40 affiliates did not air the reruns, no corporate sponsors bought commercial time, and CBS received over 17,000 letters of protest.
But regardless, abortion was on its way to being normalized in America.
Bea Arthur and Norman Lear during 1st Annual Comedy Awards at Hollywood Palladium in Hollywood, California, United States. (Photo by Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)
Normalizing abortion
Lear admitted that like many Americans, his own daughter disagreed with Maude undergoing an abortion. After watching a clip of the episode during the ABC special, “Norman Lear: 100 Years of Music and Laughter,” he explained, “I have a glorious daughter who disagrees with every bit of that. This is a glorious young woman in thousands of ways, but she will disagree about that loud and clear.”
In 2015, not much had changed. Americans were still divided on abortion. In an episode of the show “Scandal,” Kerry Washington’s character Olivia Pope underwent an abortion without the contemplation that Maude had and without mentioning it to anyone else as Maude did. Abortion had become not a ‘big decision’ but a simple one. Lear loved it.
“I love the way it was handled,” Lear said. “But it surprised me that it was so matter of fact.” He called it “frank” and “bold” but lamented that abortion was still controversial.
In 2017, he told Cosmopolitan Magazine “it’s pathetic” that there is still so much controversy surrounding abortion on television.
But that was all about to change.
In 2021, 47 abortion-related storylines were featured across 42 shows. In 2022, that number rose to 60 abortion stories (or mentions) among 52 shows. The pro-abortion Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) program at the University of California, San Francisco reported on the trend and celebrated the increase, claiming that these storylines came closer to reality than ever before because they mostly depicted women who were struggling to access abortion. The stories give the impression that women both want and need abortion. But those behind the push to legalize abortion were never concerned about what women wanted or needed.
“Maude” producer Rod Parker told The Chicago Tribune, “The funny thing is that initially, we weren’t even thinking abortion … The group Zero Population Growth announced they were giving a $10,000 prize for comedies that had something to do with controlling population, so everyone came in with ideas for vasectomies” (emphasis added).
Population control disguised as freedom
China was the first nation to openly and legally use abortion as a means of population control under its One-Child Policy. Forced abortions became common in the nation and the efforts of the government to curb population growth have had a devastating impact.
In the United States, population control has been more subtle. It’s cloaked in the euphemisms of ‘women’s rights,’ ‘reproductive rights,’ and ‘freedom to choose.’
In the early 1960s, there were calls at the national level to slow the population growth in the U.S. through coercion. But Planned Parenthood’s Dr. Alan Guttmacher advocated for “volunteerism” — meaning he felt the industry and its allies could convince women to reduce the population voluntarily. Guttmacher believed that the decriminalization of abortion would achieve population control by convincing women that abortion was empowerment — their own choice.
In 1969, the government asked Planned Parenthood for ideas on how to implement population control measures. Former Planned Parenthood vice president Frederick Jaffe complied a memo, which would become known as the Jaffe Memo. The memo offered ideas to slow the population growth — including the promotion of homosexuality, the delay of marriage, and a smaller family size. Jaffe’s memo also suggested putting birth control in the drinking water, reducing maternity leave benefits, and legalizing abortion on demand.
In a 1970 Cornell Symposium, Guttmacher declared that “unlimited abortion” was “the most effective way of reducing population growth.” He also said that if the world population growth had not dropped below 1.5 percent by 1980, “We’ll have to get tough.”
Looking back at U.S. history over the last 50 years, it’s clear that some of these ideas have been implemented. Young adults are waiting longer to get married, most couples want zero to two children, and being on birth control is an expectation of women. Under the guise of freedom, abortion was legalized in 1973. Today, research has found that about 64% of women who have had abortions have admitted they felt they didn’t freely choose to kill their preborn child but were pressured into it.
“Maude” appears to have been one of the very first efforts to push abortion into the mainstream and make it socially acceptable. The episodes lent support to decades of pro-abortion manipulation that has led to the deaths of more than 64 million children — so far. The birth rate has been declining in the U.S. (which was the goal of population control entities in promoting abortion), and in 2022, the U.S. fertility rate was just 1.7 children per woman — just slightly higher than Guttmacher’s goal of 1.5.
This means population control enthusiasts likely aren’t finished yet and we can expect more abortion-friendly storylines and propaganda.
