Most God-Awful Show that I’ve Ever Watched

I was sitting here today watching television while I worked. It was Antenna TV, channel 9.3, out of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Today, they say they are playing Norman Lear’s favorite episodes. Norman Lear is the fellow who brought us The Jeffersons, Good Times, All in the Family, and Maude, to name a few. Today, the show was Maude and the God-awful episode was called, “Maude’s Dilemma”. It’s a two-part episode, made in 1972, a year before Roe vs. Wade, and the topic was abortion.

In this episode, the title character, Maude (played by ultra-liberal Bea Arthur), finds out that she is pregnant at the age of 47. Her adult daughter finds out and starts spouting out all the reasons to have an abortion. She reminds her mother that she is “too old”, and that having a kid at that age would be an “inconvenience”. She tells her mother that abortion is accepted now, nothing to be ashamed of, and is as simple as going to the dentist. She harps and harps on her mother about having this abortion and at one point, Maude tells her daughter to get off of her back.

Now, the father of the child is Maude’s husband (second husband, not the father of the adult daughter), and he is almost 50 years old himself with no children. He tells Maude that he doesn’t care if she has the child or not, he only wants what she wants, and to ensure that Maude doesn’t get pregnant again, he rushes out and schedules a vasectomy after a round of golf.

I was so appalled at the show, the way they treat having children as such an inconvenience, and with such flippancy towards taking the life of an unborn child, that I couldn’t finish the show. I was hoping that maybe Maude would decide to have the child, but knowing a little bit about the show, I didn’t recall Maude having a young child. I looked it up on Google to find out the resolution and apparently, Maude decides to have the abortion. I couldn’t finish the episode. I had to turn it off.

The episode reeked, and I mean to high Heaven, of Nazi-style propaganda. I couldn’t see much difference between this episode’s treatment of the unborn vs. Hitler’s films about the dirty Jews. They both share a callous indifference towards life and both are masterfully created fictions that tell the audience that it’s okay to kill. They do their best to convince you, their audience, that there are reasons that these people shouldn’t live. It’s horrible.

Now, there are those out there who think there is a difference between killing Jews and killing the unborn, but I don’t. In both cases, you kill somebody. The only difference is that on one hand, you’re killing someone whose scream you can hear, on the other, they are silent.

Abortion is a horrible thing. Never should we allow the killing of the unborn because of inconvenience. Life is inconvenient. Allowing this reduces the value we as a society place on life and that is the whole point of the abortion movement, the assisted-suicide movement, and others who treat life the same way they would a wart.

Abortion is a medical procedure that should only be used in the most dire of cases. In any case, it should never be treated as a simple procedure, like going to the dentist. It should also never be done in a case where the child can be saved. Partial birth abortions should be outlawed. Anyone who supports them should be forced to watch an hour worth of video of “doctors” performing the procedure before they can advocate for the procedure. It’s gruesome. It’s not much different than Mengele’s “body-shop” in the concentration camps.

Abortion should only be allowed in the very early stages, preferably before there is a heart-beat. While I don’t believe in abortion at all, I believe this is a fair compromise. I, in opposition to my church, support contraception, but in no case, forced contraception (like the Chinese), in order to prevent pregnancies. This includes the “day-after” pill, if needed. While I would not wish my wife or daughter to use these things, I admit that I might change my mind should my wife or daughter be raped. Therefore, it should be an option.

In the end, this episode of Maude was disgusting. It’s appalling. It’s almost inhuman in how it treats human life. At one point, the daughter starts into an argument for population control (packing people in like sardines). Most people who support abortion love to use population control and “unwanted babies” as an argument for euthanasia. If these people feel the world is so overpopulated, we should designate a cliff for them to do their part by jumping off of it head-first. It’s always okay for them to prescribe death for someone else, just not them.