By Variety | Created at 2026-06-10 16:17:10 | Updated at 2026-06-10 21:18:17
5 hours ago
On Nov. 14, 1972, Maude Findlay, a 47-year-old woman living in suburban New York with her fourth husband found herself unexpectedly pregnant. It was a year before Roe vs. Wade was passed, and like many women in America, Maude wasn’t interested in having another child and found herself weighing an abortion. The dilemma played out over a two-episode arc of “Maude,” a hit CBS sitcom that was produced by Norman Lear, who was no stranger to taking on hot button issues in the “All in the Family” media empire he had built. But even Lear struggled to get this story on the air.
“We did the first part of the two abortion episode, and then we were told that we would not be filming the second half until we premiered. If our numbers were not good, we wouldn’t even film the other one,” remembers Adrienne Barbeau, who played Maude’s daughter Carol on the show. “There was a lot of pressure.”
When the episode did air, multiple stations in the South refused to air it. But the numbers were strong enough to convince CBS to let Lear wrap up the story. Maude ultimately opted to go through with the procedure, with abortion portrayed on the program as a safe medical option for women who didn’t want to have a baby. Lear could have had Maude suffer a miscarriage, but he ultimately decided that doing so would be a “cop out.”
The show reflected changing social mores. But a new documentary, “Hollywood Does Abortion,” which premiered at Tribeca Festival argues the entertainment industry’s portrayal of abortion often shaped the public’s views on the procedure, fostering a culture that viewed it as disgraceful or dangerous. In programs like “Roseanne” and “Party of Five” or movies like “Juno,” characters often agonized over whether to have the kid and either had a false positive or miscarriage that prevented them from needing to make a choice or opted to give birth. Other films and series like “Dirty Dancing” or “The Sopranos” depicted women nearly dying from their abortions or having longterm medical consequences that left them unable to have children. The negative portrait of abortion in these films and series contributed to is counterintuitive because Hollywood is often seen as a bastion of liberal politics.
“The majority of people making movies and TV are pro-choice and pro-science,” says Rachel Bloom, the creator of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” and a producer on the documentary.
Bloom thinks in most cases writers were just looking to use abortion as “a dramatic device.” “But you do have a responsibility to be accurate,” she says.
And, as the documentary notes, the complications that many films and shows depicted don’t align with the facts. Less than 0.25% of abortions in the U.S. result in a major complication, and less than 1% of abortions result in a complication that is treated in an emergency room, according to a study by the University of California, San Francisco’s Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health. Moreover, abortion is more common than some of these shows made it out to be, with Planned Parenthood reporting that one in four women have had an abortion by the time they are 45 years old.
“Hollywood Does Abortion” notes that the change in how abortion was depicted in film coincided with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 and the rise of the religious right. It accelerated as abortion proponents changed their messaging around the procedure with the likes of Hillary Clinton arguing that it should be “safe, legal and rare.”
“We think of Hollywood as being very progressive, yet we went through a pretty big era where abortion was severely stigmatized,” says Barbara Attie, one of the documentary’s co-directors. “It was made to be shameful. There would be a plot line where somebody would thinking about getting an abortion. They would ask their friends what they should do, and they would agonize over it, and then they would miscarry. The kind of messaging that TV and films were giving us was eye-opening.”
Even characters who had abortions described them as wrenching experiences. “Hollywood Does Abortion” contains footage from an episode of “Sex and the City” in which Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) becomes pregnant by her ex-boyfriend. She ultimately keeps the baby, but only after consulting with Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) who says she is still haunted by her decision to have an abortion years earlier.
“It continues this idea that there will be long-term regret,” says Janet Goldwater, one of the documentary’s co-directors. “There’s a study that shows people who are turned away and who don’t have abortions are actually the ones who experience regret and long-term negative financial and emotional repercussions. And it turns out that people who have abortions don’t experience much regret. They experience a lot of relief.”
The politics around abortion shifted once again in 2022 when the U.S. Supreme Court officially overturned Roe v. Wade in the landmark Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, leaving it up to the states to decide whether the procedure should be legal. Once again, that’s changed how abortion is dramatized in pop culture.
“There’s more abortion being portrayed last year than ever, which is positive,” says Goldwater. “But we’re still not seeing very many barriers to abortion. It’s mostly people making an appointment at the Planned Parenthood down the block.”
That doesn’t reflect the reality for people in the 13 states where abortion is banned with almost no exceptions, or in the many other states where new restrictions have been instituted. The makers of “Hollywood Does Abortion” feel like even these more recent portrayals fall short of the groundbreaking two-episode arc on “Maude.”
“It still feels revolutionary,” says Mike Attie, the film’s co-director. “How often do we see a woman taking control and having agency over her decision making?”
For Barbeau, it’s upsetting to consider the setbacks that the pro-choice movement has suffered in the more than 50 years since the “Maude” abortion episodes aired.
“We’ve gone backwards,” she says. “It is as important and as timely now as it was then, if not more so. There are three or four generations of young women who lived under Roe v. Wade. They didn’t have any idea up until 2022 what it would be like to have that law overturned. I did.”
