Where Can I Read Mary Worth Archives
Mary Worth on Teen‐age Pregnanc‐
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September 30, 1976
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Mary Worth, the colonnade of morality whose grandmotherly counsel has solved marital crises, patched upwardly spats betwixt parent and child, and taught families to cope with alcoholism, infidelity and emotional trouble for. more three decades, will exist asked to handle a new type of problem: the first illegitimate pregnancy in newspaper comic‐strip history.
"I recall we may shock some people," said Allen Saunders, Mary Worth's 77‐year‐erstwhile author, "simply we experience the problem it portrays is such a great trouble, and growing so terrifying fast, that we might serve a useful purpose in doing it."
More shocking to Mrs. Worth'southward followers, who have grown to look a somewhat Victorian repertory of advice, is that Mrs. Worth will non recommend that the young woman ally the child's begetter.
No 70‐Year‐Old Hippie
"We don't desire to turn Mary Worth into a 70‐year‐old hippie," Mr. Saunders said, "but she is tolerant and willing to consider new ideas."
While he asked that the actual ending not be revealed, Mr. Saunders said that an abortion was "never seriously considered" every bit an alternative for Karen Cooper, the comic strip's bright 17‐yr‐one-time daughter who discovers she is significant just after winning a national scholarship contest.
"We skipped that, mostly," said Mr. Saunders, who describes himself equally "sort of a Presbyterian."
"It will sort of exist hinted at in the conversations between Karen and her mother, simply nosotros felt it was so clinical to go into that," he said.
The management of the electric current story line reflects a serious change in both Mrs. Worth—who began her career in the 1930'south equally "Apple tree Mary," a kindly woman who dispensed apples and advice from a pushcart to support her crippled son—and her readers.
Doesn't Beloved the Father
Mr. Saunders speculated that, had he been able to run the strip a decade or two ago, Mrs. Worth "would probably take been a picayune more stern and Victorian" in her approach to the problem.
"I doubtable that 30 years ago she would have recommended marrying the male child, no matter what," he said.
Equally the story line adult this week (the plot will develop for well-nigh two more months), Miss Cooper has confessed that she neither loved nor specially liked the father of the child.
She volition go on, with Mary Worth'due south help, to sort out the options open to a pregnant, unwed teen‐ager. And, in the terminate, she will finish loftier school and go to college to pursue a career in medical research.
Co-ordinate to a spokesman for Field Enterprises, which syndicates Mary Worth to more than than 300 daily newspapers around the globe, there have been pregnancies in comic strips before, only never involving an unwed woman.
The spokesman, Kathy Kiabunde, said the company had no trouble approiing the strip, because Mr. Saunders and Ken Ernst, the illustrator, were "trying to show that this is not a glamormis thing—that it does break upward family life, that it'due south a hardship for the daughter, her baby, and her parents."
And she added that the syndicate had received "absolutely no complaints" about the subject affair.
"Doonesbury, which has a homosexual character, wound upwards winning Pulitzer Prize," Miss Kiabunde said. "Wouldn't you say that represents a alter in attitude?"
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1976/09/30/archives/mary-worth-on-teenage-pregnancy.html
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