Message to My Daughter

I saw this movie in 1976 while I was pregnant with my son. I thought I would never stop crying....(actually I haven't) but I remember if I had a girl I was going to name her Miranda...his name is Matthew so that never happened but it made an impact on me. I am going to get if for my 21 year old daughter to watch since she has a one year old now. My daughter was on her way to have an abortion, but did not do it. She decided to keep her child even though there would be a lot of difficulty since her father and I are divorced and I live in another state now. She has not been diagnosed with a terminal illness however leaving a recorded message to our daughters is not a bad idea. As we grow and age and times change basically we all have the same human behaviors and feelings of those who have gone before us, the fears and rejection. There is no greater rejection than abortion even though it is a woman's right to choose.

This is a movie ahead of its time in its portrayal of a troubled young woman who decides not to have an abortion. In her tapes to her daughter, she is real, angry at times, hostile to her own parents. When I saw it years ago on TV I remember a different soundtrack, a John Denver one, with "sunshine on my shoulder" being the theme. I must have mixed up movies. The movie itself left a lasting impression on me, as my mother had died two years before. I bought it the other day. It is dated and rather choppy now. The daughter's character is not fully explored but the mother's is. A good double hanky number.

I'm watching it as I type.

Bonnie Bedelia. I am always reminded of how beautiful she is and that she looks like Molly Shannon, formerly of Saturday Night Live, I think, anyway.

I had heard of her Oscar nominated performance in "Heart Like A Wheel" a movie about race car driver Shirley Muldowney, and I knew Bedelia was in the Die-hard movies, two of them anyway.

I looked her name up to see what else she might have done that I had seen.

Message to My Daughter, a 1973 telemovie.

About the right time. A quick read of the plot confirmed it. This is what I saw way back then.

I didn't watch all of it, but it seemed incredibly intriguing, and I do remember the abortion attempt, but she changed her mind.

It was the year of Roe v. Wade.

So was this movie pro abortion or anti abortion? 1973 wasn't a tame year for subject matter, but it is astonishing that more isn't heard about this film.

I saw this, at age eleven, when it first aired in 1973. My parents had left us alone for the evening, and I'm certain they would have been quite angry if they'd known we had watched a film involving a potential abortion. Frankly, I can't even imagine a current network TV movie daring to approach this subject in the same way. This film had a lasting impression on me - so much so, that I clipped the TV listing from the paper, and put it in my box of "favorite movies" after I saw it. I just came upon this title again, while performing a cross-reference IMDb search. Now, if I can only find that box with all those TV clippings - I'd love to revisit the films which meant so much to me as a child.

I watched this movie in the '70s and was very moved by it. I think it was ahead of its time in that it addressed the issue of abortion by showing how dangerous it was for young women at the time as the procedure was not regulated. It also showed how judgmental society was at that time. The young woman's parents were more concerned about what their neighbors would say rather than what was happening to their daughter. The 3 main actors played their parts with strength and understatement.

I still remember the poem by Christina Rossetti,the young woman read to her daughter "When I am dead, my dearest . . . "