"Family Guy" has never been a show to let tact stand in the way of a joke. From making a song about Down syndrome babies, to likening supporters of John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign to Nazis, there's almost no button the show won't press.
But it appears that Fox hit its own panic button to prevent a potentially controversial episode of the show from hitting the air last season.
In the never before seen "Partial Terms of Endearment, Lois Griffin debates whether or not she should she should abort a child she's carrying as a surrogate for a couple who are killed in a car crash. The episode will see the light of day when it gets a DVD release this September, according to Entertainment Weekly.
The cast of the show actually did a live reading of the episode last August before members of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and selected press.
The abortion episode was not the first one that Fox shelved due to fear of upsetting potential advertisers. In 2000, the network declined to air "When You Wish Upon a Weinstein," an episode when family patriarch Peter Griffin decides he wants to convert to Judaism after making a Jewish friend. That episode also received release on DVD and eventually was shown on-air.
