Television, film have misleading portrayals of abortion
Who and how women get them are not an accurate reflection of reality
Television and film featured 49 abortion storylines in its programming in the past year, according to a new report released by the University of California at San Francisco.
According to the report, half of those scenarios included a character who obtained an abortion or disclosed a past abortion. A quarter featured a character considering an abortion, and a quarter featured a discussion of abortion more broadly.
Logistical, financial and legal barriers to abortion access were portrayed in about a quarter of plotlines. This is fewer than in 2022, which saw one third of all abortion plotlines portraying barriers to access.
The demographic who gets abortions continues to be misrepresented on screen, with middle-class, wealthy, notably younger and childfree white women making up the majority. There were more medication abortion depictions this year.
According to researchers, other television shows reverted to a troubling trope seen in the early 1990’s and 2000’s: the averted abortion, which stigmatizes abortion by avoidance instead of providing more depth and nuance to depictions of miscarriage or pregnancy ambivalence.
“With the writers’ and actors’ union strikes now over, researchers hope that content creators will continue to expand on abortion storylines with more accurate context, like work-family considerations and pregnancy decision-making factors,” researchers wrote.