The Entertainment Industry’s Responsibility to Address Abortion Access

Whether we like it or not, what we see on our screens sets the stage for how we interpret the world around us. When it comes to the media’s depictions of abortion, what we most often see may not accurately depict the reality of people’s experiences with abortion. While onscreen abortion representation may have increased in recent decades, it hasn’t expanded to include the total breadth of these stories, according to a recent University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative report published on August 24.

The history of onscreen abortion dates back to 1916 with the release of the anti-abortion silent film Where Are My Children?. The short movie chronicles the story of an attorney who wishes to have a family with his wife; however, his wife chooses to abort her pregnancies out of the fear that having children will ruin her social life. As problematic as that depiction was, in the following decades, any depictions at all were rare. “The best that you could do would be to have a character consider it,” Steph Herold, an analyst with the Abortion Onscreen initiative at UC San Francisco’s Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health research group, told Vox. “Then that character would either change their mind or have a miscarriage on the way to the clinic. If you had a character even talk about it, that was huge.”

This has changed in recent years, however. According to the University of California at San Francisco’s Advancing New Standards of Reproductive Health research program, there were at least 33 distinct reproductive rights storylines in movies and television released in 2021, which means these storylines have nearly tripled in the last decade.

But the topic still remains taboo to some extent. For example, Herold told Vox about a TV series focused on an abortion clinic and its staff, which attracted a big producer and big-name actors, but no network wanted to greenlight it. The feedback, according to Herold, was that networks “would never have a show that focused entirely on abortion, that it was too sad, that it was a downer, that it was a bummer.”

The quality of abortion stories that make it to screen is also questionable, according to the study. Abortion is one of the safest outpatient procedures in the US, with less than 0.25% of abortions resulting in major complications. However, roughly 18% of onscreen abortions result in major complications, such as infertility or death. By raising the complication rate by nearly 70%, these shows and movies suggest that the procedure is far riskier than it is. Other studies have resulted in similar findings; a 2021 Abortion Onscreen report found that the media continues to over-represent white women as the recipients of abortion (the majority of abortions in the US are performed on people of color) and that 14% of abortion depictions portrayed the recipient as already having children when 59% do in reality.

To understand why media storytellers depict abortion this way, the researchers behind the study reached out to 46 showrunners, producers, writers, executive producers, and story editors to get their answers. One of the prevailing facts unearthed in the study was the storytellers’ desire to upend the stigmatizing narratives surrounding abortion, the first of which was the common depiction of abortion as a tragedy. “[Writers] have this sense that they wanted to write something new, where abortion is just a routine medical procedure,” instead of always being performed out of desperation. There seems to be the desire to find alternative sources for drama and conflict, “taking the emotion out of the medical procedure itself, and putting the emotion on getting access to the abortion, or figuring out who to tell about the abortion.”

But there was also a prevailing fear that abortion plot lines left in the wrong hands would be distilled down to pure drama instead of portraying the nuance and normality of said procedures. One interviewee stated, “Once a male showrunner decides the direction of an abortion plot line, it’s hard to get him to change his mind, even if he had the details about the abortion wrong.” Another added, “You can hire as many women as you want, but if the people in power don’t listen to them, it doesn’t matter.” Without a supportive infrastructure and major players in the production who are “willing to go to bat” for abortion plot lines, many creatives felt unable to tell nuanced abortion stories.

Of course, the question of representation in the media becomes all the more significant in light of the historic Supreme Court decision rolling back Roe v. Wade — and makes depicting onscreen abortions accurately all the more important. It’s “not only necessary to find legal solutions to protect marginalized communities, but it is essential to educate and inform audiences about these topics,” according to Stacy L. Smith, the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative founder. “Entertainment has a unique ability to reach viewers and provide that education,” she added.

Recent films have done this well, including Natalie Morales’ Plan B, Rachel Lee Goldenberg’s Unpregnant, and Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always. All three films depict the obstacles that stand in the way of abortion access or, in the case of Plan B, emergency contraception. All three films examine how legal age restrictions, travel requirements, ambivalent medical care providers, and financial burdens plague the process of obtaining an abortion. These movies also prove accurate depictions aren’t exclusive to one genre: Unpregnant and Plan B are comedies, whereas Never Rarely Sometimes Always is a drama.

Frustratingly, even the best depictions of abortion in the media can seem feeble in response to a Supreme Court ruling. However, the need for accurate abortion stories is one tool we have left to educate people about the procedure. Even if these stories can’t change laws, it’s up to the industry to continue educating the public or risk seeing onscreen abortion become as misrepresented as it is in society.