Study: TV shows don't reflect the reality of abortion

HuffPost

A report from the University of California, San Francisco titled "Abortion Onscreen in 2021" found that TV doesn't adequetely show the barriors people who have abortions increasingly face. “What really got to me about this year — and over the past couple of years, really — is we’ve seen this mounting number, this incredible increase in abortion restrictions that we’ve never seen before, in real life. And that’s just not translating to the lives of characters on TV. They’re just totally divorced from the reality of abortion access,” said Steph Herold, a researcher at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco, and one of the authors of the report. Most abortion patients “face at least one logistical or financial obstacle when obtaining an abortion,” the report states. But as The Huffington Post's Marina Fang explains, "most TV shows do not depict this at all, showing a character easily locating an abortion provider, paying for the abortion, taking time off from work, having insurance coverage or living in an area with relatively few abortion restrictions, like New York or Los Angeles. This goes hand in hand with the demographic disconnect between TV and reality. The majority of abortion patients are people of color, and many are low-income people, who tend to face increased barriers to abortion access. But the vast majority of TV characters in abortion-related storylines are white and wealthy. According to the report, 68% of TV characters in abortion-related storylines in 2021 were white. Only two shows featured Black women in these storylines: ABC’s The Good Doctor and HBO Max’s Love Life. More shows this year did feature Latina and Asian characters in abortion-related storylines." But as the report states, "all but one of these characters were on television shows that originated outside the United States, and thus did not represent the racialized experience of accessing an abortion in the U.S."