Elsevier

Contraception

Volume 89, Issue 5, May 2014, Pages 413-418
Contraception

Original research article
Telling stories about abortion: abortion-related plots in American film and television, 1916–2013

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.contraception.2013.12.015Get rights and content

Abstract

Objectives

Popular discourse on abortion in film and television assumes that abortions are under- and misrepresented. Research indicates that such representations influence public perception of abortion care and may play a role in the production of social myths around abortion, with consequences for women’s experience of abortion. To date, abortion plotlines in American film and television have not been systematically tracked and analyzed.

Study design

A comprehensive online search was conducted to identify all representations of pregnancy decision making and abortion in American film and television through January 2013. Search results were coded for year, pregnancy decision and mortality outcome.

Results

A total of 310 plotlines were identified, with an overall upward trend over time in the number of representations of abortion decision making. Of these plotlines, 173 (55.8%) resulted in abortion, 80 (25.8%) in parenting, 13 (4.2%) in adoption and 21 (6.7%) in pregnancy loss, and 16 (5.1%) were unresolved. A total of 13.5% (n= 42) of stories ended with the death of the woman who considered an abortion, whether or not she obtained one.

Conclusions

Abortion-related plotlines occur more frequently than popular discourse assumes. Year-to-year variation in frequency suggests an interactive relationship between media representations, cultural attitudes and policies around abortion regulation, consistent with cultural theory of the relationship between media products and social beliefs. Patterns of outcomes and rates of mortality are not representative of real experience and may contribute to social myths around abortion. The narrative linking of pregnancy termination with mortality is of particular note, supporting the social myth associating abortion with death.

Implications

This analysis empirically describes the number of abortion-related plotlines in American film and television. It contributes to the systematic evaluation of the portrayal of abortion in popular culture and provides abortion care professionals and advocates with an initial accurate window into cultural stories being told about abortion.

Introduction

In the past decade, popular discourse has alternately declared abortion to be “television’s most persistent taboo” [1], “no longer taboo” [2] and “still taboo” [3]. News accounts have asserted that abortion is underrepresented in film and television [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], estimating the quantity of abortion-related plotlines anywhere from “a single instance” [11] to “on average only once every two and a half years since 1972” [12], with the further assertion that narrative devices such as false pregnancies or pregnancy losses are specifically used to avoid abortion-related storylines [4], [7]. The presumption that abortion stories are rare, avoided and enduringly taboo in American popular culture is prevalent. Yet, a comprehensive investigation of the number of abortion stories in film and television and the pregnancy outcomes in such stories has remained absent from the literature, leaving researchers without a clear picture of how popular culture portrays abortion.

Research analyzing specific abortion stories on film and television has found that, like many depictions of medical experiences [13], [14], they are not always representative of the reality of abortion care in the United States [15], [16], [17], [18], inaccurately depicting medical procedures, clinics and who seeks abortions for what reasons. Such inaccuracies in entertainment television typically function in ways that uphold conservative, hegemonic structures [19], though we do not know whether or how this applies to abortion stories. Few scholars have examined fictional depictions of abortion decision making. Condit [20] represents a notable exception, finding that the overall pattern of fictional unintended pregnancies resolution in the 1980s overrelied on the narrative trope of a false pregnancy. Nonetheless, research has not systematically examined the number and overall outcome trends in abortion-related plotlines. The dearth of such an investigation into these trends is problematic, as without one we do not know if and in what ways abortion is represented inaccurately.

This absence is of consequence as research has shown that media portrayals influence viewers through a variety of means. Scholars have shown that news coverage, particularly in the form of in-depth stories about people with whom viewers identify, can sway not only personal opinions but also political priorities [21]. In-depth fictional programming, especially plotlines showcasing characters in whom viewers are invested, functions in a similar way [22], [23]. Scholars have demonstrated that this holds for fictional depictions of pregnancy decision making and abortion. Mulligan and Habel [24] found that after viewing one of two fictional films about pregnancy-decision making — one in which abortion was framed in a favorable light and one in which it was portrayed more negatively — subjects were significantly more likely to support access to legal abortion in a greater range of circumstances after viewing the former film. On an aggregate scale, abortion stories, to the extent that they repeat similar themes, can alter public understanding [25]: the cinematic construction of a poignant ultrasound scene, the rhetorical avoidance of the word “abortion” or the circumstances of a fictional character’s pregnancy all cultivate a common cultural idea about what pregnancy, abortion and women seeking abortion are like [16], [20], [26], [27], [28] and may play a role in the production of social myths about abortion and abortion stigma, with consequences for the lived experience of women seeking abortions [29].

In this paper, we conduct a census of plotlines that engage with abortion in US television and film since the beginning of American cinema. In addition to empirically describing their number, we make an opening contribution to developing a systematic evaluation of abortion decision making, analyzing the plotlines for the pregnancy outcome. This work provides abortion care professionals and women's health advocates with an initial accurate window into the cultural stories being told about abortion.

Section snippets

Methods

To produce a comprehensive list of all film and television representations of abortion, we conducted several online searches. First, we searched the International Movie Database (IMDB.com) for all titles that were tagged with “abortion” as a keyword or contained the word “abortion” in their plot description. As a catalog of 2.5 million titles from 1887 to the present — including films, television series and television episodes — that has been both crowd- and industry-sourced, IMDB represents

Results

The IMDB searches yielded 472 titles, Google search results found an additional 43 titles, and the review of the published literature added 35 more unique titles. Of these 550 titles, 208 were excluded for relevance. The remaining 342 titles represented 385 individual abortion plotlines, which were categorized as follows: 291 plotlines had abortion as a major plot point; 19 plotlines had an abortion provider as a primary character; 7 plotlines solely investigated the death of an abortion

Discussion

This analysis established the volume and distribution over time of abortion-related plotlines in American television and film, offering a useful starting point for considering ways abortion is represented in culture. We found that abortion stories are more common and have always been more frequent than popular discourse suggests [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12]. We further document a general growth trend in the quantity of abortion-related plotlines over time and,

Acknowledgments

Funding for this analysis was provided by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation (2012-37676).

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    Disclosures/conflict of interest: none.

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