Elsevier

Women's Health Issues

Volume 29, Issue 1, January–February 2019, Pages 80-86
Women's Health Issues

Media Coverage of Health Issues
Coverage of Abortion in Select U.S. Newspapers

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.whi.2018.08.008Get rights and content

Abstract

Background and Objectives

News coverage can shape public understanding of policy issues in important ways. In the last decade, many new state-level abortion restrictions have been passed, often based on claims about the safety of abortion care, yet little is known about recent news coverage of abortion. This study analyzes a sample of news on abortion in the United States and explores the implications for reproductive health policymakers, practitioners, and advocates.

Methods

We analyzed a sample of news and opinion articles containing the term “abortion” published in three major U.S. newspaper sources in 2013 and 2016. The total sample was 783 unique pieces. We coded for story topics, references to fetal personhood, women's stories, and basic abortion facts. Three trained coders conducted the coding, with intercoder reliability rates ranging from 0.777 to 1.0.

Findings

Most of the time abortion appears in the news, it is merely mentioned, rather than discussed substantively. Abortion is covered as a political issue more than a health issue. The personal experiences of people who get abortions are present in only 4% of the sample, and language personifying the fetus appears more often than women's abortion stories. State abortion restrictions are newsworthy, yet basic facts on the commonality and safety of abortion are virtually absent.

Conclusions

This study suggests that the news does not support public understanding of abortion as a common, safe part of reproductive health care. Such framing may undermine public support for policies that protect access to this common health care service.

Section snippets

Background

A long history of communications research illuminates the power of the news to set public and policy agendas. Agenda-setting theory posits a positive relationship between the amount of news coverage given to an issue and the public's perception of that issue's importance (McCombs & Shaw, 1972). Many studies have concluded that news coverage is one of the most powerful predictors of public opinion and, by extension, national and local policy agendas (Rogers et al., 1993, Son and Weaver, 2006).

Of

Methods

To assemble the sample for content analysis, we searched the Nexis database for stories containing the word “abortion” in three major U.S. newspaper sources: The New York Times, the newspaper with the highest paid circulation in the United States1

Results

The 2013 sample was split fairly evenly between the three news sources: 36% from the Washington Post, 34% from The New York Times, and 30% from the Associated Press. The 2016 sample was dominated by the Washington Post, with 53% of pieces, followed by 25% in the Associated Press and 22% in The New York Times. This finding likely reflects a changed business model at the Post after its acquisition by Jeff Bezos in late 2013, leading to an expanded online news presence with more rapid publication

Discussion

Our study finds that, despite being a critical health service for women, abortion is not typically covered in U.S. newspapers as a health issue. Rarely included are facts that would help the public to understand the context of abortion as a safe and common health care service.

In fact, not only is abortion not portrayed as a common women's health issue, most of the time it is in the news, it is not discussed in depth at all. In this study, abortion in the news primarily serves as a political or

Conclusions

This study illuminates important themes in U.S. news coverage of abortion. Newspaper coverage of abortion does not support a public understanding of the issue as a common, safe reproductive health care service. Abortion appears in public discourse as a political issue more than a health issue. Women themselves rarely appear in news coverage of abortion, and when they do, their abortion stories do not reflect typical patients’ experiences of abortion in this country. If, as communications

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Diana Greene Foster for research support and helpful comments on early drafts, Debbie Nyugen for coding and administrative support, Lauryn Claassen for coding, Andrew Cheyne for sampling guidance, and Lori Dorfman for helpful comments on early drafts. Thanks to the anonymous reviewers whose feedback materially improved this work.

Katie Woodruff, MPH, DrPH, is a Public Health Social Scientist at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research explores public discourse and public policy on maternal and reproductive health in the United States.

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      Teenagers are likely to rely on anecdotal evidence, judging abortion as dangerous and difficult [7]. The media also plays a key role in shaping women's perceptions about abortion and its safety, as newspapers are more likely to report on state restrictions on abortion than about the safety of the procedure [8]. Popular media, such as movies and television shows, also contribute to public perceptions that abortion is unsafe [9].

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    Katie Woodruff, MPH, DrPH, is a Public Health Social Scientist at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research explores public discourse and public policy on maternal and reproductive health in the United States.

    Funding for this research was provided by The Susan Thompson Buffet Foundation, and the author was partially supported by National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) grant #T32 AA007240, “Graduate Training in Alcohol Problems: Alcohol-Related Disparities.” The funders had no involvement in study design, collection, analysis, interpretation, or writing of this work.

    Preliminary findings from earlier versions of this work were reported at the American Public Health Association annual meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, November 17, 2014, and the annual meeting of the National Abortion Federation in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, April 23, 2017.

    The author was a consulting researcher at ANSIRH/UCSF when this work was conducted.

    Present address: University of California, San Francisco, Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, 1330 Broadway, Suite 1100, Oakland, CA 94612. Permanent phone number: +1-510-986-8990.

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