This Is How TV Shows Took On A Post-Roe America This Year

Several shows reverted to a trope that was much more common on TV in the 1990s and early 2000s, according to a new report.

By Marina Fang
Dec 19, 2023

2023 was the first full year of living in a post-Roe United States, when many people across the country directly experienced the enormous ramifications of last year’s Supreme Court decision dismantling Roe v. Wade and federal abortion protections.

Pop culture can give audiences a window into these kinds of seismic moments, telling stories that help audiences understand and empathize. However, with some noteworthy exceptions, many TV shows in 2023 failed to meet the moment, according to the newest “Abortion Onscreen” report, shared exclusively with HuffPost ahead of its release Tuesday.

Continued: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/abortion-stories-on-tv-2023_n_657bbdb1e4b036ecab446888

19.12.2023

Film, Art, Books

News

abortion on TV

Abortion Onscreen Project

Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health

And Just Like That

Grey's Anatomy

self-managed abortion

Steph Herold

The Morning Show

United States

Remembering Norman Lear’s Most Controversial Episode

A two-part November 1972 episode of “Maude,” in which the title character decides to get an abortion, still seems radical, particularly after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

By Esther Zuckerman
Dec. 7, 2023

Norman Lear, who died this week at 101, left behind a legacy of groundbreaking television. But there was perhaps no hour of TV on his lengthy résumé more controversial than a two-part episode of the CBS sitcom “Maude,” from the show’s first season.

Titled “Maude’s Dilemma,” it aired on consecutive weeks in November 1972 and follows the 47-year-old Maude, a grandmother played by Bea Arthur, as she learns she is pregnant and decides ultimately to get an abortion. In the aftermath, advertisers dropped the show and network affiliates refused to air reruns.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/07/arts/television/norman-lear-maude-abortion.html

07.12.2023

abortion on TV

Bea Arthur

Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

Maude's abortion

Norman Lear

Tracey Scott Wilson

USA – Bye bye baby? The rise of abortion playlists

Abortion is generally understood as something sad or shameful, but a new trend of feel-good playlists rejects the stigma around the procedure entirely

7 September 2023
Halima Jibril

Abortion is not funny. That’s the view held by many people on the topic, anyway. In 2012, Sarah Silverman was made to apologise for talking too “casually about abortion” on social media. The comedian posted a picture of her inflated stomach after eating a burrito and joked that she “got a quickie aborsh in case R v W gets overturned”. When the film Obvious Child, dubbed the first “abortion rom-com,” premiered in 2014, one of its stars, Jenny Slate, told The Guardian that the “movie isn’t saying that abortions are funny. It’s saying that people are funny.” That same year, Mindy Kaling told Flare that her gynaecologist character in The Mindy Project would not perform an abortion, as it “would be demeaning to the topic to talk about it in a half-hour sitcom”. Most recently, And Just Like That, the puzzling sequel to Sex and the City, included an abortion storyline in their second season but refused to use the word “abortion”. Instead, they fearfully tiptoed around it as if saying it would leave them struck by lightning.

Continued: https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/60760/1/having-an-abortion-listen-to-an-abortion-playlist-spotify-termination-stigma

07.09.2023

Examining how Hollywood portrays abortion access

A researcher from the University of California says that the majority of television characters who obtained abortions faced few barriers

Stephanie Herold, The Conversation
June 18, 2023

Two doctors sit, despondent, on the side of a busy road as they watch an EMT zip up the body of their patient into a body bag. The patient died as a direct result of a fatal ectopic pregnancy, which her OB-GYN refused to treat because of a new anti-abortion law in her home state.

Tears in her eyes, one of the doctors responds to questions from the EMT about the death. Then she shouts: “It’s the lawmakers, they should actually be made to come out here … look at the carnage they’ve caused. I mean, how are we supposed to be doctors? Women’s lives are on the line, and our hands that are trained to help them, our hands are tied.”

Continued: https://www.longmontleader.com/beyond-local/beyond-local-examining-how-hollywood-portrays-abortion-access-7140325

18.06.2023

USA – ‘Love Is Blind,’ ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ and more: How abortion’s portrayal on TV is changing

A researcher found more plotlines around and more mentions of abortion on TV this year — though wealthy White characters are still overrepresented.

Jennifer Gerson
December 15, 2022

For the past five years, researcher Steph Herold has studied portrayals of abortion in television and film as part of the Abortion Onscreen initiative.

The latest study by Herold, a research analyst at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) at the University of California-San Francisco’s Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health spans this year. It found 60 abortion plotlines or mentions from 52 distinct television shows, well outnumbering the 47 abortion plotlines in 42 shows seen in 2021.

Continued: https://19thnews.org/2022/12/abortion-portrayal-television-movies-after-dobbs/

15.12.2022

Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health

ANSIRH

Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health

Gray's Anatomy

Steph Herold

United States

Why Hollywood keeps getting abortion wrong

This researcher interviewed dozens of writers, creators, and showrunners about onscreen abortion. Here’s what she learned.

By Alissa Wilkinson
Aug 9, 2022

We’re a screen-soaked culture, and that means that what we see on TV and in movies often serves as a framework to look at the world around us. That’s certainly true for abortion. It’s still rare to see an abortion depicted, and even more rare to see it in a situation that matches the circumstances of most abortions in America; research has found that the most common abortion patient is a low-income, unmarried young mother, without a college degree, who is seeking her first abortion. The majority of abortion patients in America are non-white.

Yet that’s not the average depiction. And this affects not just what people think about abortion, but how viewers treat people who seek abortions, as well as how they think about public policy.

Continued: https://www.vox.com/culture/23298225/hollywood-abortion-tv-portrayal

09.08.2022

Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health

Steph Herold

United States

Why authentic abortion stories in TV and film are a sign of the times in post-Roe era

Hollywood has rich history of abortion storytelling, according to researcher

Jenna Benchetrit · CBC News
Aug 06, 2022

In 2004, a Canadian TV show made headlines for a controversial episode in which a pregnant teenage girl decides, much to her boyfriend's distress, to get an abortion. Her mother drives her to the clinic.

Yes, it was Degrassi: The Next Generation — and the infamous episode, entitled Accidents Will Happen, was postponed for American viewers after a U.S. cable channel decided to pull it before it could air.

Continued: https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/abortion-storytelling-tv-film-1.6543210

USA – Medication Abortion Is the Future, so Why Don’t TV Shows Depict It More?

"This year, what's happening politically right now is just so divorced from the representations of abortion that we're seeing on TV."

Dec 14, 2021
Caroline Reilly, Rewire News

Abortion is normal and common, but you wouldn’t know it from watching television. Just ask Steph Herold, a research analyst with Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) who studies onscreen abortion narratives and how they impact viewers’ understanding of abortion care.

The results are mixed. In 2021, Herold and her colleagues at ANSIRH’s Abortion Onscreen project found 47 abortion plotlines on 42 television shows, from The Handmaid’s Tale to This Is Us.

Continued: https://rewirenewsgroup.com/article/2021/12/14/medication-abortion-is-the-future-so-why-dont-tv-shows-depict-it-more/

The 8th: Ireland, the abortion referendum. You can feel the tectonic plates shifting

TV: This highly watchable film chronicles the Repeal side’s winning campaign of 2018

Wed, Aug 4, 2021
Ed Power

The historic significance of the vote to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, in the referendum of 2018, was lost on nobody at the time. Three years later, The 8th (RTÉ One, Wednesday, 9.35pm) captures the sense that tectonic plates were shifting under Irish society as the electorate went to the polls to allow abortion in Ireland.

The 8th, which comes to television after a video-on-demand run earlier this year, is told largely from the perspective of the Repeal campaign, particularly that of the veteran women’s-rights advocate Ailbhe Smyth. The point she and other campaigners make over and over is that, although the vote was of course about restoring to women their bodily autonomy, the wider context was the State’s beginning a long journey of atonement for decades of institutionalised misogyny.

Continued: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio-web/the-8th-ireland-the-abortion-referendum-you-can-feel-the-tectonic-plates-shifting-1.4638914

Are we making progress in depicting abortion on screen?

Analysis of the past 60 years of how abortion has been portrayed in film and TV reveals how many negative tropes still endure.

BY KATHARINE SWINDELLS
13 MAY 2021

Although you might not naturally see similarities between BAFTA TV nominees I May Destroy You, Bridgerton, and the latest documentary from filmmaker Deeyah Khan, they all share a common thread in their depiction and discussion of abortion.

A study of the past 60 years of film and television shows how far we have come in stories that portray abortion, but also highlights the endurance of negative tropes that perpetuate misrepresentation and stigma.

Continued: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/tv-radio/2021/05/are-we-making-progress-depicting-abortion-screen