Across America, abortion has gotten harder and harder to access ― and heading into a second Trump administration, restrictions on abortion are likely to tighten further still. But pop culture hasn’t been accurately reflecting that reality.
In 2024, TV shows that took on abortion largely failed to depict the many barriers to abortion access or reflect the real-life demographics of abortion patients — and in some cases, reinforced misleading tropes, according to a new report about abortion representation on television.
Each year since 2016, abortion researcher Steph Herold and her colleagues at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) at the University of California, San Francisco have maintained a database of abortion storylines in film and television.
This year, she found at least 67 abortion-related storylines on TV across 65 different scripted and reality shows, the most she has ever documented. These shows and storylines were varied, from Bravo’s “Real Housewives of New York,” when cast member Erin Lichy decided to publicly share her abortion story, to the Disney+ limited series “Pauline,” which dedicated much of its six-episode run to its protagonist trying to get an abortion. And for the first time, just over half of the characters in the storylines Herold tracked were people of color — an improvement from previous years, when the vast majority of abortion storylines on TV involved white characters.
However, as has been the case in prior years, there were plenty of missed opportunities to tell a wide range of abortion stories.
“We’re really not seeing the reality of what abortion access is like in the U.S. reflected on screen,” as Herold told HuffPost ahead of the report’s release on Wednesday. In a time of rampant misinformation, pop culture can play a crucial role in directing people toward accurate and empathetic stories about abortion, she said.
“My hope is that TV shows that people watch, where they love the characters and they really have these kind of parasocial relationships with them, some of these shows can share some kind of accurate information — and particularly about medication abortion and self-managed abortion — especially since it seems like more and more legislatures are trying to restrict information-sharing about abortion or helping people access abortion,” Herold said.
“I feel stressed, as I’m sure many other advocates are, seeing that there are increasingly few ways for people to get accurate information about abortion — and it really should not have to be from our TV shows. But if that’s one extra place that people can go, where they see something that leads them to get the health information that they need, then great.”
But many shows in 2024 fell short, according to Herold’s research, and several turned to some sensationalized and regressive storylines.
The storylines Herold and her team collect can involve a character getting an abortion, disclosing a past abortion, considering an abortion, or talking about abortion generally. This year, about half of the storylines fell into the latter two categories, and only 42% were about a character actually getting an abortion or disclosing a past abortion.
Herold has also observed a reliance on “troubling tropes” that portray abortions as moments of extreme melodrama. For instance, someone going to an abortion clinic, only to decide at the last minute to not go through with the abortion, is a common dramatic device on TV but is pretty rare in real life.
According to Herold’s data, this happened on several shows this year, including the PBS series “Alice & Jack,” as well as on two Netflix international shows: “Desperate Lies” and “Sisters’ Feud.”
“If someone has jumped through all the hoops to get to the abortion clinic, chances are pretty low that they’re gonna change their mind,” she said.
Another bothersome trope in abortion storylines, Herold said, is when a character on the cusp of having an abortion has a miscarriage instead, as happened on the Netflix series “Hierarchy” and the daytime soap “Days of Our Lives” this year.
While miscarriage is also important to portray onscreen, employing it as a way to sidestep abortion “just seems like a little loophole for the writers to get out of having to actually reckon with what that character having an abortion would actually be like,” Herold said.
Some shows also have turned to plotlines that involve negative health outcomes from abortion, like infertility, or having a character experience medical complications or even die from an abortion. Herold warned they can contribute to misinformation because these outcomes are very unlikely.
“Obviously, these things are very dramatic and make for good TV — but reinforce these myths about abortion and this misinformation because people are so confused, not just about abortion legality, but abortion safety,” Herold said. “Having a character actually have an abortion would require her jumping through all those hoops, having a support person, having the providers tell her how safe something is, showing on screen what it would be like for her to go through that. There’s just so much more opportunity for that person’s humanity and experience to come through.”
Another perpetual pattern Herold has documented is that relatively few shows grapple with barriers to abortion access, such as logistics and cost. Shows that illustrate the challenges of getting an abortion tend to be historical dramas, and the main obstacle the character faces is usually abortion being illegal, Herold said.
She said she hopes to see more shows depicting contemporary barriers to abortion. A notable exception this year was the British sitcom “Big Mood,” set in modern-day London. One of the show’s protagonists, Eddie (Lydia West), is seen wrangling with the complexities of health insurance, as well as figuring out how to get enough money to pay for her abortion.
One reason why many of these shows do not address the financial barriers to abortion is because they often center wealthy characters getting an abortion, one of several trends in representation that Herold has seen over the years. Another is a persistent lack of LGBTQ+ characters included in abortion storylines. And while Herold is encouraged by this year’s overall uptick in characters of color, Latina characters were disproportionately underrepresented. Moreover, there were zero Native characters or biracial/multiracial characters in any of this year’s abortion storylines.
“This is still really like a ‘white, wealthy characters’ issue on TV, for the most part. And though obviously that’s not the most important part, it’s definitely a big piece of onscreen representation of abortion that’s missing,” she said. “It’s not just what we see onscreen but also what’s not there that gives people an incomplete picture of abortion.”
Also largely missing from shows about abortion this year were mentions of medication abortion, which is now the most common type of abortion — and is increasingly under attack from conservative state legislators and judges. According to Herold’s data, only two out of the 67 abortion plotlines on TV this year involved medication abortion. One of them, the Max drama series “The Girls on the Bus,” had what to Herold’s knowledge is the first TV depiction of accessing abortion care through telehealth: Sadie (Melissa Benoist) has a video call with an abortion provider, who then mails her abortion pills.
By genre, drama shows are often the most likely to include abortion-related plots, especially legal and medical procedurals like “Law & Order” and “Grey’s Anatomy.” This year, several of those series continued to depict the consequences of the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, such as characters having to go to another state to access abortion care.
Herold would really love to see more comedies take on abortion, and argued there’s so much humor to mine from the experience of getting an abortion or dealing with the absurdity of draconian abortion laws.
“I think we had kind of like a short golden era of abortion comedy: ‘BoJack Horseman’ and ‘Jane the Virgin’ and ‘Veep,’ making all kinds of jokes about abortion restrictions and the funny parts of having or trying to get an abortion,” she said. “So I would really love to see more in-depth exploration of that: the hijinks that can happen on the way to the clinic or at the clinic, or trying to get the money for the abortion. There just seem to me to be a lot of comedic opportunities there.
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“Especially because the abortion access landscape is so grim, and policy discussions about abortion tend to be so serious,” she added, “I think there’s an opportunity for there to be a release valve, for people to see, like, OK, yes, this is a serious issue and experience to a lot of people — but also, just like every human experience, there’s room for love and laughing and joy.”