Fact vs Fiction: TV Distorts the Reality Of Abortion Health Care, Making It A Luxury For White Women
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Is TV's perceptions of who gets abortions in America clouding the real facts? On July 14, 2015, anti-bortion activist David Daleiden and his nonprofit Center for Medical Progress (CMP) released a series of deceptive and deliberately edited videos designed to ignite legislative and public perception outrage against Planned Parenthood.
The videos -- strongly invalidated in the courts -- captured the attention of Republican lawmakers and presidential candidates, causing Rep. Diane Black (R-Tenn) to introduce the Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2015, seeking to place an immediate moratorium of any federal funding to Planned Parenthood, until lawmakers conducted yet another investigation into the organization. Mother Jones shares a new story summarizing one of the least objective, state and federal investigation mockeries in recent memory.
An interesting new analysis on abortion examines the way in which TV shows actually feed into Republican mythology that single, white, self-obsessed, heartless young career women rejecting motherhood are the primary user of abortion services.
A series of charts from ANSIRH, an organization working to ensure that reproductive health care and policy are grounded in evidence and not extreme politics, effectively summarizes the TV mythology around abortion, versus the reality. ANSIRH is a program of the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco.
In 2015, we counted 20 times American television shows discussed abortion. For some shows, this was just a quick mention, but for 12 of these cases, it was a central part of an ongoing story.
Each of these 12 storylines included a character making (or who had made) a decision about getting an abortion. In 8 cases, the character actually got an abortion—that means 67% of the characters depicted consider abortion had an abortion. (This is on par with our 2014 data, where 11 abortion stories featured 7 characters getting abortions. However, it does represent a noticeable uptick from previous decades, where only 50% of characters considering abortion obtained one.) Three abortions were shown onscreen, including 2 contemporary abortion procedures, which had not previously been shown on television. Additionally, we saw the first portrayal of safe, accurate, and effective use of medication abortion.
ANSIRH summarizes each of the storylines here. Note that the study reviewed depictions of abortion on US T shows from 2005 to 2014, examing distributors including Netflix and Showtime.
These simple charts show how TV distorts the reality of real-life abortion statistics.
Self-Centered White Women, AKA Feminists
While the study researcher Gretchen Sisson didn't specifically link 'feminism' to the abortion study narrative, she did tell NPR that TV helps "build an interesting social myth, which is that women who get abortions aren't mothers and they don't want to be mothers." The facts of abortion on a wide scale are that "the majority of women getting abortions are already parenting, and the vast majority intend to parent during their lives."
Television characters seeking abortions are depicted as doing no because having a child would interfere with educational or career plans, fueling the mythology of the fabricated, feminist first mentality of women who embrace women's rights and self-actualization.
"Taken together, this pattern of reasons can contribute to the construction of abortion as a self-focused decision, and to the belief that abortions are 'wanted' because of personal desires rather than 'needed' because of circumstances such as poverty," the researchers say in their report on TV depictions." Sisson explains.
In a distortion of facts, about 10% of TV characters die from their abortions, when the real death rate is 0.0015 percent -- or nothing. Republicans and the abortions rights movement has used the ruse of protecting women's health to justify the extreme medical safety requirements placed on abortion facilities in the US.
The study will continue its focus in upcoming months, looking at how abortion providers are portrayed on TV vs the reality of these providers.
Related Reading from RedTracker:
Texas law sharply curbs action to abortion, clinics tell Supreme Court Reuters
Poll: Support for Abortion Highest in Two Years RH Reality Check
About 76 percent of Democratic poll respondents think abortion should be legal all or most of the time, up slightly from 69 percent at the beginning of 2015. Fifty-four percent of independents believe abortion should be legal all or most of the time, up from 43 percent in January, along with 40 percent of Republicans, up from 35 percent at the start of 2015.
