In Season 3 of ABC’s A Million Little Things, Maggie Bloom (Allison Miller, right) decides to have an abortion.
Hollywood’s Role in Stigmatizing Abortion
walk. An American Horror Story: Cult episode depicted a woman hemorrhaging on a gurney post-abortion. In many separate plotlines on the period piece Call the Midwife, characters are often rendered infertile or suffer grisly deaths as a result of unsafe illegal abortions. Some of this is driven by the conventions of drama, particularly in the genres noted above (legal procedural, horror, and hisincreased dramatically; we tracked just 13 torical fiction). Risk makes for a compelling plotlines in 2016, compared to 47 in 2021. Yet narrative; even car accidents on television the stubborn endurance of cultural myths are often more dangerous than they are in about abortion—that it is unsafe, that it is real life. But while viewers have a way of uncommon, or that it is easy to access—is contextualizing car accidents with their no doubt facilitated, at least in part, by the own experiences of regularly driving or riding in vehicles, they do not have a similar ubiquity of these myths on-screen. Take safety, for example. Abortion is ability to do so for abortion. Even though abortion procedures are very comone of the safest outpatient proceMovies and dures in the United States; fewer mon (about 1 in 4 women will have Television than 0.25 percent of abortions result an abortion by age 45), they are often in a major complication. Yet on television, hidden from view. Few people, especially nearly 19 percent of abortions result in a those who are anti-abortion, know that their major, adverse medical complication, a loved ones have had abortions. This creates a huge personal, political, over 70-fold exaggeration. On a 2021 Law & Order: SVU episode, a character unknow- and cultural void in our collective underingly ingests the abortion pills mifepris- standing of abortion experiences, and leaves tone and misoprostol and is later discovered people lacking the understanding that a unconscious and bleeding out on the side- medically risky abortion on TV is depicting
And its responsibility now By Steph Herold As we collectively reel from the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, every reproductive rights movement conflict, messaging failure, and cultural flashpoint is facing public scrutiny, in an attempt to place a retrospective narrative on the unraveling of abortion rights in the United States. Many are looking to entertainment media, noting its role in promoting support for other progressive issues, and asking, Why hasn’t Hollywood told more stories about abortion? But this is the wrong question. Hollywood has always told stories about abortion, from the earliest silent films to television’s pre-Technicolor era. In recent years, the number of abortion stories on-screen has
AUGUST 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 61
