American film and television has always included stories about abortion. Abortion Onscreen is a research program aimed at investigating these narratives and analyzing their impact on broader social and cultural understandings of abortion.
We publish rigorous research closely examining the way abortion providers, patients, procedures, and barriers to access are portrayed on television, and how this has changed over time. We have investigated if and how abortion plotlines have (and haven’t) changed in a post-Dobbs environment. We analyzed the way genre and narrative purpose shape abortion stories, looked at how race functions in these narratives, and explored how motherhood shapes onscreen abortion plotlines. We also conducted in-depth interviews with Hollywood showrunners, producers, and writers to understand what motivates them to bring abortion stories from page to screen, and what barriers they encounter along the way.
We have studied how abortion stories onscreen influence audiences, examining the impact of documentaries like After Tiller and television shows like Grey’s Anatomy and Little Fires Everywhere. We research how abortion plotlines do and do not impact audience knowledge, attitudes, and behavioral intent related to abortion, and if and how depictions of characters taking abortion pills shape audience beliefs about abortion safety.
We also maintain a comprehensive, publicly-available Abortion Onscreen Database, tracking depictions of abortion on scripted television and film that is viewable by audiences in the United States. This database includes depictions of abortion released as far back 1916, and as recently as this past week.
To capture cultural conversations about abortion as they occur, every December we publish a report on that year’s abortion depictions, whether a character obtained, discussed, or disclosed a past abortion. Our most recent reports include: