[Were seeing more scenes of people having to cross state lines for
an abortion, running up against gestational limits, and other barriers
mimicking the news.]
[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

HOW TV SHOWS CHANGED THEIR ABORTION PLOTLINES AFTER DOBBS  
[[link removed]]


 

Lorena O’Neil
December 15, 2022
Jezebel
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ We're seeing more scenes of people having to cross state lines for
an abortion, running up against gestational limits, and other barriers
mimicking the news. _

GREYS ANATOMY - When I Get to the Border Bailey and Addison take a
road trip to volunteer at a family planning center, but a patients
ectopic pregnancy leads to complications., Photo: Liliane Lathan/ABC
via Getty Images (Getty Images)

 

Truth or Fiction? A doctor in Idaho tells a pregnant working mom she
has a cesarean scar ectopic pregnancy, a rare but life-threatening
medical complication in which the embryo implants onto a c-section
scar. Although time is of the essence, the Idaho doctor is nervous
about the legal implications of an abortion, because he can still hear
a heartbeat, so he refuses to provide her life-saving treatment. The
39-year-old is forced to travel across the border to Washington, but
even though she’s accompanied by two doctors, one of whom is an
OB-GYN, the van gets stuck in traffic. Her pregnancy ruptures and she
bleeds out on the side of the road, leaving behind a husband and a
daughter who is about to turn 6.

If this anecdote sounds familiar, you might be a Shonda Rhimes fan:
The storyline was a plot in _Grey’s Anatomy _episode “When I Get
to the Border” that aired in November. After the woman dies, Addison
Montgomery (played by Kate Walsh) anguishes about her unnecessary
death, saying, “How are we supposed to treat patients if we’re
hamstrung by laws that are written by people that are so far away from
this?”

Her words, when I watched the episode, felt like deja vu. The day
before it aired, I had spoken to doctors in Louisiana about how
challenging it has become to provide medical care within the bounds
of the law
[[link removed]].
And here I was (in what had started out as a relaxing bubble bath)
watching a fictional woman dying from lack of care because a vague
abortion law spooked her doctor.

These kinds of scenes used to be pretty rare on mainstream TV—but in
the aftermath of the Supreme Court overturning _Roe v. Wade_,
abortion plotlines are starting to look a lot like the actual news. An
annual Abortion Onscreen
[[link removed]] report
released Thursday by Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health
(ANSIRH) found that of the 60 abortion plotlines in 2022, a third
portrayed legal barriers to abortion access. Last year, only two of
the 47 abortion plotlines on TV had anything to do with contemporary
barriers to access, like having to travel across state lines.

Researcher Steph Herold, who tracks abortion portrayals
[[link removed]] in
entertainment, told me in an interview that these very real and honest
scenes are a welcome shift in television. “I didn’t expect that at
all, even though the landscape has changed,” she said. In addition
to long distance drives to overrun abortion clinics, she said
television series also included depictions of challenges like
gestational age limits, financial assistance, childcare, as well as
what she thinks is the first depiction of an abortion fund worker.
“It shows that writers, producers and networks really want to tell
this story and shape them and want to reflect reality,” says Herold.

_P-Valley_, a drama series about people working at a Mississippi strip
club, depicted a Black mother and daughter enduring multiple abortion
restrictions. They travel to Jackson where they learn the 14-year-old
daughter Terricka is only two days away from missing the 15-week
gestational cutoff date. They check into a hotel for a mandatory
24-hour waiting period. “This episode is about two Black women
trying to access medical care and what that means and what they have
to endure,” says Herold. She praised _P-Valley_ for centering the
stories of southern, Black characters and contextualizing them within
a “racist, sexist healthcare system.” She said the “Jackson”
episode associated abortion with love and care and support.

“We felt it our responsibility to depict the war on Black women’s
bodies raging in this conservative state,” _P-Valley_’s creator
and showrunner Katori Hall wrote in a _Hollywood Reporter _
[[link removed]]essay
about the episode. “I am thankful that as a storyteller I have the
platform to create empathy where law and policy have failed.”

ANSIRH’s report found that while a “huge leap” has been made in
depicting barriers, the demographics of the people who most commonly
encounter these restrictions in real life are not accurately
represented. In 2022, 58 percent of TV characters who obtained
abortion were white cisgender women, while in reality white women make
up only about a third of the U.S. abortion patient population.

“Characters on TV who get abortions are often younger, whiter and
wealthier compared to the actual population of people who bear the
brunt of abortion restrictions in the U.S., like parents of color who
are struggling to make ends meet,” said Herold. Eighty percent of
the characters facing barriers to abortion access on television were
white and either middle class or wealthy.

Her hunch is that storytellers often have a misconception that if
white audiences saw that even people like them are affected by bans,
then things would change. “I wish that’s how it works, but it
doesn’t, so you might as well show the reality of it and build
empathy,” she said.

Interestingly, ANSIRH’s report found that only four plotlines
portrayed someone having a medication abortion onscreen in 2022, and
no stories at all depicted characters safely self-managing an abortion
with pills. Herold did point out that _Station 19_ and _Grey’s
Anatomy_ included doctors accurately detailing the abortion pill
protocol, which, given the strong fan base of the shows, gives her
hope the shows spread knowledge about the safe procedure.

On the other side of the coin is _Law and Order_, which is also a
repeat offender in abortion misinformation (although it did have one
of the first post-_Roe_ portrayals on television). Herold says the
series, as well as _Law and Order: SVU_, often talks about
mifepristone and misoprostol showing up in blood toxicology screens,
which is categorically untrue.

“That’s so wrong. I just worry that will seep into people’s
minds, contributing to a lot of fear,” said Herold. “If there is
one thing I could change, as tiny as it is, that would be it.”

Nevertheless, seeing more true-to-life abortion stories on screen (and
just more abortion plotlines in general) goes a long way toward
destigmatizing the procedure and humanizing the horror stories we keep
reading in the news. And while it’s certainly no silver lining in
the context of losing our reproductive rights, it’s a step in the
right direction for Hollywood.

* abortion
[[link removed]]
* Dobbs v. Jackson
[[link removed]]
* television programming
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]