(LifeSiteNews) — According to a new report, the big problem with TV these days is that there aren’t enough abortions taking place on screen.
On one hand, according to the annual “Abortion Onscreen” report, there is good news. There were some onscreen abortions – 66 abortion storylines in 2024 – including in shows like The Pitt, Call the Midwife, Love is Blind, Family Guy, and South Park.
“But in the past few years, there’s been a significant drop in the number of characters who actually went through with an abortion,” writes Neda Ulaby at NPR, who takes it for granted that this is a bad thing. “37% obtained an abortion in 2025, a 14% decline since 2023.”
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The “Abortion Onscreen” report is put out each year by Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, a research program on abortion at the University of California San Fransico. “I think there still is a lot of stigma, even in allegedly liberal Hollywood,” researcher Steph Herold told NPR.
In fact, “allegedly liberal Hollywood” has worked hard to push abortion onscreen over the last several years. In 2020, director Eliza Hittman released a road trip drama about two young girls crossing state lines to get an abortion. Rachel Lee Goldenberg’s Unpregnant, released that same year on HBO Max, reprised the stillborn “abortion comedy” genre with the story of a 17-year-old girl heading off on an abortion road trip with her sidekick from Missouri, which requires parental consent, to New Mexico, which does not.
With the overturn of Roe v. Wade, the Hollywood propaganda machine ramped up. In 2022, Call Jane starring Elizabeth Banks, a long-time abortion activist who serves as the chair of the Center for Reproductive Rights Creative Council, was released. The Center for Reproductive Rights is an organization that works toward the legalization and de-stigmatization of abortion – their “creative council” is made up of storytellers who work to help them do it.
Call Jane tells the story of an underground network of activists who helped provide illegal abortions to women in Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s. They are portrayed as heroes, and the director explained that the intent of the film was to normalize abortion.
These efforts, however, are apparently not good enough. As NPR put it:
On TV, 80% of characters seeking abortions are upper or middle class, but in real life, most abortion patients struggle to make ends meet. “This [disparity] obscures the role that poverty plays in obstructing access to abortion, and perhaps explains why we so rarely see plotlines in which characters wrestle with financial barriers to abortion access,” the study says. This year, a teenager on The Pitt sought abortion pills to end her pregnancy – one of only three stories depicting medication abortion out of 65 plotlines about abortion this year.
Even more importantly, Herold wishes that Hollywood could do a better job stigmatizing pro-life religious people and celebrating pro-abortion religious people:
Fewer characters this year received emotional support around their abortions, and more shows, she said, including Chicago Med, 1923, Breathless and Secrets We Keep featured plotlines that emphasized shame and stigma around abortions, especially because of religion. These storylines, the report says, “both obscure the diversity of religious observance among people having abortions, portraying religious patients as exclusively Christian, and also only associating religion with prohibiting abortion, instead of being a meaningful or supportive part of someone’s abortion decision-making and experience.”
Hollywood has been doing a pretty good job of that, too. Unpregnant portrays pro-lifers as creepy “Jesus freaks” (who at one point attempt a kidnapping), and the film is packed with Planned Parenthood talking points. Rachel Goldenberg stated that she was passionate about the film because of her own abortion: “I’m proud to be working on a project that will hopefully help destigmatize and normalize abortion.” It is filled with scenes like this:
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According to Herold, the one “bright spot” when looking at the year’s onscreen abortion stories is that, as NPR put it, a “slight majority of characters in abortion plotlines are people of color – and although they are by far the majority of abortion seekers in real life, this marks a notable improvement from a decade ago, when TV shows more often portrayed women seeking abortions as wealthy and white.”
If you’re an abortion activist, more non-white women having abortions in TV shows is a good thing. Because who doesn’t want to watch characters on screen discover they are pregnant and then decide to have an abortion as their evening entertainment?
