The Abortion Pill and Other Myths: Medication Abortion on Screen

Abstract

Abortions are more prominent in popular culture than they have ever been. While abortion used to rarely feature on mainstream television and was frequently viewed by producers and channel executives as risky and polemical, recent years have seen an increase in abortion storylines. This is beginning to reflect the fact that abortion is a common event with an estimated one in four US women having an abortion, and television narratives are more frequently showing abortion as a positive decision. However, inaccuracies in how abortions are shown still exist. In this chapter I address one specific inaccuracy: the rarity of medication abortions on television. There are two broad types of induced abortion: medical and surgical. A surgical abortion is a minor physical procedure that directly terminates a pregnancy while a medication or medical abortion is the taking of medications to end a pregnancy. Most abortions in the US are now performed using medications, but abortions shown on screen have been disproportionately surgical. Here, I examine a selection from the minority of television plotlines that do portray medication abortions in order to explore how they represent them, with a specific focus on the accuracy of the portrayals. The television programs analyzed are Vida, Standing Up, and Scenes from a Marriage, which are all recent television programs that show a main character accessing a medication abortion. First, I give an overview of medication abortion followed by a summary of why abortion misinformation on screen matters and a description of the methodology used to analyze the plotlines. The chapter then presents an analysis of the above television programs’ abortion plotlines through two themes: accessing the abortion and experiencing the abortion. I then conclude the paper by considering the future of the representation of medication abortion, particularly in a post-Roe world.