Medically accurate storylines about abortion can help educate and inform viewers “across all political leanings,” according to a new study from USC Annenberg’s Norman Lear Center.
In their paper “Abortion Depictions on Television: Impact on Audience Knowledge and Mobilization,” researchers surveyed 1,016 adult television viewers of three television episodes with depictions of the procedure that were deemed to be medically sound. The viewers of these storylines were tested for their knowledge of abortion and their interest in taking action after watching the 2022 A Million Little Things episode “Fresh Start,” the 2022 Better Things episode “No, I’m Not Gonna Tell Her” or the 2022 Station 19 episode “The Little Things You Do Together.”
Viewers who were casual, even occasional watchers of the series and did not recall the specific abortion episodes in question were surveyed alongside those who did remember the content of the specific storylines. Researchers gathered participants’ demographic information, including their political leanings. The survey took place in May 2022, before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June of that year, ending the constitutional right to abortion.
The A Million Little Things episode featured a radio announcer offering advice to a mother who is deciding whether to share with her family that she is having an abortion. The study’s authors found that viewers, primarily women, who watched the episode were found to have greater understanding of the expense of an abortion in the first trimester. These viewers, especially women and politically moderate people, also demonstrated a better knowledge of where to send a friend who is seeking an abortion. Male respondents exhibited a better understanding of medication abortion.
The Better Things episode (which initiated a storyline spanning multiple episodes), meanwhile, depicted a character’s daughter withholding her abortion from her mother. Researchers found that conservative and moderate participants with exposure to this plotline demonstrated better knowledge of the safety of abortion.
The Station 19 episode depicted a character having a medication abortion with the full support of her partner. Viewers of this episode showed a fuller understanding of the prevalence of first-trimester abortions (a trend that was especially strong for conservative and liberal viewers), while liberal viewers better understood the religious diversity of abortion patients.
Notably, the authors write, “Station 19 was the only one of the three storylines for which viewers took a greater number of actions in support of abortion access” — with viewers of all political leanings more likely to pen a social media post about reproductive rights after watching the episode and liberal viewers more likely to comment on a social media post, attend a rally or join a volunteer group related to abortion.
The paper’s findings were unveiled at an event on Thursday featuring Texas OB-GYN and UT Southwestern Medical Center clinical assistant professor Dr. Austin Dennard, The Girls on the Bus showrunner Rina Mimoun, USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center Media Impact Project senior researcher Soraya Giaccardi and UCLA Law’s Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy executive director Melissa Goodman.
The researchers’ focus on factual depictions of abortion is significant because few studies have drilled down on the effect of accurate storylines in particular. Indeed, past research of onscreen depictions of abortion has largely found that the procedure “has often been depicted in over-dramatized and inaccurate ways in scripted entertainment,” the USC study authors write. One previous study of TV abortion storylines airing between 2005 and 2016, for instance, found that portrayals generally overstated medical threats posed by the procedure. Another found that between 2015 and 2019 these plotlines tended to minimize the number of people of color, low-income people and parents who seek abortions compared to the demographics of real-life U.S. patients.
The USC report turned its attention instead on TV episodes that were deemed to contain “medically accurate information about abortion, emotional nuance and discussion of abortion stigma.” The accurate portrayals of the procedure seem to have made a difference. Overall, the results of this study “underscore the power of entertainment media to educate viewers, correct misinformation, and in some cases, mobilize audiences to action,” the authors state.