The lies of the TV abortion storyline

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

65% : "Thanksgiving 1994" opens with a bit of foreshadowing as Roseanne establishes her perspective by pranking anti-abortion protesters outside a clinic.
52% : Mrs. Herrera wants an abortion so that she can continue attending business school and avoid needing to rely on government assistance programs.
49% : Looking back on how abortion came into our living rooms starting in the 1960s and persisted into our audience-fragmented streaming era can teach us how these stories taught, shaped, and contributed to today's public discourse about abortion.
48% : It isn't hyperbolic to say that television significantly changed the way America understood abortion and, as a result, deeply influenced public policy.
45% : Communication researcher Celeste Condit emphasizes that despite such plots articulating positions of choice, most of them "explicitly highlighted the values of childbearing, family, and mothering in the face of the potential threat to these values abortion represents.
44% : The Defenders was the first series to mention abortion, although the procedure did not include a main character.
44% : Except abortion.
43% : Abortion was frequently represented as medically dangerous, as happening much more rarely than in actuality, and as mostly sought by demographics that don't match national trends.
40% : Roseanne's ambivalence causes conflict with Dan, but by the end of "Maybe Baby," a second test shows a normally developing fetus and abortion is no longer discussed as an option.
39% : Gretchen Sisson and Katrina Kimport, researchers at the University of California San Francisco, argued in 2014 that, over time, these narratives collectively created "common cultural ideas about what pregnancy, abortion, and women seeking abortion are like.
38% : For decades, abortion on television was largely depicted as a debate in narrative form, one that pitted melodramatic anti- and pro-abortion rights stances against each other through characters audiences knew and loved.
38% : Issues like breast cancer, domestic violence, single motherhood, rape, working life, dating, and abortion were all explored from 8 to 11 pm.
37% : " The message is that abortion is the enemy of motherhood, and motherhood is the natural desire of women.
36% : Abortion was shown as morally ambiguous, a necessary evil, regrettable, a consequence, a binary choice against parenthood, and/or reserved for specific examples of desperate need.
35% : Julia's friend Sarah says she can't support abortion since she is an adoptee who could have been aborted by her birth mother.
34% : These three tropes couched abortion in terms of high moral conflict, making for good stories but inaccurate portrayals.
32% : From the origins of television all the way through the past decade, overwhelmingly male TV writers created plot lines that framed abortion as a moral issue, amping up conflict for maximum emotional journeys.
29% : On May 5, 2021, state Rep. Shelby Slawson introduced Senate Bill 8, a law that the Supreme Court allowed to go into effect that bans abortion after six weeks, by telling her mother's pregnancy story.
22% : In execution, these plots often created an unintentional binary that sanctified motherhood and villainized abortion.

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