18. How Anti-Abortion Bias Shapes Media Coverage

Written By Garnet Henderson

Whether on the news or in scripted television and movies, the abortion stories we see in media are often stigmatizing, inaccurate, or simply outdated. Two researchers tell us why that matters.

Guests:

Sources:

Logo by Kate Ryan, theme music by Lily Sloane. Additional music in this episode from Blue Dot Sessions. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

[00:00:00] Garnet Henderson: Hey everybody, Garnet here. This is our last episode of 2022, so before we get started, I just wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone who has listened to the show this year, especially those of you who have done something to support us, like donating, buying merch, or sharing the show with other people. As you've heard me say before, ACCESS is a truly independent production with no backing from any big media company or podcast network, and making this show takes a lot of work. So your contributions, in whatever form, literally keep the lights on around here. So thank you, and enjoy this episode. 

[intro music plays]

Hello and welcome to ACCESS, a podcast about abortion. I'm your host, Garnet Henderson, and today we're getting a little meta because we're talking about media portrayals of abortion. And I'm part of the media. I'm a journalist. But I hope that if you listen to access, you've noticed that the way we talk about abortion here is different from the abortion coverage you may have heard elsewhere. I've been reporting on abortion access and other reproductive health topics for almost a decade now. For most of my career, mainstream publications just haven't been that interested in stories about abortion. Certainly not the kind of nuanced stories that I wanted to tell. When major media outlets do cover abortion, they often frame it as a political debate rather than as a human rights issue. And because they believe that they need to give space to both sides of that political debate, they end up giving anti-abortion extremists a platform and helping them to spread misinformation. So, I wanted to do something really different, and that's how ACCESS was born. And now over two years after I started the show, we are seeing a big boom in abortion coverage because of the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. People are waking up to the fact that abortion access is in crisis in America. There's more interest now. But there is still so much that our country's biggest news outlets are getting wrong about abortion. And this has a tremendous ripple effect. Media coverage influences public opinion. It can drive us to fear or to complacency. And when it comes to abortion, when the information we hear in the news is inaccurate or incomplete, that has serious consequences for people who need abortions and the people who provide that care to them. So, to help us understand more about what exactly is wrong with media coverage of abortion, I spoke with Jasmine Geonzon a researcher at the Nonprofit Media Matters for America.

[00:03:30] Jasmine Geonzon: Media Matters is a watchdog organization that covers the landscape of all types of media, online, local, mainstream media, right wing media, print. And I have mainly been focused on abortion coverage in the mainstream and right wing media ecosystems.

[00:04:04] Garnet Henderson: One of the recent studies conducted by Jasmine and her colleagues looked at how major news outlets covered the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs versus Jackson Women's Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe versus Wade. And 

[00:04:20] Jasmine Geonzon: We conducted a study where we looked at 103 different news articles following the Dobbs decision in late June. And what we looked at were the top five print mainstream outlets. So we looked at the LA Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, since they're the biggest by circulation. And we found that at large, these mainstream outlets really failed to include critical context about the Dobbs decision, which really changes the accuracy and the quality of coverage that they're providing to their audiences of millions. We found that over three quarters of all the articles that we looked at excluded the fact that abortion rights are extremely popular among Americans and that the Dobbs decision is way out of line with what most people would want the Supreme Court to rule. We also found that even though Justice Clarence Thomas very explicitly stated that the Supreme Court should look at other precedents about privacy rights such as the right to contraception, such as the right to same sex marriage and same sex sexual activity, more than two thirds of the articles that we looked at completely failed to say that other rights are in a really precarious state right now. 

[00:05:36] Garnet Henderson: And we know that the impact of Roe's overturn isn't being felt equally throughout our country. It's affecting some communities much more than others, but Jasmine says mainstream news outlets aren't making that clear either. 

[00:05:55] Jasmine Geonzon: Almost three quarters of the articles that we looked at, 72%, failed to include how certain populations are disproportionately impacted by the downfall of Roe. So for example, low income people who can't travel out of state if they live somewhere where abortion has been outlawed or where there are really strict restrictions, or LGBTQ people such as non-binary people and trans people who are very explicitly excluded from the conversation about abortion rights, as well as people of color who are also disproportionately unable to access abortion healthcare.

[00:07:06] Garnet Henderson: As a reporter myself, I can say that one of the hardest parts of the job is often figuring out what to include in a story and what to leave out. Because it's true that you can never fit everything. But as Jasmine is pointing out, there are consistent trends when it comes to what gets left out when we're talking about abortions. And remember we've been talking about mainstream outlets. The United States also has a massive right wing media ecosystem, and there pundits are openly pushing anti-abortion talking points.

[00:07:47] Jasmine Geonzon: Since the fall of Roe, right wing media have really just been spinning the Supreme Court's decision by saying that it's actually not that big of a deal and that abortion advocates are actually over exaggerating. One thing I also wanna touch on is that anti-abortion outlets specifically, such as Pregnancy Help News, Live Action, Life Site News, all of those guys, since Roe was overturned, are doubling down on their attacks on contraception and abortion medication, even though those are the most accessible resources for people in states where abortion access is really hampered down on, and places where clinics are closing. They're continuing to spread misinformation that Plan B ends pregnancies when in fact it does not, or that medication abortion is unsafe and ineffective, which is not true, or that abortion medication can be reversed. None of these things are true and they know that, but they're really hampering down on it in the post-Roe era.

[00:09:09] Garnet Henderson: Back in episode five, way back, we talked about violence and harassment at abortion clinics and how it's driven by anti-abortion misinformation. Remember, anti-abortion extremists have killed at least 11 people in the United States since the early 1990s, and they've perpetrated thousands of other violent incidents. And conservative media fans the flames that lead to these attacks.

[00:09:49] Jasmine Geonzon: Right wing media has been home to so many violent threats against abortion providers for years, and they've just glossed over it forever and they pretended that any violence that might happen in real life to abortion providers and to patients is not their responsibility at all. One big example of course is Fox's Bill O'Reilly calling the abortion provider George Tiller, "Tiller the baby killer," and repeating that messaging over and over again for weeks to the point where Dr. George Tiller was assassinated because of his role as an abortion provider. And again, this happened in 2015 with a mass shooting at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs where so many right-wing hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones were spreading misinformation that Planned Parenthood sold baby parts, which obviously isn't true, but that inspired a mass shooting to occur. 

[00:10:44] Garnet Henderson: Early this year, a group calling itself Progressive anti-abortion Uprising rocketed to national fame out of relative obscurity because one of its leaders was arrested for storing fetal remains in their home. The group then held a huge press conference showing graphic images of the remains and making some truly absurd claims, including that fetal remains from abortions are burned to power the city of Baltimore. This is obviously not true, but the media, including mainstream outlets, repeated a lot of these claims verbatim without making it clear they weren't true.

[00:11:28] Jasmine Geonzon: That anti-abortion group that you've mentioned was given a national platform by multiple mainstream media outlets. Before they got in the news over storing fetal remains they were maybe floating around like a thousand followers and then after all of their media coverage, they gained all of these online followers and mainstream media has just been giving them this huge national outlet that they themselves have been bragging about to peddle more lies about abortion.

[00:12:00] Garnet Henderson: This is exactly the kind of media environment that led to the Colorado Spring shooting that Jasmine mentioned earlier. So abortion providers were on high alert. It was really scary. More recently, there have been numerous reported incidents of vandalism at crisis pregnancy centers, the anti-abortion clinics that try to convince people not to have abortions. A group calling itself Jane's Revenge has taken responsibility for a number of these incidents online, not all of them. And there are a lot of questions about whether this group is even real and who is actually behind the vandalism. But whatever's going on, conservative media has been having a field day with this story. And just for some comparison, by the way, according to Fox News, there have been around 100 incidents of vandalism at crisis pregnancy centers and other anti-abortion churches and organizations this year. That, by the way, is about double the number that some other outlets are reporting, but we'll go with the high number. Now at abortion clinics in 2021, that's the most recent year for which full statistics are available, there were over 1400 violent incidents, including vandalism, as well as trespassing, assault, death threats, and clinic invasions. There were also more than 144,000 incidents of disruption at clinics and 27 clinic blockades. That's when anti-abortion extremists stop anyone from going in or out, and again, you can hear a firsthand account of what it's like to experience that from a clinic owner back in episode five.

[00:13:56] Jasmine Geonzon: It's just extremely hypocritical for Fox to decry all of these attacks on crisis pregnancy centers that are happening in the wake of the Dobbs decision, because if you look back in history, they've been a platform for a violent rhetoric for years. 

[00:14:17] Garnet Henderson: I think by now we're all aware that media coverage of elections is highly consequential. And abortion has been on the ballot several times already since the Supreme Court overturned Roe. The first place this happened was in Kansas, where voters resoundingly rejected an anti-abortion ballot measure in August, and Jasmine says that right wing outlets covered that vote in a way that baselessly called its legitimacy into question.

[00:14:47] Jasmine Geonzon: The big lie that the 2020 election was stolen, and that there are so many instances of election interference, those claims are really impacting coverage that we see about abortion measures that are going to the ballot. So in Kansas, many right wing media activists were claiming that these ballot drop-off boxes weren't secure, weren't safe for people to drop off their ballots and vote in the measure. And they tried to take away the ballot boxes before the date of the primary, august 2nd. And thankfully their request was not approved, but those election lies are really seeping into national abortion coverage.

[00:16:15] Garnet Henderson: Now, once the Kansas ballot measure succeeded, Jasmine says these outlets really changed their tune.

[00:16:27] Jasmine Geonzon: Murdoch- affiliated outlets, specifically the Wall Street Journal, New York Post and, the Fox News Network all tried to play off the Kansas ballot measure as this big showing for democracy and proof that democracy is doing what it needs to do, when in fact there were so many hurdles that abortion advocates had to overcome in order to see the really big surprise that Kansas voters came out in droves in support of abortion rights.

[00:17:05] Garnet Henderson: In the midterm elections, ballot measures in Michigan, Kentucky, California, Vermont, and Montana, all went in favor of abortion rights. But leading up to the election, there was a lot of speculation in the media that the momentum that led Kansas voters to defeat their state's anti-abortion ballot measure had faded, and that couldn't have been more wrong. Of course, it's impossible to predict the future, but a majority of Americans believe abortion should be legal. We know this, and yet mainstream media outlets are attached to this narrative that abortion is controversial when that just isn't the whole truth.

[00:17:51] Jasmine Geonzon: One thing that I really just wanna underscore is that when mainstream media fail to do their jobs correctly and fail to provide accurate reporting, fact checking, et cetera, the burden falls on people who provide abortions and people who need abortions. It greatly impacts the ability of abortion providers to do their jobs, because people will be reaching out to these clinics who are already overworked, who are just extremely tired from the last few months, asking these abortion clinic workers for even more answers to try and remedy the mistakes that mainstream media are making. 

[00:18:25] Garnet Henderson: If you listened to episode 16, about the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court decision, this will sound familiar. Several clinic workers in that episode told us about fielding dozens, if not hundreds of calls from distressed patients who were confused about whether or not abortion was legal. Sometimes people who aren't even patients will call clinics because it's the only source they know of for reliable information about abortion. For me, this brings to mind a study published last year in which researchers at Ohio State University looked at how the flurry of media coverage around a six week abortion ban in Ohio influenced public perception of the legality of abortion there. So the governor of Ohio signed this six week abortion ban in 2019, but the bill was first introduced in 2018, so it had already been in the news for quite a while by the time it became law. However, the ban was blocked right after the governor signed it because at the time, six week abortion bans were considered clearly unconstitutional. The law only went into effect this year, after Roe was overturned. And then, a state court blocked it. So even now, abortion is legal through 21 weeks of pregnancy in Ohio. But in 2018 and 2019, researchers found that almost 10% of women in Ohio believed abortion was illegal, and 26% weren't sure. With each month that this ban was in the news, people were 17% more likely to believe that abortion was illegal in Ohio. This is why clarity and accuracy are so important.

[00:20:25] Jasmine Geonzon: So really mainstream media just need to stop falling into the same traps as right wing media and stop trying to give anti-abortion activists a platform under the guise of diverse opinions and covering all sides, when in fact they're really just bad actors.

[music]

[00:22:01] Garnet Henderson: Before we get to the rest of the episode, I wanted to take a moment to tell you about the beautiful new design in our merch store by Caitlin Blunnie, aka Liberal Jane illustration. It's something I've been wanting to add for a long time, a drawing of a manual vacuum aspirator, aka MVA. This is a little handheld plastic device used in first trimester abortions. You learned about it way back in our very first episode. And this little handheld thing is actually totally revolutionary. It has made abortions faster, easier, and safer. It's enabling mobile abortion clinics to serve people now, and Caitlin found such a beautiful way to represent it. This is the kind of nerdy stuff we love on this show. So this holiday season, I hope you'll support ACCESS and show the MVA some love by sporting this gorgeous art. You can get it on a t-shirt, a hoodie, a mug, in wall form, pins, stickers, magnets, really anything your heart desires. Check it out. You'll find the link in the show notes. 

[music]

Okay, now if we're being honest, many of us probably spend more time watching movies and scripted or reality TV shows than we spend watching the news. So what's going on with the abortion storylines there? To learn more about that, I spoke with Steph Herold.

[00:23:32] Steph Herold: I'm a researcher at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California San Francisco, and I study how abortion is depicted on television and film.

[00:24:03] Garnet Henderson: Steph does this research with her colleague, Dr. Gretchen Sisson, whose name you might recognize, because she was a guest on our adoption episode just a few months ago. And they've found that the way abortion is depicted on TV and film is often just out of step with reality. So I asked Steph to give us a few examples. 

[00:24:28] Steph Herold: I'll highlight some of the ones that really trouble me the most. So often when a character decides that she wants an abortion, it's really easy for her to get one. The majority of characters we see face, few, if any, barriers to getting their abortion. And the barrier that we see most often depicted is illegality. The plot line takes place in a historical time where abortion wasn't yet legal. Like a pre-Roe time. So we rarely see a lot of the contemporary abortion barriers, like gestational bans, waiting periods, mandatory ultrasounds, trap laws, or the more logistical barriers, right? Like needing to take time off work, having to find childcare, find a place to stay, getting money together because your insurance refuses to cover the cost of the abortion. A lot of that is invisible on tv. And that really matters, right? Because all of those restrictions really are the defining aspects of the American abortion experience. And then another piece is the demographic aspect. So the characters both on TV and film who have abortions are on average, younger, whiter, and wealthier than their counterparts in real life. They're often not parenting at the time of their abortions. And they are often straight cisgender women in heterosexual relationships. So we get one single story about who has an abortion when it's a character on tv. Very different than your typical abortion patient who's already parenting at the time of their abortion, who's a person of color, who's struggling to make ends meet. And we rarely see any queer characters have abortions, any trans characters have abortions, or be involved in any kind of reproductive health related storyline at all. So it means the average experience of an abortion seeker today, they don't see their stories reflected on screen.

[00:26:12] Garnet Henderson: And you might be wondering, why is this important? What does it matter if fictional portrayals of abortion aren't accurate? It's fiction, right? Here's what Steph had to say about that.

[00:26:34] Steph Herold: It's a very real and important question. You know, TV and film can really help us make sense of the world. They can reflect societal myths, or they can refract them. They can create new stories about ourselves and our experiences that could help us feel, seen and heard, or they could help us feel more isolated, more alone, more ashamed. So especially with, you know, stigmatized issues like abortion, a TV show may be the first time someone sees a depiction of abortion as a personal experience instead of as a political issue, or a talking point on the news. Abortion plotlines can give people a blueprint for how to support someone before or after their abortion. It can convey that having an abortion is okay, right? And that it's okay to feel relieved. It's okay to need an abortion, period. TV and film are part of a constellation of pop culture that also includes social media, podcasts, books, the internet, that helps people make sense of themselves and of the world. And it's really important for us to know what cultural messages are out there about abortion, especially now I think.

[00:27:46] Garnet Henderson: Now, I conducted a very informal poll on Twitter where I asked you to tell me about the first abortion related storyline you remember in a movie or on tv. And by far the most popular answer I got was Dirty Dancing, which happens to be a favorite movie of mine. So if you haven't seen Dirty Dancing, first of all, how? And spoiler alert. But the gist is that there's this glamorous dancer Penny, who's dating a rich jerk. She gets pregnant and she needs an abortion, but the year is 1963, so abortion is still illegal and really hard to get across the entire United States, and this guy totally bails. So Baby, who is the main character, borrows money from her dad to give to Penny. Penny and Johnny, the man who ultimately becomes Baby's love interest, teach her to dance so that she can cover for Penny in a performance. And when Penny has complications after her abortion, Baby gets her dad, who's a doctor, to help. And Baby's dad is angry, but he's not mad that Penny had an abortion. He's mad at Baby for lying to him, and mad at Johnny because he incorrectly assumes it was Johnny who got Penny pregnant and then ditched her. This plot line has always stood out to me because the conflict is never around whether Penny should or shouldn't have gotten an abortion.

[00:29:16] Steph Herold: I actually think that movie is an incredible portrayal of the way a community can really rally around someone who needs an abortion and give her all the support she needs. It's never about oh, Penny shouldn't be doing this, or This is so shameful. It's all about how they support her and really because of that abortion is why Baby and Johnny have their love affair, you know? I also love that movie. So good, so good. 

[“Time of My Life” from Dirty Dancing plays]

[00:30:08] Garnet Henderson: Part of the reason this stands out is that it's unusual. Most of the abortion portrayals I remember from growing up were much more focused on the decision, with characters feeling a lot of conflict over the choice of whether or not to have an abortion. And as we learned back in episode eight, some people do find this choice very difficult, but most do not. An example of this type of plot line that I really remember from my teen years is the movie Juno. The title character is a high school student who gets pregnant. And initially, Juno thinks she wants to have an abortion. But then she decides not to after having an encounter with one of her classmates who's protesting outside the clinic and tells her that her fetus already has fingernails. She ends up carrying the pregnancy to term and placing the baby for adoption, which as we learned in our previous episode, is not in any way easy. Now, to be clear, people choose to continue unplanned pregnancies all the time, and that doesn't mean they're opposed to abortion, but even the film's writer, Diablo Cody has said she just wouldn't handle this story the same way now.

[00:31:23] Steph Herold: Especially in the nineties and early two thousands, some of the biggest trends in the abortion plot lines was having a lot of the conflict or the drama being about decision making. But now, more contemporary abortion stories have really moved on from that, which is awesome to see. It's less about will she or won't she, and the drama is more around how will she get the abortion? Who is she gonna tell or not tell? What impact does revealing the abortion have on her relationships, her career, her life? So that's been really heartening to see.

[00:32:08] Garnet Henderson: Another common answer to my informal poll was Degrassi. Now if you're around my age, I'm 31, you probably watched Degrassi: The Next Generation, a Canadian show that also aired here in the US starting in 2001. And many people in the eighties and nineties watched the earlier iterations of Degrassi, Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High. And in 2004, Degrassi: The Next Generation featured a storyline in which a character named Manny chooses to have an abortion. But the show's US distributor decided that this plot line was too controversial and it didn't air here until 2006.

[00:32:59] Steph Herold: Yeah, that actually happened to a couple of shows. I think there's a Family Guy episode about abortion that wasn't aired here. But of course, as soon as you reveal that you're censoring an episode, people do everything they can to access that episode. So I think all of those kind of censorship efforts tend to backfire and people end up figuring out how to watch those episodes anyway.

[00:33:23] Garnet Henderson: Steph and Dr. Sisson just released their abortion onscreen report for 2022, and they found that there were at least 60 abortion plot lines or mentions in movies and on scripted and reality TV this year. That's more than any previous year they've studied. And about a third of these plot lines did depict barriers to abortion care, compared to only two last year. Writers are also starting to grapple with the complicated post-Roe landscape. Steph pointed to two recent TV episodes as examples.

[00:34:05] Steph Herold: I don't know if I would say that they were great episodes, but they were the first two that I've seen that have started to contend with the post-Roe reality that we're in. And one was the show FBI Most Wanted, and another was Law and Order, not the SVU version, just kind of like the regular Law and Order. And they both have plot lines about people crossing state lines to get abortions and the hypocrisy of anti-abortion legislators. I was impressed that the writers and producers and networks were able to tackle this so quickly, but also decided to showcase how people will do what it takes to get their abortions. In the Law and Order episode, they actually have an abortion fund activist depicted, which we've never seen before. Now unfortunately, both of these episodes follow some of the tropes I was talking about before. Like the main characters who get the abortions are young, white women. But they do face quite a few barriers in getting their abortions including our current legal reality. So that was really interesting to see. But unfortunately, spoiler alert, in the Law and Order episode, both the abortion fund activist and the person who had the abortion end up dead. So it's this common Law and Order trope, that's like the only abortion patient that they feel sympathetic for is a dead one, you know? It's tricky. It's interesting to see how our culture creators are reckoning with this moment by creating new tropes and also perpetuating some old ones.

[00:36:06] Garnet Henderson: One recent example of a film portrayal Steph did not like was the movie Blonde, the Marilyn Monroe biopic. 

[00:36:18] Steph Herold: I think so many things disturbed me about Blonde. And I'm not a Marilyn Monroe scholar, so I think somebody who really knows her life story and her perspective and her whole career trajectory would probably have a lot more to object to in terms of how they portrayed her and what they decided to show and what they decided to exclude. But the abortion components of the plot to me were so singularly offensive and disgusting in ways I really haven't seen in a movie that was really presented as for mainstream audiences. Because of my work, I've watched some of the movies that very explicitly anti-abortion producers, directors, writers, put out for their Christian version of Netflix called Pure Flix, and others that they try to put out for mainstream audiences, but they're very clear about the intent of the film that it's anti-abortion. And this didn't have that. 

[00:37:13] Garnet Henderson: In the film, Marilyn has two abortions and one miscarriage. The abortion scenes feature graphic views of the inside of her vaginal canal. Yes. Really. 

[00:37:25] Steph Herold: It's just so ridiculous, over the top, but not in a campy way, in a really insulting and diminutive way. I couldn't believe what I was watching 

[00:37:52] Garnet Henderson: Marilyn's first abortion in the film also seems coerced. On her way to the hospital, she tells the driver she's changed her mind, but he won't turn around, and the doctors do the abortion anyway. And later in the film, a CGI fetus appears to shame Marilyn for having had an abortion.

[00:38:15] Steph Herold: The miscarriage scene happens directly after she has this conversation with the fetus who shames her about her past abortion and insists that it's the same baby as before. And then she has the miscarriage right after. I think what's also unfortunate is that we don't know if the real Marilyn Monroe had abortions or not, how she would've felt about them had she had them. I think that really does the actual Marilyn Monroe, a huge disservice. I think a more responsible, inquisitive director would've given that character the chance to explore her feelings about her mother, her career, her desires to have a family. Instead, she's this kind of one dimensional character with daddy issues. It just feels like such a cliche trope. 

[00:39:11] Garnet Henderson: Fortunately, there aren't a lot of examples that are quite this egregious, but Steph says there are lots of ways in which abortion plot lines are still just out of touch with reality. For example, only 6% of plot lines in 2022 showed a character having a medication abortion, despite the fact that medication abortion accounts for more than half of all abortions in the US now. 

[00:39:44] Steph Herold: First, we rarely see the actual abortion take place. The majority of times that we see abortion on our screens, it's often a character disclosing that they had a past abortion or they make the decision and then we see them afterwards. Like in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, for example, a show from a couple years ago this character Paula decides to have an abortion and then we see her recovering at home afterwards. And when we do see the procedure, it's often in a hospital or, we kind of see the camera zoom in on the patient's face and the single tear falls down and then, you know, the next scene happens and she's recovering. So we get this kind of heightened sense of emotion in a hospital setting. We very rarely see medication abortion and when we do it's often portrayed as dangerous. So an example I often refer to is actually a Law and Order SVU episode. Oftentimes when they depict medication abortion, it's coerced. Like someone slipped abortion pills into someone's drink, and then that person is found bleeding out on the sidewalk. And most egregiously they'll often say, oh, mifepristone or misoprostol is found in her tox screen. Which is so egregious to me because people will think that it's possible for that to appear on your tox screen when it's not. Doctors have told us over and over again that it's not, and that seems particularly dangerous to depict now in this post-Roe world where people are self-managing their abortions and are worried about being prosecuted. Though we are starting to see some shows depict medication abortion in a really sensitive and thoughtful and nuanced way. So I'm thinking in particular of Station 19. They had an episode where our character, we actually see her put the pills in her mouth. We actually see her on the toilet, which we never see. It's like this pivotal part of the medication abortion experience that you expel the pregnancy at home. And we actually see this character on the toilet, and we see her partner outside of the bathroom singing a song to distract her. So I thought that was amazing.

[00:41:45] Garnet Henderson: So along those lines, I asked Steph what kinds of plot lines she wants to see more of.

[00:41:53] Steph Herold: First I'd like to see shows that focus entirely on abortion. Often we see one plot line, or maybe two if we're lucky on a show, and maybe the beloved character is the one who has an abortion, but oftentimes the secondary character. I'd like to see shows that really embrace the idea and the reality that abortion is actually about everything that's important in life, like religion, love, family, relationships, death, money, sex, power, like all of it is there. So I'd love to see more shows that fully portray that, whether it's an abortion clinic workplace drama, or following abortion funds or, like a time traveling abortion provider. Sky's the limit. And then I think we need to see more portrayals of people who order abortion pills online, who are able to take them safely and successfully at home but then contend with the legal risk, so we really drive home this reality, that medication abortion is really safe medically, but risky legally. And people see that in stories to kind of understand what that means.

[00:43:15] Garnet Henderson: You hear that Hollywood? A whole bunch of free ideas right there. 

[outro music plays]

ACCESS is produced by me, Garnet Henderson. Our logo is by Kate Ryan, and our theme music is by Lily Sloane. Additional music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions, and of course that clip from Time of my Life by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes. Don't forget to check out our amazing new merch. That link, as well as a donation link, is in the notes. If you liked this episode or any episode from this year, please share it and subscribe to ACCESS wherever you get your podcasts. You can also really give us a boost by leaving a rating or review and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @accesspod. See you in the new year.

Garnet Henderson
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