SeaChange Program, Issue 23, January 2017
Both women who have abortions and abortion care providers experience stigma in a number of ways, with profound implications for them on a personal level and for our public discourse about the issue. In fact, almost all those attached to abortion can face stigma, including the journalists who write about it, either in the form of editorial pressure or backlash from their readers.
If abortion is one of the most common and safe medical procedures in the United States, why is it still so shrouded in shame, stigma, and controversy? There are many factors, certainly. We suspect one of them is media coverage. In this Issue, we examine news coverage of abortion to determine how it might reflect and reinforce stigma…
News coverage is an important part of the public conversation about public health issues such as abortion. The news sets the agenda for what issues people think about and how they think about them. News coverage influences both how the public and policymakers perceive an issue and what they think should be done about it. Journalists, editors and op-ed contributors make decisions on a daily basis, consciously or unconsciously, about how to frame issues like abortion… The ways that journalists and their sources frame abortion in news stories can serve either to reduce or reinforce stigma around the issue…
One study of abortion in the three leading U.S. newspapers found that abortion is covered as a political issue more than a health issue, that women experiencing abortion are rarely present in the public record, and that, to the extent they are mentioned, women are framed as potential victims of abortion as often as they are seen as its beneficiaries.
A handful of international studies have examined stigma in news coverage of abortion. An analysis of abortion newspaper coverage in Great Britain, for example, found that abortion was presented using predominantly negative language. Furthermore, very little coverage offered alternative framings of abortion as positive or morally valid, and the voices of women who had sought abortion were either absent or marginalized. A study analysing news coverage of abortion in Uganda, where the procedure is illegal, documented the influence of the Catholic Church on media framing, including the dominance of narratives about the sanctity of life and the emotional and physical “agony” suffered by women who underwent abortion.
In this Issue, Berkeley Media Studies group partnered with the Sea Change Program to explore how abortion stigma appears in mainstream print and online news and to consider the implications of these portrayals for reproductive health, rights and justice advocates. We also consider implications for journalists interested in telling stories that broaden the narrative around abortion in ways that affirm the range of individuals’ reproductive experiences and reduce shame and stigma.
We identified 2,856 articles that mentioned abortion or related terms at least three times in our selected news sources from 2014-2015. We selected a random, scientific sample of 10% of the identified articles for in-depth analysis. After we eliminated articles that mentioned abortion or abortion-related language only in passing, we had 263 articles to analyse that substantively discussed the issue. The majority of these were straight news (62%); the rest were opinion pieces such as blogs (13%), op-eds (9%), columns (6%), letters to the editor (6%) or unsigned editorials (4%).
We saw four main categories of stigma that were most common in the news coverage in our sample: 1) coverage that personified the embryo or fetus and made invisible the woman sustaining the pregnancy; 2) coverage that directly discredited abortion providers by characterizing them as murderous, unscrupulous or profiteering; 3) coverage that framed abortion as dangerous; and 4) coverage that framed abortion as emotionally and psychologically harmful. We also looked for coverage that assigned negative motivations to women who have abortions or labeled them as selfish or irresponsible, but instances of these statements were rare…
Half of the stories in our sample contained at least one of these examples of stigmatizing language. Furthermore, the more times a news article mentioned abortion, the more likely it was to contain a stigmatizing quote or statement. Sixty-three percent of articles that mentioned abortion more than five times contained stigmatizing quotes or statements, as did 89% of articles that mentioned abortion more than 10 times. Among opinion coverage, stigmatizing quotes or statements were most prevalent in stories that opposed abortion rights, but 25% of opinion pieces that supported abortion rights also contained stigmatizing language. Many of these stigmatizing statements were quotes or attributions from elected officials and anti-abortion rights advocates, although a third of that language came directly from the pro-abortion rights authors of the opinion pieces themselves…
