The Emmy-nominated team behind a new documentary has a few notes about how Hollywood portrays abortion on screen.
Hollywood Does Abortion, which made its world premiere on June 7 at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, traces how movies and TV series have depicted abortion care over the past 50 years. Throughout 95 minutes of expert interviews and archival footage—from Maude in the 1970s through more recent shows like Jane the Virgin—the film shows that Hollywood has frequently stigmatized abortion care, judged characters who want to end their pregnancy, and suggested getting an abortion is the lowest point in a character’s life.
“We’ve all seen so many abortion storylines at various points—and they’re almost all really really bad,” Kimberly Mutcherson, the film’s legal and policy advisor, told Rewire News Group.
Mutcherson, a Rutgers Law School professor, spoke with Rewire News Group about the Supreme Court, Scandal, and why misinformed abortion storytelling can “be a really dangerous thing.”
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
What was the first time you saw an abortion storyline on screen?
The one that I remember most distinctly is Dirty Dancing [from 1987]. I went to my first abortion rights march when I was in high school, so it was something I cared about.
That storyline focused on somebody who got a really unsafe abortion and then needed care. It was really a reminder of what can happen when people don’t have access to safe abortion care, and that it can be deadly. Also, the people around her were like, ‘She needs an abortion let’s figure out how to make that happen for her.’”
It was very well done in the context of how Hollywood tends to deal with abortion storylines.
How did this portrayal shape your understanding of what abortion was?
I don’t think it impacted how I perceived abortion. It certainly impacted my sense of why it was so crucial that abortion remain accessible and remain legal.
What I liked about that storyline was that it was not one where all of the people around her were shaming her or treating her as though she was making an immoral choice. The men in her life were really supportive—none of whom were the person who got her pregnant. Other men in her life stepped up to be accessible to her, to be helpful to her, to help her pay for it, to take her there.
There was something about that caretaking that I thought was really different than a lot of the abortion storylines that we tend to see.
That was around the same time that abortion was becoming a major, hot-button political issue as evangelical Christians took it on. Did the representation of abortion on screen change once abortion became a talking point for politicians?
I’m not a media studies person, so I don’t look at media culture in that way, but there was this very old storyline from [the TV series] Maude which showed a person making abortion decisions who is treated well by the people around her in making that decision.
In the ’80s and the ’90s and the 2000s, it was really hard to find an abortion storyline like that. It was really hard to find an abortion storyline that did not treat abortion as this incredibly divisive issue—which is certainly where we were living if you think about the ‘80s and the ‘90s, and the violence that was happening at abortion clinics and to abortion providers.
What’s in the culture gets reflected in entertainment, so it was really hard to find an abortion storyline that felt neutral. There was always some sort of this sense of: Here’s this devastating thing that is happening in a person’s life. I think the level of moralizing that you saw in entertainment when it came to abortion was very reflective of the politics of the time.
What’s the best, most realistic, and nuanced portrayal of abortion on screen, in your opinion?
As a Black woman, I’m very attuned to how Black women are portrayed in entertainment across the board, and Scandal was just my favorite. This was just a Black woman [Kerry Washington, playing a Washington fixer] who was so seeded in her power and so good at what she did. We all had our issues with the affair with the president [that resulted in a pregnancy], because he was a loser and, like, why are you wasting your time with this man? But her abortion storyline was handled so well.
It didn’t turn into a miscarriage. She wasn’t begging people to respect her choice. She was a grown woman who knew she did not want to have this child. She made herself an appointment, and she went and she got herself a legal abortion, and it was done. She wasn’t ashamed or regretful; she was relieved that she could go and do this thing that she wanted to do and not stay pregnant.
That’s one I remember so starkly because at that point, I was so conditioned for abortion storylines to be these deep tragedies—you know, something terrible is going to happen or they’re going to end up sterilized because of the abortion or some other negative outcome. And this one was kind of like, phew, got that done—let me move on and continue to be a boss bitch. I love that!
What’s an abortion scene so bad it made you want to stomp out of the theater?
The movie Blonde [a 2022 biopic based on the life of Marilyn Monroe]. It was literally shocking to me.
I’ve seen a lot of bad abortion storylines—women being treated horribly and people saying terrible things to them and all of that kind of stuff, but the idea that you would invent an abortion that wasn’t known to have been the experience of a real person, and [include] that weird thing of having a fetus talking to her, like “Are you gonna hurt me again?”
The scene in the clinic where it’s just a wall of white men standing around watching her get an abortion—like, what abortion clinic are you in?
The fact that that even made it on screen is really demoralizing.
Have you seen changes in how abortion is represented on screen since the fall of Roe v. Wade?
I think that people were incredibly complacent for a very long time, that people did not understand how precarious the federal constitution right to an abortion was—that the Supreme Court could just decide it doesn’t exist anymore. I don’t think people were really prepared for that to happen, nor were they prepared for what that would look like.
There are two parts to what we’re seeing now: One is a little bit of the democratization of the tools for creating entertainment. Everybody doesn’t have to do a big Hollywood studio movie; you can do sort of smaller things. [That has translated into] more opportunities for other people—more women of color, in particular—to be involved in entertainment. [Scandal producer] Shonda Rhimes has built the careers of so many women of color in entertainment—and not just as actors—people as writers, people behind the screens.
So we are seeing more storylines from people who recognize that their platform can help people understand what happens when people can’t get access to health care and to abortion care, whether that storyline is on Law and Order about a minor who needs an abortion or on Grey’s Anatomy about somebody who needs abortion care.
It’s really important that there are [also] depictions of health-care providers and the frustrations that they experience when a person who needs abortion care is being denied that care, and the consequence. That’s in stark opposition to these depictions of having an abortion as this really really dangerous thing that can kill you.
I’m glad to see more people who are not just straight white men who are able to make entertainment, and some of those folks [are] using that platform in ways that are educating a lot of people to realities that they maybe have not spent as much time as they should have thinking about.
What do you most want audiences to take away from Hollywood Does Abortion?
To cast a very critical eye on the entertainment that they are consuming and to recognize how much of it is educating them in false ways.
Women have been having abortions since people got pregnant. Abortion is a part of the landscape and it has been for a very very long time. It is care people have a right to have access and it is care that can be done very, very safely.
It’s so unfortunate that as people consume movies and TV, [they are fed] these really dangerous messages. There’s a lot of ignorance behind what they are seeing. I hope that that’s something people recognize: how dangerous so many of those messages are, and how false those messages are.
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