(LifeSiteNews) — Last month, I noted that in the post-Roe era Hollywood has begun to ramp up its glamorization of abortion. Previously, the staunchly progressive entertainment industry had shied away from pushing abortion — not for reasons of conscience, of course, but because most people simply don’t want to see abortion on the screen. Unwanted or unexpected pregnancies almost always resulted in a baby being born, even on sitcoms like Friends that celebrated every other cultural evil.
As the abortion industry gears up for the greatest propaganda battle in decades, however, Hollywood has once again been pressed into service. With abortion referendums unfolding across the United States, an all-hands-on-deck approach to capturing the hearts and minds of the American people is necessary, and storytelling is one of the most potent ways of shaping the minds of the public. In recent films, most notably Rachel Lee Goldberg’s Unpregnant, abortion is presented not as a necessary evil but as the happy ending driving the storyline.
A recent column from the Hollywood Reporter published on August 30 details the strategy. Titled “Abortion Storylines on TV Impact Viewers ‘Across All Political Leanings,’ Study Finds,” it explains how abortion propaganda on the big and small screen is an essential part of the abortion industry’s plan going forward:
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 and UC San Francisco’s Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health program.
In a 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.
In particular, the report noted that conservative-aligned voters could be swayed by representations of abortion onscreen. This is due in part to the fact that people let their guard down while engaging with entertainment, meaning that they can be more easily influenced and can absorb the values and perspectives being subtly (or even not so subtly) pushed in the storylines. In particular, the study cited scenes in which the abortion pill used as showing “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.” Portraying conservatives and Christians having abortions, too, is a deliberate tactic aimed at normalizing the practice among potentially pro-life voters.
The study found that the impact of abortion scenes was powerful enough that people could actually be spurred to post about abortion or engage in abortion activism afterward, and that TV shows were an effective way of minimizing any possible side effects from abortion. According to the Hollywood Reporter:
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 and ANSIRH 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 and ANSIRH 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.
By “medically accurate,” of course, the study means inaccurate — that is, hiding the fact that abortion violently ends the life of a developing human being and portraying abortion as utterly safe. Pro-lifers should not underestimate the power of the entertainment industry to shape public opinion on abortion — and we should keep in mind that until now, Hollywood has been relatively restrained in its portrayals. That is changing, and it is a very deliberate and strategic move on the part of our culture’s elite storytellers. There have been a handful of powerful pro-life films, such as Gosnell and Unplanned, and several unwatchable offerings — Roe v. Wade and Lifemark come to mind — but pro-life storytellers often have enormous difficulty in getting their films in front of audiences.
In the propaganda war, we are badly outgunned. We need pro-life storytellers, and we need stories that can reach broad audiences.
