Fewer TV Characters Had Abortions in 2025 — More Stories Reinforced Shame

Lead

This year television included 65 storylines that referenced abortion across dramas, reality series and animated comedies, roughly the same total as 2024. Despite similar frequency, far fewer on‑screen characters actually obtained abortions in 2025 — just 37% — a 14% drop since 2023. The finding comes from the annual Abortion Onscreen report compiled by Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco. Researchers say the portrayals increasingly emphasize stigma, underrepresent medication abortion and misalign with real‑world demographics and access barriers.

Key Takeaways

• There were 65 abortion‑related plotlines on TV in 2025, down one from 66 in 2024 but nearly unchanged overall.
• Only 37% of characters seeking abortion in 2025 received one, a 14% decline in characters completing abortions since 2023.
• Medication abortion appeared in just 3 of the 65 storylines, despite pills accounting for the majority of U.S. abortions in reality.
• On‑screen characters seeking abortion were 80% upper or middle class, contrasting with the economic profile of most real‑world patients.
• Only 8% of characters seeking abortion were shown as parents, while most people who obtain abortions in the U.S. already have at least one child.
• Researchers identified an increase in plotlines that emphasize shame and religious opposition rather than nuance or supportive faith experiences.
• Representation of race improved slightly: a slim majority of characters in abortion stories were people of color, closer to real‑world demographics than a decade ago.

Background

Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) at UCSF has released an Abortion Onscreen report annually for about ten years to track how abortion appears in U.S. television. The study catalogs plotlines across genres, records what kind of abortion is portrayed and notes barriers, class, parental status and race of the characters involved. The goal is to compare screen representations to empirical data about who seeks abortions and what obstacles they face in the United States.

Those real‑world data show that medication abortion now makes up the majority of abortions in the country and that many patients encounter logistical and financial barriers. Research cited by ANSIRH indicates roughly 60% of Americans who seek abortion face at least one barrier — from cost and childcare to distance and insurance limits. The report’s metrics are designed to surface gaps between lived experience and fictional narratives that shape public understanding.

Main Event

The 2025 television season included abortion storylines on high‑profile dramas such as The Pitt and Call the Midwife, reality programs including W.A.G.s to Riches and Love Is Blind, and animated shows like Family Guy and South Park. While those plotlines kept abortion visible as a topic, the substance of many stories shifted: fewer characters actually completed abortions, and several series foregrounded stigma. Examples cited by the report include episodes of Chicago Med, 1923, Breathless and Secrets We Keep that tied abortion to moral judgment or religious condemnation.

One concrete instance: The Pitt depicted a teenage character seeking a medication abortion, played by Abby Ryder Fortson. That episode was one of only three 2025 storylines to show abortion by pills, a small fraction compared with the prevalence of medication abortion in the U.S. The show presented a clinical setting and some logistical detail, but the broader dataset shows pill‑based care remains underrepresented on screen.

ANSIRH researchers also flagged who appears in these storylines. Eighty percent of TV characters seeking abortion were portrayed as upper or middle class, and only 8% were shown as parents. Those portrayals differ markedly from national statistics, where many patients live with financial strain and a majority have at least one child. The report notes that such disparities obscure the role poverty plays in limiting access to abortion care.

Analysis & Implications

Television remains a major cultural lens through which many viewers form impressions about medical care and moral debates. When shows emphasize stigma or present religion solely as prohibitive, they narrow the range of experiences audiences see and risk reinforcing social shame. Fictional narratives that repeatedly frame abortion as morally fraught, without showing supportive companions or pragmatic barriers, can shape public sentiment in ways that diverge from population realities.

The underrepresentation of medication abortion on screen is particularly consequential. Because pills now constitute the majority of U.S. abortions, failing to depict them accurately limits public familiarity with the most common clinical pathway. That gap can affect viewers’ expectations about safety, privacy and logistics, and it may alter support for policies that regulate telehealth, pharmacies or medication access.

Economics is another key implication. By primarily depicting upper‑ and middle‑class characters, television minimizes how cost, childcare and travel constrain many people’s options. When storytelling overlooks these structural barriers, it reduces public awareness of why policy interventions such as financial assistance, clinic funding or insurance coverage matter to real patients.

There are also potential political feedback loops. Simplified or stigmatizing narratives can harden stigma that translates into policy preferences and civic debate. Conversely, more varied and accurate depictions could broaden understanding and empathy, influencing public discourse and possibly policy over time.

Comparison & Data

The table highlights the ways on‑screen metrics diverge from empirical patterns. While the raw number of abortion plotlines held steady, the composition of those stories shifted toward portrayals less consistent with national data on abortion method, socioeconomic status and parental status. That mismatch is central to ANSIRH’s critique and to concerns about how fiction shapes public knowledge.

Reactions & Quotes

Researchers emphasized the distance between television portrayal and reality. Before the report’s release, ANSIRH researcher Steph Herold summarized the concern: many on‑screen characters do not face the real barriers that most patients do.

“I think there still is a lot of stigma, even in allegedly liberal Hollywood,”

Steph Herold, ANSIRH researcher (academic)

Herold noted that while some programs show legal barriers, fewer depict financial, logistical or caregiving obstacles that are common in real‑world care. The omission can underplay the difficulty many people encounter when trying to obtain abortion services.

“Only about a third of people who are characters on screen face any kind of barrier to abortion,”

Steph Herold, ANSIRH researcher (academic)

Producers and writers were not quoted directly in the report summary, but the dataset includes examples across genres, suggesting varied creative choices. Some viewers and advocates said any portrayal that normalizes stigma is harmful, while others argued that raising moral conflict can reflect parts of lived experience.

Unconfirmed

• Some observers claimed that the number of stigma‑focused episodes will directly shift policy attitudes; the causal link between a single season of TV and policy change remains unproven.
• Attribution of intent to specific writers or networks about why they chose stigmatizing angles is not documented in the ANSIRH data and remains speculative.

Bottom Line

Television in 2025 kept abortion visible as a plot device across many genres, but content choices reduced fidelity to real‑world patterns. Fewer fictional characters completed abortions, medication abortion was rarely shown and portrayals often centered middle‑class protagonists, masking the financial and caregiving barriers most patients face. The upshot is that audiences are still receiving a narrowed, sometimes stigmatizing picture of abortion that undercuts public understanding of how common and varied these experiences are.

For storytellers and public‑health communicators, the gap points to an opportunity: more realistic, varied depictions — including medication abortion, parental experiences and the role of economic barriers — would better reflect population data and could reduce stigma. Viewers, advocates and policymakers should treat popular portrayals as culturally influential but not definitive evidence of how abortion care works in the United States.

Sources

• NPR (news coverage summarizing the ANSIRH report)
• Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) (academic/research program at UCSF)