Why TV’s Abortion Storylines Took a Troubling Turn This Year
Fewer Abortions on TV, More Shame on Screen: What 2025’s Storylines Say About Us
This year, television featured fewer abortion storylines and more shame-driven plots, a shift researchers say could shape how millions of viewers understand real-world reproductive rights. Looking at everything from prestige dramas to reality TV, 2025’s trends reveal how small-screen narratives often lag behind lived experience — and why that matters in a post-Roe America.
According to researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, abortion came up on TV just 65 times in 2025 — in everything from boundary-pushing dramas like The Pitt and Call the Midwife to glossy reality fare such as W.A.G.s to Riches. On paper, that might sound like a lot. But zoom in, and the pattern is worrying: fewer characters actually had abortions, and more of the stories reinforced stigma, fear, and moral panic instead of reflecting the complex, ordinary reality of abortion in people’s lives.
How TV Tracks with Real-Life Abortion — and Where It Doesn’t
In the United States, abortion is common: by age 45, roughly a quarter of women will have had one, and patients span a wide range of ages, races, religions, and political beliefs. On television, however, that diversity narrows. Abortion plots tend to orbit around white, relatively young, usually cisgender women, often framed as middle-class or upwardly mobile. It’s less “representative sample” and more “focus-grouped protagonist.”
UCSF’s researchers have long argued that because TV reaches people who may never directly discuss abortion in their own lives, these stories become a form of informal sex education — and myth-making. In 2025, those myths tilted even more toward anxiety and punishment: pregnancies that end in dramatic complications, relationships that implode, or moral reckonings underscored by swelling strings.
- Fewer characters decided to have an abortion on-screen.
- More plots emphasized regret, shame, or social backlash.
- Medical misinformation and exaggerated risks continued to crop up.
“What happens on TV doesn’t just mirror what’s happening in the world — it can actually shape what audiences think is normal, common, or morally acceptable,” one UCSF researcher explained to NPR.
Prestige Dramas: Slow Progress Wrapped in Heavy-Handed Morality
On the prestige side, shows like The Pitt and long-running medical period drama Call the Midwife continued TV’s decades-long fascination with reproductive ethics. These series pride themselves on nuance, but the 2025 crop of episodes often circled familiar tensions: faith versus bodily autonomy, law versus compassion, and the clash between medical expertise and social pressure.
Call the Midwife, set in mid-20th-century Britain, has historically threaded the needle between historical accuracy and modern sensibilities. But even there, narratives can slide into what might be called “soft stigma”: characters insisting they “have no choice” while the script lingers on tears, guilt, and imagined futures. The behavior makes sense for the period; the subtext, broadcast to a 2025 audience, is more complicated.
Contemporary legal dramas like The Pitt take their cues from real-world court battles in the wake of the Supreme Court’s rollback of federal abortion protections. That topicality is valuable, but the temptation to turn every abortion case into a “very special episode” means characters shoulder a level of anguish that doesn’t reflect most real procedures, which are typically safe, brief, and emotionally varied — sometimes fraught, sometimes profoundly ordinary.
Reality TV and the “Teachable Moment” Trap
Reality shows like W.A.G.s to Riches bring abortion into spaces that typically revolve around glamor, wealth, and interpersonal drama — not public health policy. That’s a double-edged sword. On one hand, it normalizes the idea that abortion is something that can come up in any life, including the aspirational ones on screen. On the other, the format is built on conflict, confessionals, and emotional escalation.
Producers often frame an abortion decision as a pivotal, sensational reveal: a season-long secret, a bombshell in a reunion special, or a flashpoint in a relationship arc. The result is that abortion is less a health-care decision and more a narrative twist — one that leans heavily on shame, betrayal, and moral judgment from other cast members.
“Reality TV can feel candid, but it’s still engineered,” one critic noted. “When abortion becomes a storyline beat instead of a human experience, the genre’s limits become painfully clear.”
To the industry’s credit, some contestants and influencers now push back in real time, using talking-head segments or social media to frame their abortions as responsible, thoughtful choices. But in the edit, the larger narrative usually still emphasizes tension and fallout over agency and normalcy.
The Return of Punitive Storylines and Moral Hangovers
One of the most concerning trends the UCSF team flagged in 2025 is the quiet resurgence of “punishment arcs.” These are storylines where a character’s abortion is followed — explicitly or implicitly — by something bad happening: infertility scares, tragic accidents, relationship breakdowns, or professional disgrace. No one says “this is karma,” but the narrative rhythm points strongly in that direction.
It’s an old device, rooted in classic Hollywood’s former Production Code and, later, in network TV’s fear of angry letters: if a character does something “controversial,” they must suffer, or at least agonize, so the show stays morally “balanced.” In a media environment where abortion access is already highly politicized, that kind of balance can look a lot like bias.
- Characters frequently express lasting guilt, even when circumstances made abortion the safest choice.
- Partners, friends, or family members react with harsh judgment more often than research suggests is typical.
- Religious shame is overrepresented; supportive faith communities are comparatively rare.
From a storytelling standpoint, it makes sense: conflict drives drama. But when nearly every character who chooses abortion pays a visible price, the cumulative impact drifts toward propaganda, even if individual episodes are well-intentioned and empathetic.
Who Gets Abortions on TV vs. Who Gets Them in Real Life
The numbers behind the narratives tell their own story. In the real world, people of color, low-income patients, and parents who already have children make up a significant share of those seeking abortions. On TV, however, abortion remains heavily associated with young women whose primary concern is derailed careers or romantic turbulence.
That skew matters because audiences internalize patterns. When the only abortion stories a viewer sees are about a 20-something protagonist in a big city, the procedure can start to feel like something that belongs exclusively to that demographic — not to married parents, older women, or people in rural communities, all of whom appear far less frequently on screen.
- Race and class: Television often centers white, middle-class characters in relatively stable housing and employment, while real-world patients are more economically diverse and often navigating financial strain.
- Parenthood: Many TV characters seeking abortion are child-free, despite data showing that a majority of abortion patients are already parents.
- Geography: Post-Roe legal patchworks in U.S. states are dramatized, but the focus is on travel obstacles and courtroom showdowns more than on day-to-day access and community support systems.
Why These Storylines Matter in a Post-Roe Media Landscape
In the wake of major legal changes to abortion access in the U.S., television has become a kind of parallel public square. Viewers might never read a court ruling, but they will watch a streaming drama where a character drives across three states for a procedure, or a sitcom where a passing joke makes clear that abortion pills are now harder to get.
Social scientists have found that media portrayals of health care can influence everything from what symptoms people recognize to which treatments they consider risky. When shows exaggerate the medical dangers of abortion or imply that regret is inevitable, they’re not just “telling a story” — they’re participating in a larger, messy national conversation about rights, morality, and public policy.
“Television doesn’t decide policy,” one media scholar told NPR, “but it does influence how people feel about policy — and those feelings can be incredibly powerful.”
That’s why the UCSF team’s finding — fewer abortions on screen, more shame in the stories that remain — lands with such weight. It suggests that even as audiences become more comfortable talking about reproductive health, the most visible narratives are retreating into older, more moralistic scripts.
Where TV Could Go Next: Toward Honest, Less Dramatized Stories
None of this means television should avoid abortion storylines; if anything, the opposite is true. The issue is scarcity and skew. When only a handful of shows tackle abortion each year, and many default to worst-case scenarios, viewers are left with a distorted sense of how common and safe the procedure is.
There are encouraging counterexamples — series that depict abortion as one decision among many in a character’s life, or that show supportive partners, competent clinicians, and communities that don’t collapse into judgment. These moments hint at a future where abortion can be portrayed with the same range and subtlety as any other health-care choice.
- Normalizing stories where characters don’t face outsized punishment or melodramatic regret.
- Including more parents, people of color, and varied faith perspectives in abortion-related plots.
- Grounding medical details in evidence-based information, especially around safety and timing.
As streamers and networks chase global audiences, there’s also an opportunity — and responsibility — to recognize that these aren’t just American culture-war scripts. They’re templates for how millions of people worldwide learn about abortion, many of whom may never see their own realities reflected otherwise.
Conclusion: TV Is Still Writing the Script on Abortion — Carefully
Television may never be a neutral observer, especially on issues as charged as abortion. In 2025, the medium edged backward in some ways: fewer characters chose abortion, and more of those who did carried the weight of heightened shame and narrative punishment. Yet the very existence of detailed research into these trends — and public conversations around them — is a sign of progress.
As writers, showrunners, and networks plan the next wave of dramas, comedies, and reality series, they have a choice: keep recycling old moral frameworks, or trust that audiences are ready for stories that treat abortion not as a plot twist or a cautionary tale, but as one facet of real, complicated lives. What shows decide in the writers’ room won’t determine the law — but it will keep shaping how viewers understand what’s at stake.
