Abortion in U.S. newspapers, 2013

Background: How the news covers a highly contested issue like abortion can have significant impact on how policymakers and the public understand the issue. Advocates for women’s access to safe abortion care need to understand current news coverage in order to shift the debate toward a more productive framing of the issue.

Method: A quantitative and qualitative content analysis of eight “constructed weeks” of news and opinion articles on abortion published in three major US newspaper sources in 2013.

Findings: Substantive stories on abortion increased throughout 2013, as events like State Senator Wendy Davis’s filibuster of Texas’s abortion restrictions and the debate over proposed 20-week abortion bans increased the salience of abortion on the news agenda. Preliminary findings suggest that abortion is increasingly framed in the news as a battle between constitutional rights and fetal rights, while women’s actual experiences of unintended pregnancy and abortion are rarely represented.

Implications: These findings suggest that current news frames on abortion could impair public understanding of the importance of this care to women’s lives. For example, reporting of claims about “fetal pain,” empirically unsubstantiated and biologically unsupported by scientific consensus, may influence policy makers and the public alike to accept the “personhood” of the fetus, which may in turn lead to further restrictions on women’s reproductive decision-making. Implications of these and other findings will be discussed, with the goal of helping public health advocates understand the current public conversation on abortion and consider ways to improve the public debate.