As more states pass restrictive abortion laws and the conservative majority on the Supreme Court is actively trying to dismantle Roe v. Wade , abortion storylines on TV have not adequately depicted the barriers in accessing abortion, according to a new report .

What really got to me about this year and over the past couple of years, really is weve seen this mounting number, this incredible increase in abortion restrictions that weve never seen before, in real life. And thats just not translating to the lives of characters on TV. Theyre just totally divorced from the reality of abortion access, said Steph Herold, a researcher at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco, and one of the authors of the report.

Herold and her colleagues have been tracking abortion storylines in pop culture for about a decade. The good news is they have found a marked increase in the number of TV shows that have incorporated an abortion-related storyline, which can reduce the stigma against talking about abortions and illuminate the issue for viewers. In 2016, they found just 13 abortion-related plotlines on major scripted shows in the U.S., involving characters either having an abortion, disclosing a past abortion or considering getting an abortion. In 2021, there were at least 47 abortion-related plotlines on 42 shows.

But the bad news is a lot of those storylines remain limited. They often do not reflect the barriers to access that many people, such as low-income people, people of color and trans people, experience. And they dont reflect our current political situation.

Most abortion patients face at least one logistical or financial obstacle when obtaining an abortion, the report states. But most TV shows do not depict this at all, showing a character easily locating an abortion provider, paying for the abortion, taking time off from work, having insurance coverage or living in an area with relatively few abortion restrictions, like New York or Los Angeles.

This goes hand in hand with the demographic disconnect between TV and reality. The majority of abortion patients are people of color, and many are low-income people, who tend to face increased barriers to abortion access. But the vast majority of TV characters in abortion-related storylines are white and wealthy.

According to the report, 68% of TV characters in abortion-related storylines in 2021 were white. Only two shows featured Black women in these storylines: ABCs The Good Doctor and HBO Maxs Love Life. More shows this year did feature Latina and Asian characters in abortion-related storylines. However, all but one of these characters were on television shows that originated outside the United States, and thus did not represent the racialized experience of accessing an abortion in the U.S., the report said.