Hayley V McMahon, Naya Pearce, Alexis J Smith, India C Stevenson, Grace E Howard, Sara K Redd, Whitney S Rice
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Self-managed abortion (SMA) is prevalent in the United States (US) and has become increasingly common since the 2022 Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization that allowed states to enact early abortion bans. Although SMA is legal in nearly every US state, the number of people who have been arrested for alleged participation in SMA has continued to grow in recent years. Reproductive justice advocates have identified news media portrayals of these cases as a likely contributor to adverse legal outcomes for criminalised individuals; however, researchers have not yet investigated this. Therefore, we aimed to qualitatively assess the ways in which national news media outlets depict instances of SMA criminalisation. We identified 41 articles published by the top five national newspapers between 2000 and 2023 and conducted a reflexive thematic analysis. Our analysis revealed concerning patterns in news media coverage, in which journalists frequently personified the fetus as a victim while vilifying the criminalised person, undermined the character of the criminalised person through selected personal histories, and promoted the presumption of guilt by treating biased police statements as objective accounts. These findings contribute to the literature by describing the ways in which reproductive injustice is legitimised through news media and provide empirical support for reproductive justice advocates' calls for more responsible journalism in news media coverage of SMA criminalisation.
期刊介绍：
SRHM is a multidisciplinary journal, welcoming submissions from a wide range of disciplines, including the social sciences and humanities, behavioural science, public health, human rights and law. The journal welcomes a range of methodological approaches, including qualitative and quantitative analyses such as policy analysis; mixed methods approaches to public health and health systems research; economic, political and historical analysis; and epidemiological work with a focus on SRHR. Key topics addressed in SRHM include (but are not limited to) abortion, family planning, contraception, female genital mutilation, HIV and other STIs, human papillomavirus (HPV), maternal health, SRHR in humanitarian settings, gender-based and other forms of interpersonal violence, young people, gender, sexuality, sexual rights and sexual pleasure.
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