News Coverage of Abortion in Relation to Race and Class in the United States in 2021.

Mass media play a significant role in shaping public opinion. News coverage of abortion reflects narratives about reproductive health, ethics, and women, and may potentially reinforce negative social stereotypes and stigma surrounding abortion (Feltham-King and Macleod 2015). The target article (Watson 2022) argues that low-income Black and Hispanic women are overrepresented in discussions about abortion, while non-Hispanic white women are underrepresented, which may lead to the racialization of poverty in inappropriate ways. To explore the representation of abortion in news coverage, this commentary employs a qualitative, discourse analysis of news stories published by CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post between January 1, 2021, and December 31, 2021. Discourse analysis is an effective method to reveal macrolevel social values through analyzing microlevel texts (Richardson 2007; van Dijk 1987). This commentary adopts van Dijk’s critical discourse analysis as a research method for textual analysis and applies intersectionality theory to explain the results. These online news platforms were selected for analysis because they are leading English-language news websites in terms of readership, circulation, and advertising revenues. The aim of this commentary is to explore how news outlets represent Black and Hispanic women who have abortions versus nonHispanic white women who have abortions in terms of proportion of representation, language strategies, and social ideology. “Abortion woman” and “abortion women” were the keywords used to search the eight news platforms. Related results were divided into three categories: racial minorities as main characters, white women as main characters, and women whose race was not mentioned. Among 79 news stories collected from the designated websites and determined the percentage of the content discussing abortion related to Black and Hispanic women (31%), non-Hispanic white women (27%), and articles which did not specifically mention race (42%). After using NVivo 12 to code the content of relevant news stories, we found three themes among the representations of women who were racial minorities and had abortions. (1) A connection between race and poverty: In these news stories, “the poor” and “people of color” often appear together, showing a tendency to relate racial minorities to the poor population. For example, one article in the New York Times states, that “Suppress the fertility of the poor and people of color do nothing to bring about structural change” (Bokat-Lindell 2021). According to van Dijk’s (Richardson 2007; van Dijk 1987) method of discourse analysis, the language device “presupposition” was employed here, prompting readers to accept the assumption that poverty and racial minorities are intrinsically linked, which may lead to increased racialization of poverty and unconsciously fuel white economic advantage and minority economic disadvantage (Watson 2022). (2) More stigmatized details of abortion: When depicting personal abortion experiences of