Of the 100 highest-grossing movies of 2023, only one contains a portrayal of abortion — and it’s a line spoken by a demon. “Scraped out, she was, like a rotten pumpkin, your baby,” the demon says, in the Blumhouse/Universal horror movie Exorcist: Believer, as it torments a supporting character played by Ann Dowd for an abortion she had had as a younger woman.
At a moment when roughly 40 percent of women under 30 say that abortion is the most important issue in this year’s election, popular movies are virtually silent on the topic, according to a new report from Stacy L. Smith at USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, The Prevalence & Context of Reproductive Health Portrayals Across 100 Popular Films. In 2023, the year after Roe v Wade was overturned, Hollywood’s biggest films contained no references to abortion as a medical procedure, nor mentions of abortion medications like Plan B.
“Abortion and access to reproductive care are some of the most significant issues in the upcoming election,” Smith said. “Yet Hollywood devoted only 3 minutes and 12 seconds to the topic in the nearly 200 hours of film content last year. The film industry has squandered its opportunities to depict abortion in authentic, informative and multidimensional ways.”
Smith attributes the absence of abortion references in part to the gender of most big-screen storytellers, noting in the study that across the 1,700 most popular films of the last 17 years, 93.5 percent of directors, 87 percent of writers and 77.9 percent of producers were men. “Many of the narratives brought to the biggest screens in the U.S. and around the world are told from the perspective of a single gender,” the research brief says.
Forty-two percent of top films contained a depiction of reproductive health, with the majority of those focused on pregnancy, according to the study, which examined the 100 most popular movies of 2023 for portrayals related to pregnancy, miscarriage, infertility, contraception, abortion, menstruation and overall reproductive health.
Fifty-three characters experienced pregnancy, though only 51 appeared on-screen, representing 3.3 percent of all adolescent or adult women in popular films. Few teenage pregnancies were shown on screen, and the majority of characters were in a committed relationship (80.4 percent).
There were just two portrayals of infertility across the top 100 films of 2023, both in historical settings and both framed around male disappointment. In Apple’s Napoleon, when Vanessa Kirby’s Josephine is unable to conceive a male heir, she and Joaquin Phoenix’s Napoleon divorce; in the Angel Studios biblical drama His Only Son, Sarah can’t bear a child for Abraham. There was no present-day portrayal of infertility, IVF or surrogacy in any of 2023’s top 100 films.
Five of the 100 films had a portrayal of general reproductive health, including a scene where Margot Robbie’s Barbie visits a gynecologist in Barbie and one in which preteen girls look at an anatomy book in Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret?, notably two of the year’s top films that were directed by women, Greta Gerwig and Kelly Fremon Craig.
