A legal brief or political memo may be complicated to understand, but its impacts will affect citizens whether they understand it or not. The news can break down these more complex stories and make them digestible by the general population (Kempton 2024; O’Boyle and Li 2019). As cited in “My Body, My Voice”, research has shown that the portrayal of abortion in the media has impacted political, cultural, and personal beliefs in the United States. The increased politicization of abortion has generated higher demand for political information (Kempton 2024). 

Shifting media coverage of abortion was reported by POLITICO following the overturn of Roe v. Wade in 2022. While the most used word started as “pregnancy”, this landmark decision shifted the media focus to “vote.”  POLITICO’s analysis of over 15,700 local papers to determine shifts in the media identified two key themes: “abortion as a political issue and a focus on the real-world effects of restrictions” (“How Abortion Coverage Changed in the Media, According to the Data” 2023). 

Swing states, like PA, were found to have coverage that increasingly focused on the politics of abortion. These states have the potential to alter the course of a presidential campaign and are the target of increased political efforts, thereby intensifying the media’s influence on public opinion.  States with higher levels of restriction, such as NC and GA, were found to use political words more than three times as often as any other frame. Whether or not a midterm election was approaching was also found to impact media coverage. 

The implications of this large-scale study demonstrate the reflexive relationship between the media and public opinion. Abortion has become an increasingly hot-button political issue. As many as 1 in 4 registered voters report that a candidate’s stance on abortion will determine their ballot. This shift may come at the cost of obscuring other human and medical effects of changing policies. The question then becomes whether more alternative forms of journalism, such as student coverage, can address this gap (“How Abortion Coverage Changed in the Media, According to the Data” 2023).