Tragic but Rare: Abortion Storytelling in Local News Coverage One Year Past-Dobbs

This essay examines local news coverage of abortion stories during the year following the United States Supreme Court decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), in states with trigger bans and states considering legislation to severely restrict abortion. Framing theory stipulates that news narratives are never neutral. The way stories are structured inevitably foregrounds certain themes while pushing others to the margins (Chong and Druckman 2007; Pope, Pelletier, and Guertin 2018). We analyzed 1600 local news articles 1 for the presence of thematic frames, which focus on the big-picture context of a political event, and episodic frames, which more closely resemble a case study (Feezell, Glazier, and Boydstun 2021; Iyengar 1994). Our initial framing analysis found that only a small handful of articles, 66 out of 1,600, used episodic frames to tell the abortion stories of individuals. 2