After Roe v. Wade was overturned, 1,500 showrunners, creators and directors in Hollywood banded together to figure out how they could do more when it came to advocating for reproductive rights. But when Showrunners for Abortion Rights decided to extend that care to the health and safety of their own crews, they were met with resistance, writer, producer and the advocacy group’s co-founder Nicole Jefferson Asher revealed at TheWrap’s 2024 Power Women Summit on Tuesday.
While commiserating about the lack of complex reproductive portrayals onscreen, the group started to wonder what would happen if one of their crew or cast members had an atopic pregnancy or was raped or needed hormones or experienced one of the hundreds of ailments that can impact women. That led to a push for the safety of their own teams.
“As a matter of fact, most of the studios didn’t want to talk about it. We really forced them. People who had big, sexy overall deals at each studio went in demanding at least some sort of protocols and paradigms,” Asher said during the “Reproductive & Caregiving Justice: On Screen & Behind the Camera” panel, presented by Women in Film (WIF).
This rallying worked, to a point. Hotlines were added to the call sheet, giving crew members an outlet if they needed help and didn’t feel like they could go to a producer. The organization also released a report card compiling policies for different studios. But so far, the results have been limited.
“Almost everybody has some sort of privacy and protocol. But they stopped short of actually defending women if they were persecuted or prosecuted for either seeking abortion care or helping someone else get abortion care. Certainly, they stopped short of actually committing to any kind of emergency services,” Asher said. “The struggle continues … It’s our responsibility to make sure that our crews are safe and know they at least have some options.”
The panel also revealed the gaps Hollywood has when it comes to portraying both reproductive health and caregiving, two topics that greatly impact women. The
USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that, out of the top 100 films of 2024 that featured 5,000 speaking characters, there were only four portrayals of abortion. One of those was “Exorcist: Believer,” which had a reference to a woman “being scraped out like a rotten pumpkin.”
“This is the type of message that is being communicated in this global enterprise of storytelling in movies, which is highly problematic,” founder and director of the Inclusion Initiative Dr. Stacy Smith said during the panel.
Portrayals of caregiving, whether to a child or another loved one, were equally rare. The Geena Davis Institute found that when children are part of stories, childcare is only mentioned roughly 20% of the time. Additionally, caregiving as a whole is shown on screen about 11% of the time.
“But they’re 100% of the time relevant to more than half of the population,”
Vicki Shabo, Senior Fellow for Gender Equity and founder-director for the Entertainment Initiative at the Better Life Lab at New America, said. “Up to 106 million people in the United States are providing care to a child or a loved one. Most of those people are working. Seventy-three million children are living in families, most of whom have all adults that are working. And yet we are almost never seeing two working parents on screen trying to manage work and family, or a single parent trying to manage child care or elder care.”
This lacking trend also speaks to a racial gap onscreen as well as a gendered one. For example, it’s been found that Latino workers have lower rates of access to paid leave. The stereotypical types of families who appear onscreen do not mirror
writer, director and showrunner Linda Yvette Chavez’s experience. And neglecting them fails to highlight how complicated and lacking the healthcare system is in the United States.
“I can’t speak for all Mexican Americans — I want to preface with that — but I do think that of those that I know, which are a lot, there are a lot of intergenerational familial bonds. A lot of times our households have multiple generations within them,” Chavez said, referring to these households that take care of both parents and children as households with “sandwich generations.”
Chavez herself is currently experiencing these complicated family dynamics. Before the premiere of Chavez’s “Flamin’ Hot,” her aunt — a woman whom she called a “second mother” — had a brain hemorrhage that left her mentally incapacitated. “We couldn’t leave her alone,” Chavez said. “It was an eye-opening experience to see how broken the system is in terms of getting care and support, even with family members who were caregivers.”
Now Chavez’s plan is to write a movie about her experience. “I hope to direct that as my first film, because it’s been such a impactful journey. That’s not something some dude is just going to be like, ‘Let me tell the story.’ It’s so specific that only a woman could tell it,” Chavez said. “To be able to invest in those stories is so vital.”
Watch the full panel below:
