Welcome to our Research Spotlight series, where we invite postgraduate researchers and early career researchers to submit short-form articles that sheds light on their research, highlighting fresh scholarship on underrepresented research areas in an effort to stay abreast with new voices in the humanities. In this article, Rebecca Siddall explores the ways in which reproductive abuse is presented in contemporary media, including films, television, and social media.
I am a First Year PhD student at Anglia Ruskin University. My thesis explores the ways in which reproductive abuse (coercion around pregnancy, abortion, contraception, and sterilisation) is presented in contemporary media, including films, television, and social media. This topic is popular in cultural discourse and yet significantly under-researched, leading to misinformation and polarisation. It spans so many experiences: from a partner removing a condom without consent, to nationwide abortion bans, to doctors pushing a patient to have a sterilisation procedure. My work is strongly informed by feminist theory, especially Black feminist reproductive activism, as well as queer theory and disability studies. Historically, it is marginalised groups who have borne the brunt of reproductive abuse, yet their experiences have often been rendered invisible; I hope that by centring these issues, my work can play a part in shifting the narrow ways that we think about and discuss reproduction.
In this blog post I will focus on a case that exemplifies the crucial interplay between mediation and activism in narratives of reproductive abuse. This May, news broke that a pregnant 30-year-old African American woman, Adriana Smith, was being kept on life support to gestate her foetus to viability: the latest battleground for unyielding US anti-abortion law [1]. Smith had originally come to hospital seeking treatment after experiencing sustained severe headaches, but was sent away – another case of the institutional racism and misogyny that pervades healthcare facilities. Soon, she had collapsed from untreated blood clots and was declared brain dead. But Smith lived in Georgia, a state that now has a near-total ban on abortions. Despite only being nine weeks pregnant at the time of her brain death, and expressly contradicting her family’s wishes, doctors artificially sustained her body for four months in order to incubate the foetus. She passed away on 17th June: her extremely premature baby is expected to survive, but will need ongoing support [2].
Once traditional media had picked up on this unprecedented story, social media was in turn awash with the news. Astute users had noticed that Adriana’s experience exactly paralleled a plot from the TV show The Handmaid’s Tale. The show, which ran from 2017-2025, graphically depicts the ritual rape and impregnation of fertile women (‘handmaids’) in a dystopic, authoritarian United States. Season 3, Episode 9 centres on the story of a young Black handmaid, Natalie, who suffers a fatal injury in early pregnancy, but is kept on life support in hospital until the foetus can be delivered. The other handmaids watch on helplessly for months as Natalie wastes away, unable to help her. Aware that social media algorithms boost exposure for sensationalist content, users incorporated clips from The Handmaid’s Tale into their posts about Adriana [3]. By combining images of Natalie with descriptions of Adriana – by blurring the line between the two women – the social media videos place the viewer in the position of the handmaids in the show, standing above Natalie/Adriana’s lifeless body. The posts rapidly went viral, with hundreds of thousands of viewers expressing their outrage at Adriana’s experience.
While Natalie’s plot in The Handmaid’s Tale was invented specifically for television, Season 1 of the TV show is based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel of the same name. Written at a time of widespread reproductive activism, Atwood famously based the plot on a wide range of real-life stories from the 20th century [4]. She collated experiences, from Nazi-era Lebensborn eugenics to forced pregnancies in Ceaușescu’s Romania, translating them into a cohesive, dystopian narrative. Historically, reproductive abuse has been erased: poorly documented, sparingly researched, and often a taboo subject of discussion. This is particularly true for women of colour, who were the victims of forced pregnancy during slavery, and forced sterilisation during the era of population control policies [5]. Atwood’s novel was itself designed to generate outrage in an era preceding social media, raising awareness of invisible reproductive experiences. The highly successful TV show in turn reignited this mission, coupling the politically relevant plot of the novel with explicit visuals of rape, torture, and death to curry emotional responses from viewers [6]. The image of Natalie’s body, forcefully suspended between life and death, shocks us. The viewer is driven to centre her, to empathise with her as the focal point of her story, as opposed to the foetus in her womb.
Social media users recognise that, unfortunately, it is rarely enough to relay an abhorrent story like Adriana’s on its own; within the attention economy paradigm of social media, users rely on comparison with the shocking visuals of The Handmaid’s Tale to whip up outrage at the treatment of a woman of colour in the US medical system. Sociologist Dorothy Roberts describes how ‘the systematic, institutionalized denial of reproductive freedom has uniquely marked Black women’s history in America’, and yet you will barely find it mentioned in any classroom [7]. Social media videos, addictive and emotive, capture our attention and force viewers to bear witness: to remember that this has happened before, it is happening now, and it can happen again. Adriana’s story unfolded behind the closed doors of a hospital, but we can watch clips of Natalie in The Handmaid’s Tale and feel the viscerality of her experience. It becomes our duty, as the viewer, to remember Adriana Smith, and to not allow her story to also be lost to history.
Notes:
[1] Sherman, C. (2025) ‘Fetus of brain-dead Georgia woman kept alive due to abortion ban is growing, says family’, The Guardian, 20 May. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/20/pregnant-georgia-woman-brain-dead.
[2] Dobkin, R. (2025) ‘Family of woman who carried baby while brain dead give heartbreaking update on child’, The Independent, 27 August. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/adriana-smith-child-brain-dead-georgia-abortion-ban-b2815401.html.
[3] Hathaway, B. (2021) ‘“Likes” and “shares” teach people to express more outrage online’, Yale News, 13 August. Available at: https://news.yale.edu/2021/08/13/likes-and-shares-teach-people-express-more-outrage-online.
[4] Penguin (2019) ‘Margaret Atwood on the real-life events that inspired The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments’, Penguin Interviews, 8 September. Available at: https://www.penguin.co.uk/discover/articles/margaret-atwood-handmaids-tale-testaments-real-life-inspiration/
[5] Roberts, D.E. (1997) Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. New York: Vintage Books.
[6] Hamilton, C. (2025) ‘How “The Handmaid’s Tale” Leveraged Critical Acclaim to Drive Subscriber Revenue’, The Wrap, 11 April. Available at: https://www.thewrap.com/the-handmaids-tale-revenue-data-hulu-amazon/.
[7] Roberts, Killing the Black Body, p.4.
Rebecca Siddall is a PhD student at Anglia Ruskin University. Her interdisciplinary research explores the intersections between reproduction, rape culture, and the media. She has MSci and BA degrees in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge, with a specialism in the history and politics of reproduction.