Abstract
Pregnancy is a universal experience shaped by sociocultural contexts. News media presents a unique opportunity to analyze public narratives of pregnancy and how it differs across cultures. Our study aims to (1) identify the most prevalent overall themes in news media narratives of pregnancy across 19 English-speaking countries, and (2) compare pregnancy narratives across geographic regions. We used the largest English news media corpus that included over 30 million news articles from more than 7000 news websites across 19 countries, and extracted a one-year data subset (2019; 1.5 billion words). Of the primary search terms 'pregnant' and 'pregnancy', we collated 240,464 descriptors that met criteria of lexical proximity and semantic bonding. Thereafter, we used topic modelling to identify the five most prevalent pregnancy-related themes: (1) complications and risk, (2) crime, (3) celebration, (4) celebrity births, and (5) contraception. Although there were regional differences, themes of complications and risk were most common, comprising 39.6% of all pregnancy narratives in our big-data corpus. The second-most dominant theme was crime (20.8%). Narratives of contraception were more prevalent in Europe, North America, and Oceania (27.2-31.3%) compared to Africa and Asia (11.9-19.6%). Though the vast majority of pregnancies are healthy, themes of complications and risk dominated the news media discourse; unchecked, this may be an avenue for misinformation, stress, and anxiety. In addition, lower prevalence of contraception narratives in Africa and Asia may reflect a gap that requires the attention of policymakers in building culturally-adapted programs to promote family planning and encourage open discussions about sexual health. Results contribute to the academic repository of societal representations of pregnancy through a big-data lens, providing contextual information for future development, implementation and evaluation of localized pregnancy-related campaigns.
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