ABSTRACT
Between 1989 and 2017 Degrassi – the longest-running teen series in Canadian history – offered four narratives about teens who choose to have abortions. This essay considers those stories, by thinking about Degrassi as a cultural space where the meaning of abortion is negotiated at the national and transnational levels. I argue that while (national) production context plays a role in what a television series can “say,” it is always in tension with the highly desirable, transnational circuits of distribution through which television (and capital) circulates. Or, put another way, abortion stories on Degrassi tell us something about how production context impacts the discursive solvency producers have in the face of pressure to tell stories in particular ways.
