Compared to other mosquito-borne illnesses, the Zika virus is mild and for that reason has garnered little media attention in the fifty years since its discovery. However, the most recent Zika outbreak, identified in Brazil in 2015, brought an onslaught of media coverage. From a media standpoint, it had all of the elements of an exciting story: the virus was in an exotic location that happened to be where the summer Olympics were going to be held; it affected babies more severely than adults; it might come to the U.S.; and it didn’t have a known cure. However, several journalism and public health organizations questioned the ethics of the rhetoric and misinformation that seemed to spread more quickly than the virus itself. This paper will explore the ethics of how Zika was reported in the media by looking at the ways images and headlines framed the issues surrounding Zika. In particular, this paper will look at how news reports framed the severity of the outbreak and its consequences compared to the historical data available about Zika and other mosquito-borne diseases. Additionally, this paper will explore how Zika’s link to microcephaly was used as a justification to expand abortion legislation and compare this to how rubella was used to expand abortion legislation in the 1960s. Included in this analysis is whether other solutions, such as vaccines and genetically modified mosquitoes, received similar press coverage as abortion and abstinence as solutions to the Zika outbreak. While this paper looks at Zika, specifically, the broader scope addresses the ethics of reporting epidemics and disease and how we, as consumers of news, can practice discernment when obtaining information on public health issues.