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Valdez, D., Jozkowski, K.N., Mena-Melendez, L., Crawford, B.L. & Arvind , A. (March 12-15, 2023) A monumental blow to the reproductive rights movement”: Online reactions and deep learning insights into the overturn of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS). American Academy of Health Behavior (AAHB) Annual Meeting
Background: The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) June 24, 2022, ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ended a 49-year precedent establishing abortion before viability as a constitutionally protected right in the US. Predictably, the aftermath of the SCOTUS ruling saw exponential increases in social media activity related to abortion and Roe v. Wade, affording the opportunity to model these data for insights into nationwide abortion climate. Purpose: This study characterizes longitudinal social media reactions for themes and activity related to the overturn of Roe v. Wade (beginning May 17 (the date an unofficial Dobbs ruling was leaked to the public) and ending June 29, 2022 (one week post Dobbs decision)). Methods: We leveraged Twitter’s Application Programming Interface (API) to collect (N=4,353,103) tweets for analysis. We applied Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic models with qualitative inductive coding to generate themes for tweets. We then applied a Sentence Bi-directional Encoder from Transformers (S-BERT) neural-network analysis with a restricted sample to evaluate daily themes and longitudinal changes in themes over time. Finally, we applied a sentiment analysis to measure affect and changes in daily posting volume. Results: Public reactions to the Dobbs decision were largely negative, potentially reflecting outrage and sadness at a monumental loss to reproductive rights and access. Indeed, most topics generated from our corpus likewise reflected multiple domains of reproductive rights and access and Dobbs aftermath, including forced births, bodily autonomy, and undue male influence on women’s rights. Only few topics indicated support for SCOTUS actions. These topics generally framed the Dobbs outcome as a victory for the unborn and support for former President Trump’s SCOTUS appointees. And, although social media activity was high during early phases of data collection, social media activity related to abortion returned to baseline levels (i.e., posting volume reflected prior to abortion in major news cycles) just one-week after the Dobbs ruling. Discussion and Conclusion: Although initial reactions to the Dobbs ruling were in support of abortion, people’s inability to remain engaged overtime may reflect only passive interest or complex beliefs about abortion. However, public apathy holds serious implications for other social issues that will likely be heard before SCOTUS in coming terms, including the right to contraception, same sex marriage, and other critical issues.