States of Abortion Talk: Social Media Responses to Threats and Opportunities Post-Dobbs

The Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in June 2022 reversed 50 years of precedent by allowing states to formulate their own abortion policies. This resetting of abortion policy created a new raft of opportunities and threats across the states for both pro-life and pro-choice supporters. In this study, we aim to analyze how public discourse around abortion responded to this changed political context. Using a dataset of 288,325 abortion-related Tweets posted in 2022, we examine public reaction to Dobbs using both quantitative and qualitative approaches. We categorize Tweets by abortion stance (pro-choice and pro-life ) and geo-political context by state groups ( protected, restricted, and unsettled based on abortion access policy). Our temporal analysis shows that while both pro-choice and pro-life Twitter activity spiked after both the leaked draft in May 2022 and the final decision, only pro-choice discussions maintained a heightened level of engagement over time. Analyzing the discussion frames among the Tweets reveals that pro-choice users emphasized a wider range of arguments that varied by state context, while pro-life Tweets were generally unresponsive to state context. Our findings indicate that the new threats and opportunities had uneven effects within pro-life and pro-choice public discourse.