Reddit After Roe: A Computational Analysis of Abortion Narratives and Barriers in the Wake of Dobbs

TL;DR

This study analyzes Reddit discussions on abortion post-Dobbs decision, revealing emotional barriers dominate discourse and highlighting how online narratives evolve with legal and cultural changes.

Contribution

It offers a large-scale computational analysis of abortion-related Reddit posts, classifying barriers, emotions, and information behaviors across different stages and time periods.

Findings

Emotional barriers like fear and sadness are most prevalent.

Discourse evolves with legal and cultural shifts.

Online narratives reflect complex emotional and informational dynamics.

Abstract

The 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization reshaped the reproductive rights landscape, introducing new uncertainty and barriers to abortion access. We present a large-scale computational analysis of abortion discourse on Reddit, examining how barriers to access are articulated across information-seeking and information-sharing behaviors, different stages of abortion (before, during, after), and three phases of the Dobbs decision in 2022. Drawing on more than 17,000 posts from four abortion-related subreddits, we employed a multi-step pipeline to classify posts by information type, abortion stage, barrier category, and expressed emotions. Using a codebook of eight barrier types, including legal, financial, emotional, and social obstacles, we analyzed their associations with emotions and information behaviors. Topic modeling of model-generated barrier rationales further revealed how discourse evolved in response to shifting legal and cultural contexts. Our findings show that emotional and psychological barriers consistently dominate abortion narratives online, with emotions such as nervousness, confusion, fear, and sadness prevalent across discourse. By linking information behaviors, barriers, emotions, and temporal dynamics, this study provides a multi-dimensional account of how abortion is navigated in online communities.