Online Social Media Reactions to the Overturn of Roe v. Wade : Public Health Implications and Policy Insights

Background The Supreme Court of the United States’ (SCOTUS) decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned the Court’s previous decision in Roe v. Wade , the case that established abortion before fetal viability as a constitutionally protected right in the USA, thereby returning abortion legality prior to viability back to individual states. Social media reactions indicated strong rebukes of SCOTUS’ actions, potentially indicating support to maintain legal abortion to some extent. Yet, understanding the nuances in public opinion about abortion at the population scale is lacking. Objective To measure reactions to overturning Roe v. Wade (an outcome of the Dobbs v. Jackson decision) via social media. Methods We applied Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic models to generate themes for tweets ( N = 4,353,103) collected between 5–3-2022 and 7–6-2022. We then applied a Sentence Bi-directional Encoder from Transformers (S-BERT) analysis with a restricted sample to evaluate daily themes and longitudinal changes. Finally, we applied a sentiment analysis to measure affect and changes in daily posting volume. Results Social media reactions to overturning Roe v. Wade were largely negative. LDA and S-BERT topics indicated mostly unease at SCOTUS’ actions and changes to abortion access, though we also observe some support for SCOTUS and its decision. Increased abortion-related social media reactions lasted approximately 7 days before returning to baseline levels. Discussion and Conclusion Although initial reactions to overturning Roe v. Wade were in support of abortion, rapid news cycles may have diverted attention away from this monumental issue. Declining coverage about Dobbs , and overturning Roe v. Wade , and by extension social media reactions, holds serious implications for other social issues that will likely be heard before SCOTUS in coming terms. Our findings can inform US abortion climate and promote awareness of the tenuous nature of US social issues and associated rights.