Abortion pill marketing and sourcing on twitter following Dobbs v. Jackson supreme court ruling

This study examines abortion-related discourse on Twitter (X) pre-and post-Dobbs v. Jackson ruling, which eliminated the constitutional right to abortion.

We used a custom data collection tool to collect tweets directly from Twitter using abortion-related keywords. We used the BERTopic language model and examined the top 30 retweeted and top 30 textually similar tweets from relevant topic clusters using an inductive coding approach. We also conducted statistical testing to assess potential associations between abortion themes.

166,799 unique tweets were collected from December 2020-December 2022. 464 unique tweets were coded for abortion-related themes with 154 identified as relevant. Of these, 66 tweets marketed abortion pills, 17 tweets were identified as offering consultations, and 91 tweets were relevant to self-managed abortion. All marketing and consultation tweets were posted post-Dobbs decision and 7 (7.69%) of self-managed tweets were posted pre-Dobbs versus 84 (92.30%) posted post-Dobbs. A positive association was found between tweets offering a medical consultation with tweets marketing abortion pills and discussing self-managed abortion.

This study detected online marketing of abortion pills, consultations and discussions about self-managed abortion following the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling. These results provide more context to the type of abortion-related information that is available online.