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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between people's attitudes about abortion acceptability and the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade—two distinct but related issues—has not been rigorously explored. The authors used a mixed-methods approach for analyzing in-depth interviews to better understand how participants' feelings toward abortion acceptability are related to perceptions of whether abortion should be legal. The authors then assessed (1) correlations between abortion acceptability and different measures of support for Roe v. Wade, and (2) how the phrasing of survey items related to Roe v. Wade may evoke different responses via an online survey fielded in 2018. The study's qualitative results highlight that there is a disjuncture between people's moral feelings toward abortion and their attitudes toward abortion legality. The study's quantitative results further demonstrate that correlations between abortion acceptability and support for Roe v. Wade are moderate, and the differences in responses to the phrasing of survey items related to Roe v. Wade are moderated by knowledge. The authors recommend that when researchers develop survey items, they avoid ambiguities of abortion as a general construct, especially when public opinion measures on abortion are employed for research and the design of social and health policy and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines knowledge of and attitudes toward Roe v. Wade among a sample of 779 US Latinx adults. Survey response patterns were examined in relation to generational status and choice of survey language as well as to several demographic variables previously shown to influence abortion attitudes (e.g., age, religiosity, political affiliation). Differences were found in knowledge of Roe v. Wade by generational status and survey language, with those with higher generational statuses and those taking the survey in English exhibiting greater knowledge. Finally, greater knowledge of Roe v. Wade and choosing to take the survey in English predicted more positive attitudes toward Roe v. Wade controlling for other demographic variables; no effect on attitudes of generational status was observed. These findings contribute to our understanding of abortion attitudes among US Latinxs as well as the relationship between political socialization, knowledge, and attitudes toward social issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examined people's (1) attitudes about abortion using an item from Pew Research Center (i.e., whether abortion should be legal in all cases, legal in most cases, illegal in most cases, or illegal in all cases) and (2) support for different punishments if abortion were illegal in all cases for different people involved in the abortion–the pregnant person, their partner, an informant and the healthcare provider. We administered a web-based survey to 2,204 U.S. adults using quota-based sampling. Post-stratification weights were applied to the data so that the sample was comparable to U.S. benchmarks for gender, race, Hispanic ethnicity, age, education, and political affiliation. We compared endorsement of various punishments for a pregnant person, their partner, informant, and healthcare provider. Additionally, we compared the endorsement of these punishments across response options of Pew's abortion legality item. Overall, most of our sample indicated that abortion should be legal in most (34%) or legal in all scenarios (21%). However, if abortion were illegal in all circumstances, most of our sample supported some form of punishment for the pregnant person (72%−75%), their partner (65%−68%), and healthcare providers (70%−71%), but not informants (47%−49%). Among the endorsed punishments, therapy/education typically received the most support. Because of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision and the subsequent overturning of Roe v. Wade , abortion is illegal in a significant number of states and a punishable offense. Our findings suggest that current punishments associated with many of these laws are counter to public sentiment. Despite majority support for some punishment, the categories of "no punishment" or therapy/education had the most support. Given the lack of plurality or majority support for fines or incarceration, abortion laws including these punishments, including bounty-style laws passed in Texas and Oklahoma, may be out of step with public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]