Analyzing the Stance of Facebook Posts on Abortion Considering State-Level Health and Social Compositions

Abstract

Abortion remains one of the most controversial topics, especially after overturning Roe v. Wade ruling in the United States. Previous literature showed that the illegality of abortion could have serious consequences, as women might seek unsafe pregnancy terminations leading to increased maternal mortality rates and negative effects on their reproductive health. Therefore, the stances of the abortion-related Facebook posts were analyzed at the state level in the United States from May 4 until June 30, 2022, right after the Supreme Court’s decision was disclosed. In more detail, a pre-trained Transformer architecture-based model was fine-tuned on a manually labeled training set to obtain a stance detection model suitable for the collected dataset. Afterward, we employed appropriate statistical tests to examine the relationships between public opinion regarding abortion, abortion legality, political leaning, and factors measuring the overall population’s health, health knowledge, and vulnerability per state. We found that infant mortality rate, political affiliation, abortion rates, and abortion legality are associated with stances toward abortion at the state level in the US. While aligned with existing literature, these findings indicate how public opinion, laws, and women’s and infants’ health are related, as well as how these relationships can be demonstrated by using social media data.