Online community

Waiting to start abortion: A qualitative exploration of narratives of waiting shared in a Reddit community for abortion post-Dobbs leak in 2022

Karen Weidert
Ndola Prata
Cassondra Marshall
Emma Anderson
Eliza Dolgins
Lindsay Parham
Ushma D. Upadhyay
Elizabeth Pleasants
2024

With the Dobbs leak introducing uncertainty about access and the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in June of 2022 overturning the US constitutional right to abortion, delays in accessing desired abortion care are likely growing longer and more common. Timely research on people’s experiences waiting to access abortion care is needed. Using data from an abortion subreddit (r/abortion), we analyzed posts that described waiting after having decided to terminate the pregnancy, either by having an in-clinic appointment or ordering medication(s) online for self-managed...

Abortion access barriers shared in “r/abortion” after Roe: a qualitative analysis of a Reddit community post-Dobbs decision leak in 2022

Elizabeth Pleasants
Karen Weidert
Lindsay Parham
Ndola Prata
Ushma Upadhyay
Eliza Dolgins
Emma Anderson
Coye Cheshire
Cassondra Marshall
2024

With drastic changes to abortion policy, the months following the Dobbs leak and subsequent decision in 2022 were a uniquely uncertain and difficult time for abortion access in the United States. To understand experiences of challenges to abortion access during that time, we used a hybrid inductive and
deductive thematic coding approach to analyse descriptions of barriers and their impacts shared in an abortion subreddit (r/abortion). A simple random sample of 10% of posts was obtained from those shared from 02 May 2022 through 23 December 2022; comments were purposively sampled during...