The fall of Roe dramatically changed abortion access. This researcher used Reddit to capture how — SkimNews
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- Betsy Pleasants, then a UC Berkeley School of Public Health graduate student, was studying Covid-19's impact on abortion access when the Supreme Court's draft Dobbs opinion leaked in spring 2022, prompting her and her thesis committee to redirect her dissertation to track post-Roe barriers on Reddit.
- Pleasants and colleagues used natural language processing to analyze more than 7,000 posts from r/abortion spanning the months before, during, and after the leak, identifying 55 distinct topics; human reviewers then conducted qualitative close reading on a subset to add context.
- The study reaffirmed established barriers such as high costs and limited appointment availability while surfacing newer challenges including delays receiving abortion medications by mail, low credibility of online ordering platforms, and fears of legal prosecution.
- To protect Reddit users — some of whom could face legal risk — the team applied a "heavy disguise" process, replacing identifiable posts with composite quotations tested against online searches and plagiarism-detection tools to prevent tracing back to original posters.
- Pleasants is now a postdoctoral research associate at UNC's Center for Women's Health Research, was recently named a STAT Wunderkind, and has expanded her research to include contraception and online misinformation.
- Mentors Ushma Upadhyay (UCSF) and Danny Valdez (Indiana) called the dual NLP-plus-qualitative approach visionary and a potential model for ethically studying sensitive online discourse at scale, particularly as reproductive health research grows more legally fraught.
Why it matters: The research establishes a methodological template — combining NLP's scale with qualitative depth and privacy safeguards — for studying stigmatized health topics where researchers must capture candid lived experience without endangering participants, at a moment when reproductive health researchers face heightened legal scrutiny.
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