Interpersonal Abortion Conversations: Communication Characteristics Post-Roe

ABSTRACT

Abortion is a politicized and stigmatized health procedure that has received considerable attention in popular discourse in the past year. The present study investigated how often people (N = 235) talk about abortion throughout their lifespan and within the past 12 months, with whom they have these conversations, and which conversations were most memorable. Key findings from the present study, framed through the Theory of Memorable Messages and the Social Ecological Model, include that most participants had at least one conversation about abortion in the past 12 months. Within the past 12 months, the most common conversation partners for abortion-related communication were friends, followed by mothers and romantic partners. Over the lifespan, but prior to the past 12 months, a majority of participants had at least one conversation about abortion. Similarly, friends were the most frequent source of abortion-related communication over the lifespan, followed by mothers and romantic partners. Many of the conversations within the past 12 months focused heavily on the overturn of Roe v. Wade or navigating a post-Roe world with a body that could become pregnant, or as someone who cared about people who could become pregnant. Prior to the past 12 months, participants characterized abortion communication as tense, religious, pro-choice, descriptive of the women who might have abortions, relating to specific abortion disclosures, or political. Within the past 12 months, memorable conversations about abortion were personal or relational, and were often prompted by discussions surrounding Roe.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

There is no dataset associated with this manuscript. Raw data available by emailing the first author upon reasonable request.

Notes

1. The Guttmacher Institute is an independent research agency that provides the majority of abortion data in the United States but does report slightly higher abortion trends due to its reporting methods than the CDC (Ranji et al., 2023).

2. We use the past 12 months (at time of data collection) to examine perceived changes since the overturn of Roe v. Wade.

3. To discourage participation from only one political ideology and in an effort to capture organic talk about abortion in multiple contexts, this study intentionally excluded any questions pertaining to political affiliation or identity. We discuss this more in the Limitations section.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.