For decades, abortion has been one of America’s most divisive political issues, fueling debates not only in legislatures and courtrooms but also in homes, churches, and street protests. That polarization reached new heights in June 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating the federal right to abortion. 

For Ashwin Rao, a Ph.D. student at USC Viterbi Information Sciences Institute who studies political polarization, this moment marked more than a political turning point—it was an opportunity to study how Americans understand and respond to divisive political topics online, in real-time.

In a study presented at the 2025 International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), held June 23-26, 2025 in Copenhagen, Rao and his colleagues analyzed over 3.5 million tweets posted in the year surrounding the Dobbs decision. What they found was that liberals and conservatives not only framed the abortion debate through starkly different lenses, but also mirrored each other’s use of hostility, particularly in response to political events.

“When people talk about issue-based polarization in the U.S., they often look at broad topics like gun laws, LGBTQ rights, or abortion,” Rao said. “But they rarely examine the sub-issues or specific framings that reveal how people actually understand and express their positions. That’s what this research sets out to do.”

The study examines over a million unique Twitter/X users between January 2022 and January 2023. Researchers used machine learning models to predict users’ political ideology and detect five types of hostile expressions: anger, toxicity, obscenities, insults, and hate speech. They then tracked how these expressions changed over time and in response to four pivotal events: the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion, the official Dobbs verdict that overturned Roe, the Kansas abortion referendum, and the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, which all generated online discussion about abortion rights.

The study found that while conservatives generally expressed more hostility overall, both liberals and conservatives tended to match each other’s tone. When one group escalated its use of anger, insults, or toxic speech, the other quickly followed. “Both groups were very hostile,” Rao said.

Beyond the divisive rhetoric, the study identified five dominant frames in abortion discourse: religion, bodily autonomy, fetal personhood, women’s health, and exceptions to abortion bans. Each side approached the issue through its own preferred frames; for example, conservatives talked about abortion through religion and fetal rights, while liberals emphasized bodily autonomy and women’s health. Beyond emphasizing different frames, liberals and conservatives also expressed hostility in opposing ways—liberals were more hostile toward religion and fetal-rights, while conservatives showed greater hostility toward bodily autonomy and women’s health. 

Yet interestingly, one frame appeared on both sides of the divide: exceptions. The debate on exceptions for abortion, such as in cases of rape, incest, or medical complications, remained a contentious issue yet showed some consensus among the public. 

“Conversations around exceptions were sort of hard to disentangle,” Rao said. Both liberals and conservatives discussed exceptions, but often from different angles and with different emotional tones.

Still, exceptions were a rare point of overlap in an otherwise polarized conversation—signaling a possible entry point for dialogue, even amid intense disagreement. “Exceptions are where survey studies have shown that there’s more willingness to come across the party lines,” Rao said. “I think this is the only way to solve ideological divisions—giving people hope that there’s a bridge across two groups.” 

Published on June 26th, 2025

Last updated on July 3rd, 2025