Before (and After) Roe v. Wade: A Content Analysis of Conservative and Liberal Media on Abortion Legislation in the United States, 2020–2024
Exploring Sentiment, Framing, and State-Level Policy Intersections in U.S. News Coverage
Abstract
This blog investigates how abortion is framed in the media by analyzing coverage from two ideologically opposed outlets: Fox News and The New York Times. Using text and sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and geographic policy data from the Guttmacher Institute, we examine shifts in media narratives before and after the 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
Introduction
Long a topic of debate across law, medicine, gender, and religion, abortion remains one of the most polarizing issues in American public life. That polarization deepened in June 2022, when the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that had established a constitutional right to abortion. The decision unsettled not only the legal framework around abortion, but also the broader discourse surrounding it. As states move in sharply different directions, media coverage has had to grapple with new divisions, new language, and new stakes.
At its core, the public debate still turns on a simple but deeply charged question: is abortion good or bad? How that question gets answered—or even framed—depends heavily on where one looks. News coverage of abortion varies sharply by ideological leaning. Conservative media outlets often emphasize religious and legal arguments, focusing on fetal personhood, state-level bans, and moral appeals (Jenssen 2013). In contrast, liberal media frequently frame abortion in terms of bodily autonomy, healthcare access, and gender justice, while highlighting the disproportionate impact of abortion restrictions on marginalized communities (Rohlinger 2015).
In this blog, we examine how abortion is framed by two ideologically distinct media outlets: Fox News and The New York Times. These platforms were selected for their national prominence, wide readership, and well-documented political leanings—Fox News is widely recognized as a conservative outlet, while The New York Times is identified as liberal-leaning (Mitchell et al. 2020; Pew Research Center 2014).
We complement this analysis with geographic policy data from the Guttmacher Institute, a leading research organization on reproductive health. Using tools such as sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and spatial comparison, we explore how media narratives align with state-level abortion laws and how discourse evolves in response to shifting legal landscapes.
A First Look at the Coverage
We collected a total of 3168 abortion-related news articles for this analysis. Of these, 1739 were published by Fox News and the remaining 1429 by The New York Times, spanning from early 2020 through late 2024. Together, these articles provide a window into how two major media outlets approached abortion coverage across a period of significant legal and political change.
To trace how attention fluctuated over time, we first examined monthly trends in article publication. Both Fox News and The New York Times exhibited visible surges in abortion-related reporting across the 2020–2024 period. While our primary focus is on the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision and its aftermath, earlier spikes in coverage are also notable. Attention intensified sharply in September 2021 with the enactment of Texas’s SB8 “heartbeat bill”, surged again in May 2022 when Politico leaked the Supreme Court’s draft opinion in Dobbs, and peaked in June 2022 when the Court officially overturned Roe v. Wade.
Beyond the immediate aftermath of Dobbs, two additional peaks in abortion-related media coverage align with major electoral moments. The first appears in November 2022, during the U.S. midterm elections, when abortion rights were a central issue on state ballots across the country. Notably, Fox News overtook The New York Times in article volume — a reversal from earlier months when The Times had led during key judicial moments. This surge in Fox’s reporting likely reflects heightened partisan framing around abortion’s political salience, especially in contested states.
A second uptick occurs in August 2023, during the Ohio special election, when voters decided whether to raise the threshold for constitutional amendments. The measure was widely understood as a proxy battle over abortion rights. While both outlets covered the vote, the media response was more subdued than in 2022 — perhaps due to its more localized scope despite national implications.
The most recent spike emerges in late 2024, with The New York Times reclaiming the lead in coverage volume. This increase likely corresponds with renewed national focus on abortion in the lead-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election, where reproductive rights once again became a central campaign issue.
While monthly patterns highlight media reactions to key events, they don’t fully capture the broader arc of attention. To provide a cumulative perspective, we plotted the running total of abortion-related articles over time. Although The New York Times often displayed sharper monthly peaks, the cumulative view reveals a different pattern: over the long term, Fox News produced a significantly larger volume of abortion-related coverage. Following the Dobbs decision, both outlets showed a sharp rise in article counts, but Fox News continued publishing abortion-related content at a faster pace. By the end of 2024, Fox News had amassed a much larger body of coverage compared to The New York Times.
A Calendar of Changing Narratives
To understand how language and sentiment around abortion shifted in the media before and after the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, we mapped article AFINN sentiment scores across the two major outlets in a calendar heatmap format spanning 2020 to 2024.
Since we’ve been talking about how Fox News devoted a large volume of coverage to abortion, let’s first take a closer look at the tone of that coverage.
While Fox News consistently produced abortion-related articles throughout the 2020–2024 period, its emotional tone varied more subtly than expected. Most days register as light red or pale blue, which indicates slightly negative or slightly positive sentiment, with fewer extreme spikes than one might assume for such a polarizing topic.
In 2022, around the time of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, we observe scattered patches of deeper red and blue. However, rather than clustering tightly around key events, these peaks appear spread out across weeks.
Interestingly, sentiment remained relatively stable in 2023 and 2024, with more diffuse tonal variation. This could imply that while the political salience of abortion persisted, the emotional framing of Fox News coverage settled into a more routine cadence post-Dobbs.
After exploring how Fox News covered abortion in both volume and tone, it’s worth asking: how does The New York Times compare?
Surprisingly, it’s The New York Times that reads as more restrained. In contrast to Fox’s more visibly fluctuating sentiment, the Times displays a remarkably steady emotional cadence in its abortion coverage from 2020 through 2024. Most days are washed in muted reds and pale blues. There is consistently neutral or mildly toned language across the board.
The only noticeable deviation appears in spring 2022, just before the Supreme Court officially decided Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Being a liberal-leaning outlet, and one generally supportive of abortion rights, we expected the New York Times to lean more negative in tone around the Dobbs decision. So it’s surprising to see a spike in positive sentiment in the weeks before the ruling.
That moment of optimism might feel out of place given the looming loss of constitutional protections — but it likely reflects the way the stories were framed: not with defeat, but with mobilization. Articles during that time may have highlighted state-level protections, legal challenges, or grassroots organizing, which could register as “positive” in sentiment scoring, even if the context was defensive or reactive.
For example, an article celebrating the swift passage of abortion protections in certain states might score as “positive” based on language even though it was prompted by a national-level loss. Similarly, a story framing a restrictive abortion law as “historic” or “a major success” (even if opposed editorially) could also register as positive if the wording carried emotional approval.
Even as article volume rises again toward the end of 2024, likely tracking with presidential election season, the emotional register stays steady. The New York Times seems to maintain its editorial evenness throughout.
Running the Narrative Race
To visualize how The New York Times’ framing of abortion evolved over time, we animated the top bigrams appearing in abortion-related articles each month from 2020 to 2024.
In early 2020, bigrams like health care, pro life, and women’s health were prominent, reflecting a healthcare- and ideologically-focused framing of abortion. In September 2021, with Texas’s SB8 law going into effect, terms like texas law and planned parenthood surged.
By May and June 2022, during the leaked draft opinion of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and the eventual Dobbs decision, legal terms like court decision became prominent and terminology surrounding rights and laws shaped the overall discourse, marking a shift to more court-centric, legal framing of abortion discourse.
Following the Dobbs decision, phrases like overturn roe and court decision remained dominant. At the same time, healthcare-focused language persisted with health care, while ballot measures rose to prominence during state-level campaigns in Kansas and Ohio.
The presence of terms like 12 weeks, 15 weeks, shield laws, and aid access reflects the growing complexity of abortion policy post-Roe, especially surrounding medication abortion and interstate protections.
As the articles move through 2023 and 2024 mentions of election results, ballot measures as well as the republican sentate and the democratic party demonstrate the growingly politicized nature of abortion articles. In September 2024 as the election comes close metions of Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and JD Vance are at the forefront of the discourse around abortion.
Overall, we see how The New York Times coverage adapted in real time to political events—shifting from national healthcare debates to increasingly legal and rights-based discourse.
We did the similar thing for Fox News.
We consistently see health care as a primary focus each year, but especially in 2020, there was a heightened emphasis on public care, with frequent mentions of phrases like affordable care, care access, and medical progress.
A focus on the pregnancy and the fetus top bigrams, unborn children, fetal heartbeat, and partial birth in in February 2021. Articles in 2021 have an increasing focus on the pregnancy and the fetus when disscusing abortion. While 2020 centered more on medicine, public health, and social institutions impacted by abortion laws, 2021 marks a shift toward individual experiences and situations of pregnancy, mothers, and children.
During May 2022 and June 2022 the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision is at the forefront of media with a large spike in supreme court, court decision, and court ruling in the vocabulary of many articles. After the descion there is an increased use in anti/pro discourse. Terms such as pro life are matched with pro choice and anti abortion is matched with pro abortion to reflect the focus on the polarized nature of the abortion in the aftermath of the decision.
Throughout the entire four year, there are mentions of communion, and the catholic faith in November 2020, religious freedom, in December 2020 and satanic temple in Feburary 2023, suggesting relgious narrative and arguments surrounding abortion. We see more striking terms such as rape incest, gender identity, and 15 weeks like we saw in the NYT articles, suggesting the complex narratives and range of perspectives in the current media discussions about abortion.
This wider thematic spread reflects the surge in media attention and public discourse in the lead-up to and aftermath of the overturning of Roe v. Wade—capturing debates around health care, law, religion, and personal trauma in equal measure.
The Knots and Threads of Discourse
While identifying top bigrams reveals frequently used terms, it does little to clarify the deeper relationships between ideas or how discourse evolves over time. To capture the semantic structure of abortion coverage in Fox News, we applied a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model to extract dominant themes and clustered terms around them using a bigram co-occurrence network. This method allows us to visualize how terms are grouped and how they relate to one another within and across topics.
For a full description of our modeling process and visualization methods, see the Technical Appendix.
Continuing our analysis of changes before and after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, we compare topic and bigram networks across the two outlets during both periods.
Below, we present two topic networks generated from Fox News articles: one before the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (which overturned Roe v. Wade), and one after the ruling.
In the pre-Roe network, moral and religious framing occupied the center of discourse. The largest topic hub, labeled Moral Arguments, connects with terms such as pro life, pro choice, abortion access, and supreme court, which suggests that abortion was portrayed as a question of ethical conviction and individual responsibility. Religious language appears throughout this network, with terms like holy communion, faith & institutions, and texas law feeding into a cluster that combines legal governance with religious values. At the same time, judicial terminology, i.e., court decision, ban abortion, abortion law, i.e., organizes around nodes such as Federal Debate & Drafts and Clinic Laws & Enforcement, which emphasize the legal contestation of abortion rights. Interestingly, terms like president trump and health care sit somewhat outside the network’s core but remain tied to the moral and legal debate. This network reveals that prior to the Dobbs ruling, Fox News framed abortion primarily as a clash between moral order and legal authority because of religious and ethical codes occupying a central role in how narratives were constructed.
Consequently, in the post-Roe network, the structure of Fox News discourse shifts in form and focus. Moral arguments remain present, but they are now in in a landscape of policy enforcement and rhetorical messaging. New thematic hubs appear, including Pro-Life Messaging, Political Rhetoric, and Pregnancy Centers & Alternatives. The first of these, Pro-Life Messaging, is tightly connected to emotionally charged terms like anti abortion, abortion restriction, rape incest, and late term, which suggests a more targeted effort to frame abortion around specific scenarios and moral outrage. Political actors and institutions take on a more visible role than before: president biden, vice president, and biden administration now appear alongside supreme court and court decision in the central cluster, which show heightened politicization of the issue. Meanwhile, Pregnancy Centers & Alternatives draws together terms such as abortion clinic, abortion access, abortion pill, and pro abortion, signals a new focus on the mechanisms of reproductive healthcare and the alternatives promoted in states with abortion bans. The presence of language like life movement and reproductive health further shows that the discourse expanded from ideological stances to debates over service provision, enforcement, and identity.
Having examined the thematic structure of Fox News’ abortion coverage, we now pivot to The New York Times, whose approach to the topic differs both in language and in conceptual emphasis. Using the same Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) modeling process, we extracted topic labels from New York Times articles and mapped their co-occurring bigrams into topic networks.
In the pre-Roe network, The New York Times centers its coverage on institutional power and procedural framing. The largest hub, White House & Party Messaging, is densely connected to terms such as president biden, vice president, democratic party, republican party, and support abortion. This reflects a narrative in partisan strategy and executive messaging, especially from the Democratic establishment. Nearby, the Judicial Appointments cluster includes key terms like judge barrett, justice thomas, ruth bader, and law school, which could suggest a framing that foregrounds long-term shifts in the federal judiciary and their implications for reproductive rights. The presence of draft opinion, federal court, and chief justice reinforces the emphasis on legal architecture and decision-making power. Notably, topics like Healthcare & Public Access and Legislative Pushback overlap with terms such as abortion ban, medication abortion, birth control, and texas law. This signals attention to both clinical outcomes and state-level resistance. This network highlights The New York Times’ commitment to covering abortion through both the dual of governance and rights.
Afterwards, during the post-Roe network, the thematic structure tightens, and the discourse becomes more explicitly political and issue-specific. At the center is Pro-Life & Court Battles, connected to terms like abortion ban, pro life, supreme court, court’s decision, and anti abortion. This central node reflects the paper’s continued attention to judicial dynamics but also marks a shift toward the active strategies and campaigns shaping reproductive policy. Adjacent to this is Medication Abortion Access, linking medication abortion, abortion care, abortion pill, and abortion access, which is a clear signal of increased focus on pharmaceutical options in the wake of clinic closures and legal restrictions. Another prominent cluster, Political Institutions & Reproductive Health, merges legislative and executive figures—kamala harris, democratic party, president biden, white house—with healthcare-related terms such as health care, abortion provider, and reproductive health. Interestingly, Opinion & Media Figures emerges as a thematic addition in this network, which features voices such as ezra klein, donald trump, larry kramer, and jd vance. These additions suggest a media ecosystem in which individual commentators shape the terms of debate. The presence of project 2025, ballot measure, and pregnant woman within Anti-Abortion Campaigns shows how the post-Roe narrative expanded to include grassroots activism and electoral politics, not just institutional decisions.
Across both Fox News and The New York Times, the overturning of Roe v. Wade triggered shifts in how abortion was framed, but the nature of those shifts differed significantly between the two outlets. Fox News coverage evolved from morally anchored narratives to more targeted messaging and political mobilization, often emphasizing anti-abortion rhetoric, pro-life identity, and campaign-style language. In contrast, The New York Times consistently centered institutional structures, which are courts, parties, and healthcare systems, while expanding its focus after Roe to include pharmaceutical access, and public figures. We could therefore see that the networks reflect two distinct approaches to abortion discourse: one grounded in ideological advocacy and cultural signaling, the other in institutional analysis and procedural accountability.
Cartographies of Care and Control
After focusing primarily on media discourse, it became clear that much of the conversation around abortion is shaped by the Supreme Court and the increasingly politicized nature of legislation. Our topic networks frequently referenced specific states and court rulings which points to a geography of reproductive governance that extends beyond rhetoric. While discussing the social and legal impacts of Roe v. Wade through media coverage is crucial, it is equally important to examine abortion legislation itself, separate from the narratives that shape its public perception.
To better understand this legal landscape, we turned to the Guttmacher Institute, which provides comprehensive and up-to-date data on abortion laws and policies across all 50 U.S. states. Using their data, we visualized the geographic distribution of restrictions, exceptions, and protective laws in order to identify legislative trends. These maps complement our media analysis by showing how legal realities are unevenly distributed across the country.
In our bigram and topic network models, Texas consistently emerged as the most frequently mentioned state, if not the only state mentioned by name, which shows its role in both media discourse and legislative action. Its repeated presence in coverage from both Fox News and The New York Times mirrors how Texas operates as both a policy bellwether and a rhetorical symbol. It is a place where the politics of abortion are especially contested and consequential.
This prominence is mirrored in the legal data as well. In the Abortion Bans Map, we see varying bans across the United States based on gestational duration. Southern states shaded in dark green, such as Texas (as expected), Mississippi, and Louisiana, have implemented total bans, which prohibit abortion in nearly all cases. Other states have more complex legislation. Arizona and New York, for example, allow abortion up to the point of fetal viability.
The Abortion Exceptions Map further illustrates how different states define exceptions to their bans. These range from threats to the pregnant person’s life to pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. While some states list multiple exceptions, others allow only one, or none at all. At first glance, states like Colorado and New Mexico appear to lack exceptions, but when cross-referenced with the bans map, it becomes clear that these states do not have abortion bans in place to begin with, and therefore do not require exception clauses.
Other notable patterns also emerge: states like Florida and Georgia, while restrictive, permit a higher number of exceptions. Meanwhile, much of the West Coast and Northeast ensures broader access without relying on exceptions at all. And throughout all of this, Texas remains central. Not only as a legal outlier with one of the strictest bans in the nation, but also as a dominant narrative force in national media.
Conclusion
Our analysis reveals how abortion in post-Roe America is shaped by both media narratives and legal realities. Fox News and The New York Times differ sharply in tone, framing, and focus: one leaning into moral and political messaging, the other emphasizing institutional processes and rights-based discourse. Topic networks and sentiment trends show how these narratives evolve in response to legal shifts, with Texas standing out as a central figure in both media and law. Mapping state-level bans and exceptions further highlights the uneven and often contradictory geography of reproductive care. Together, our findings show that abortion is not just a legal issue or a media topics, but is a contested terrain of discourse, power, and access, playing out differently across headlines, states, and lives.
References
Jenssen, M. M. P. (2013), “Broadcast news and abortion: The effects of conservative narratives on the reproductive health debate,” PhD thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Mitchell, A., Jurkowitz, M., Oliphant, J. B., and Shearer, E. (2020), “Americans are divided by party in the sources they turn to for political news,” Pew Research Center.
Pew Research Center (2014), “Political polarization and media habits.”
Rohlinger, D. A. (2015), Abortion politics, mass media, and social movements in america, Cambridge University Press.