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“Be patient and kind to yourself!!” Abortion-related health information practices on Reddit in the age of Dobbs v. Jackson
Journal article   Peer reviewed

“Be patient and kind to yourself!!” Abortion-related health information practices on Reddit in the age of Dobbs v. Jackson

Alex H. Poole, Aria Pessianzadeh and Rezvaneh Rezapour
Journal of documentation, pp 1-18
09 Sep 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-05-2026-0302
Featured in Collection :   Drexel's Newest Publications

Abstract

Health information Feminism Information seeking Reddit Information practices Abortion Information sharing
Purpose This exploratory qualitative case study examines abortion-related health information practices (IPs) on social media surrounding Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022). We pose the following research question: what types of abortion-related health information do pregnant individuals seek and share on Reddit? Reconceptualizing abortion-related “support” as affectively saturated information practice, we center abortion as a site of information practices and intervene in scholarship on temporality, information modalities, defensive and protective practices, storytelling, sensemaking, care and community. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on 188 posts purposively sampled from four subreddits across a 12-month period spanning Dobbs, we employ directed qualitative content analysis. Coders independently screened 400 posts, applied theoretically derived and inductively surfaced codes across four categories to the resulting 188 posts, and achieved high intercoder reliability. Findings We make five claims: that seeking and sharing proved co-constitutive, that temporality structured IPs across the abortion arc, that crisis conditions complicated Lloyd et al.’s (2014) epistemic/corporeal modality hierarchy, that posters simultaneously experienced information poverty and richness through defensive and protective IPs, and that the abortion context problematizes the conventional work/nonwork distinction. Storytelling, which hinged on self-disclosure, counternarrative and catharsis, organized posters' IPs; it enabled sensemaking as a recursive and relational process. We trace the emergence of a trauma-informed, crisis-inspired virtual community of care. Originality/value This article is the first qualitative account of abortion-related information seeking and sharing on Reddit from an information practices perspective. Challenging five categories on which IP scholarship relies – the separability of seeking and sharing, the directionality of sensemaking, the primacy of epistemic knowledge, the stability of platform affordances and the work/nonwork binary – it shows that each proves insufficient when IPs occur under conditions of stigma, trauma, crisis and legal peril.

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