  Abortion remains one of the most controversial topics, especially after
overturning Roe v. Wade ruling in the United States. Previous literature showed
that the illegality of abortion could have serious consequences, as women might
seek unsafe pregnancy terminations leading to increased maternal mortality
rates and negative effects on their reproductive health. Therefore, the stances
of the abortion-related Facebook posts were analyzed at the state level in the
United States from May 4 until June 30, 2022, right after the Supreme Court's
decision was disclosed. In more detail, the pre-trained Transformer
architecture-based model was fine-tuned on a manually labeled training set to
obtain a stance detection model suitable for the collected dataset. Afterward,
we employed appropriate statistical tests to examine the relationships between
public opinion regarding abortion, abortion legality, political leaning, and
factors measuring the overall population's health, health knowledge, and
vulnerability per state. We found that states with a higher number of views
against abortion also have higher infant and maternal mortality rates.
Furthermore, the stance of social media posts per state is mostly matching with
the current abortion laws in these states. While aligned with existing
literature, these findings indicate how public opinion, laws, and women's and
infants' health are related, and interventions are required to educate and
protect women, especially in vulnerable populations.
