Researcher uses Reddit to study abortion access with AI tools

Betsy Pleasants, recognized this year as a STAT Wunderkind, has built a research framework that applies natural language processing to Reddit posts to track how abortion access changed after the fall of Roe v. Wade. According to STAT News, Pleasants mines posts from forums where people describe seeking abortion care, using AI tools to identify patterns in barriers such as travel distance, cost, and delays across states with differing restrictions.

STAT reports that Pleasants designed her methodology with attention to the limits of automated text analysis, cross-checking machine-identified themes against close reading of individual posts to avoid stripping context from people’s accounts. The outlet describes her approach as an attempt to combine the scale of computational analysis with the specificity of firsthand narrative, so that aggregate trends do not obscure individual circumstances.

The profile situates Pleasants’ work within a broader shift in health policy research since 2022, as investigators have turned to social media as a data source for documenting on-the-ground effects of abortion restrictions that are difficult to capture through clinical records or surveys alone. STAT notes that Reddit’s pseudonymous, long-form posts offer researchers detail not typically available in traditional datasets, while also requiring careful methodological safeguards.

STAT frames Pleasants as part of a generation of researchers experimenting with AI methods in sensitive public health domains, raising questions the field continues to work through about verification, consent, and the risk of losing sight of individual experience within large-scale text analysis.