The Hijacked Hashtag: The Constitutive Features of Abortion Stigma in the #ShoutYourAbortion Twitter Campaign

Authors

  • Kami Kosenko Communication, North Carolina State University
  • Emily Winderman University of Minnesota
  • Abigail Pugh North Carolina State University

Keywords:

stigma, abortion, women’s health

Abstract

Although originally intended to destigmatize abortion, the #ShoutYourAbortion Twitter campaign was hijacked by anti-abortionists who linked the hashtag to hundreds of stigmatizing, anti-abortion messages. Using a Twitter Search API, we collected these messages (N = 1,990 tweets) to identify the discursive features of abortion stigma, which we defined as messages that other and label something related to abortion as physically, behaviorally, socially, and/or morally deficient. These messages bore six features: religious references, disgust cues, infamous allusions, imputations, mentions of medical maleficence, and stigma affirmations. The discussion section details the implications of these findings. 

Author Biographies

Kami Kosenko, Communication, North Carolina State University

Associate Professor & Scheduling Officer

Emily Winderman, University of Minnesota

Assistant Professor, Department of Communication Studies

Abigail Pugh, North Carolina State University

 BA, Department of English

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Published

2019-01-02

Issue

Vol. 13 (2019)

Section

Articles

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