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Exploiting a Crisis: Abortion Activism and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2021

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Abstract

How do social movement organizations involved in abortion debates leverage a global crisis to pursue their goals? In recent months there has been media coverage of how anti-abortion actors in the United States attempted to use the COVID-19 pandemic to restrict access to abortion by classifying abortion as a non-essential medical procedure. Was the crisis “exploited” by social movement organizations (SMOs) in other countries? I bring together Crisis Exploitation Theory and the concept of discursive opportunity structures to test whether social movement organizations exploit crisis in ways similar to elites, with those seeking change being more likely to capitalize on the opportunities provided by the crisis. Because Twitter tends to be on the frontlines of political debate—especially during a pandemic—a dataset is compiled of over 12,000 Tweets from the accounts of SMOs involved in abortion debates across four countries to analyze the patterns in how they responded to the pandemic. The results suggest that crisis may disrupt expectations about SMO behavior and that anti- and pro-abortion rights organizations at times framed the crisis as both a “threat” and as an “opportunity.”

Type
Special Issue Articles: Pandemic Politics
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 20 , Issue 2: Special Issue: Pandemic Politics , June 2022 , pp. 396 - 411
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

Data replication sets are available in Harvard Dataverse at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/P6YAMO

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Supplementary material: Link

Hunt Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/P6YAMO
Link