This project aims to analyze the evolution of abortion discourse in U.S. legislation, particularly between the landmark Roe v. Wade (1973) and Dobbs v. Jackson (2022) decisions, which established and then rescinded abortion as a constitutional right, respectively. We have assembled a dataset of congressional legislation from 1973 to 2024 alongside a dataset of opinions from 13 pivotal Supreme Court cases.
Our main research questions are as follows:
This project will focus on two main datasets: abortion-related SCOTUS opinions and abortion-related congressional legislation. For congressional legislation, we will explore all legislation from 1973 until 2024. We sourced this legislation from the congress.gov legislation search, where we filtered for any legislation within this period that could have become bills and included the following keywords in the bill text or summary: 'abortion,' 'reproduction,' or 'reproductive health care.' For the SCOTUS abortion legislation, we targeted SCOTUS decisions outlined on supreme.justia.com, which provides a list of abortion-relevant SCOTUS decisions from 1965-2022. From here, we used web-scraping to extract the relevant information for each SCOTUS opinion, including opinion text.
Based on our outlined questions, we expect to apply the following methods:
We plan to use them as benchmarks to categorize legislative sessions. For example, if a case on abortion was adjudicated in 2010 and another in 2015, we would assess the semantic, tonal, and linguistic similarities among all congressional legislation enacted between those years. Our hypothesis posits that the substance of Supreme Court opinions significantly influences abortion-related legislation from the time of their issuance until a subsequent opinion emerges. We will also determine which opinions, aside from Roe and Dobbs, exert the most influence on legislative documents. Finally, as a stretch goal, we will create a network graph that centers around the SCOTUS opinions and links out to pieces of congressional legislation.
^3.11
data
folder at the path abortion-legislation-analysis/legislation_analysis/data.
data
folder, create the following subfolders: api
, cleaned
, raw
, processed.
Save your API key as an environment variable, naming it CONGRESS_API_KEY
.
For MacOS:
zsh
configuration file by running open ~/.zshrc
. This command will open the file in your default text editor. If the file doesn't exist, it will create a new one.export CONGRESS_API_KEY=value
in the file. Replace value
with your API key.source ~/.zshrc
in the terminal. This will reload your zsh configuration with the new variable.For Windows:
setx CONGRESS_API_KEY "value"
. Replace value
with your API key.Download the search results from this link.
poetry shell
into the terminal.make run
command.poetry add [module]
command.
poetry add black
make lint
: Runs pre-commit
make run
: Runs the main
function in the legislation_analysis
folder