By: Tyler Bradham

When researching a highly politicized topic like Roe v. Wade and abortion laws in America, it is important to stay mindful of the potential bias of a source. To start this project, I first tried to find an academic source that correlated to my topic. I found one by going to JSTOR and looking for key words like “Roe v. Wade” and “abortion”. I ended up choosing an article called “Before (and After) Roe v. Wade: New Questions About Backlash” that was published by the Yale Law Journal. The source was reliable because it had been peer reviewed and had a lot of research put into it. It also helped my project when I started to look into the effects of Roe v. Wade on American society. To find the case files and other judicial aspects I mostly looked at Oyez because it has details about each case and the way that the judges swayed and for what reasons. I also got a lot of information about the current state of affairs for abortion rights for women across the country through both the Planned Parenthood website and the US News and World report site. When reading from the planned parenthood site, I did note that the organization is a pro-choice organization that brings awareness to the limited access to abortion. I, however, didn’t think that it was too biased that it had to be removed because most of the information that I used from the site was factual historical information that I did fact check through other sites. Once I started getting further into the more recent aspects of Roe v. Wade and the conflict between pro-life and pro-choice that has taken stage in the upcoming elections. I thought it was important to recognize media bias. To do so, I found the same event or instance on both a more liberal leaning website, the Washington Post, and a conservative leaning site, Fox News. I did this both for Biden and Trump’s stance on abortion rights in America and read through both articles to help sift out any potential bias.  Overall, because the topic is very political and has been a large part of the conflict between conservatives and liberals for the past couple of elections, it is important to note that there is a bias when reading about the topic. Specifically when it comes to presidential candidates, newspapers and sites that lean toward a certain side are more likely to paint their candidate in a positive light and the other in a negative light.