This report is the output of a research developed during Synthesis Lab at Polytechnic of Milan.

Our theme was abortion and we had to analyze and visualize a controversy about this issue, so we started from a general research on Google.com to find the different debates about abortion and we chose the fetal pain debate.

The work is divided into four steps: in the first we chose our debate, that is the controversy on fetal pain and related abortion laws, and defined the research question, i.e. since when fetus can feel pain; in the second step, we analyzed websites to research the main actors of the controversy; then, we defined the networks among actors; at the end, we conduced a scientometric analysis.

We always proceeded into two parallel directions of research: analysis of science and analysis of laws.

We analyzed scientific papers and individuate that the most of them were American, so we decided to study the connection between science and laws in USA; we also examined the two Wikipedia's pages related to sciencific debate on fetal pain and abortion laws in Usa.

At the end, we matched the results of science and laws to understand if there are mutual influences and we verified that there are many correspondences during the developing of scientific debate and legalization of abortion.