Anti-mifepristone studies retracted by academic journal

PART VI: Mifepristone lawsuit

Feb 06, 2024

🔆 This is Part VI of an ongoing multi-part series examining the mifepristone lawsuit to be heard by the Supreme Court of the United States. Read the rest of the series here.

In Part III, I discussed the anti-choice movement’s “Invent-Your-Own-Facts Approach.” The anti-abortion movement “has recognized that research plays a critical role in framing the national conversation about abortion and has thus invested heavily in giving pseudoscience and other intentionally misleading content the veneer of respectability.’” [1] Anti-choice groups, like the Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI) and the Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG), publish flawed and biased studies which create “pseudoscientific bases for restricting or outlawing reproductive healthcare” that allow “abortion opponents to create confusion that conceals their ideologically driven goals.” I also discussed one such study used in the mifepristone lawsuit.

Yesterday, “two of the key studies cited by plaintiffs and judges as evidence that [mifepristone] should be pulled from the market or heavily restricted have been retracted because of undeclared conflicts of interest and unreliable findings,” the Nebraska Examiner reported. Sage also retracted a third anti-choice study. All three studies were produced by the Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI) and have the same lead author, James Studnicki, CLI’s vice president and director of data analytics.

The three retracted papers are:

🟩 “A Longitudinal Cohort Study of Emergency Room Utilization Following Mifepristone Chemical and Surgical Abortions, 1999–2015” (2021)

🟩 “A Post Hoc Exploratory Analysis: Induced Abortion Complications Mistaken for Miscarriage in the Emergency Room are a Risk Factor for Hospitalization” (2022)

🟩 “Doctors Who Perform Abortions: Their Characteristics and Patterns of Holding and Using Hospital Privileges” (2019)

I discussed some of the flaws of the 2021 study in Part III. The 2022 study is a follow-up to the 2021 study and used the same data as the 2021 study. The 2019 article used a different dataset. “[S]ubject matter experts undertook an independent post-publication peer review of the three articles anew,” stated Sage.

In the retraction notice, Sage explained these experts’ findings:

🟩 In the 2021 and 2022 articles, “experts identified fundamental problems with the study design and methodology, unjustified or incorrect factual assumptions, material errors in the authors’ analysis of the data, and misleading presentations of the data that, in their opinions, demonstrate a lack of scientific rigor and invalidate the authors’ conclusions in whole or in part.”

🟩 In the 2019 study, “experts identified unsupported assumptions and misleading presentations of the findings that… demonstrate a lack of scientific rigor and render the authors’ conclusion unreliable.”

Sage also noted authors’ conflicts of interest, the Nebraska Examiner reported. “Upon submission, the lead author declared no conflicts of interest and all authors declared the same within each article; however, all but one of the article’s authors had an affiliation with one or more of Charlotte Lozier Institute, Elliot Institute, and American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists – all pro-life advocacy organizations that explicitly support judicial action to restrict access to mifepristone.”

“Based on the results of the investigation, the post-publication peer reviews, and COPE standards, Sage and the Journal Editor retracted these articles,” the retraction notice concluded.

In a statement, Sage said, “Following Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines, we made this decision with the journal’s editor because of undeclared conflicts of interest and after expert reviewers found that the studies demonstrate a lack of scientific rigor that invalidates or renders unreliable the authors’ conclusions.”

Lead author Studnicki and senior research associate Tessa Longbons accused Sage of carrying out a “baseless ideological attack on our scientific research and experts” and of “launch[ing] a political assault against” the Charlotte Lozier Institute. ”Sage has now caved to outside partisan pressures that dominate elite circles,’’ Studnicki and Longbons claimed. In addition to these paranoid and neurotic accusations, the duo also attacked scientific institutions as a whole. “Sadly, this incident points to a larger, newer phenomenon, which is, many of our scientific institutions no longer stand in defense of open inquiry. Rather, what we’re seeing is a biased faction in the medical community (that) holds all the power and attempts to suppress any research that cuts against their approved, pro-abortion narrative,’’ Studnicki and Longbons said. Bananas!

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