Study on dangers of abortion pill retracted ahead of Supreme Court hearing

A major academic publisher has retracted three articles by a leading pro-life research group, including a study raising medical concerns about the abortion pill ahead of a Supreme Court hearing on the drug’s federal approval.

Sage Journals removed three articles published in 2019, 2021 and 2022 by the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, citing concerns about conflicts of interest and “lack of scientific rigor,” which prompted the institute to accuse Sage of an “unprovoked and partisan assault” on its research.

The studies were pulled Monday, a week after the Supreme Court scheduled oral arguments for March 26 in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA, a case challenging the Food and Drug Administration’s 2000 approval of mifepristone for pregnancy termination.

In April, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk placed a temporary hold on the approval, citing the institute’s 2021 study of Medicaid claims data, which found the rate of abortion-related emergency-room visits by women who had taken the abortion pill within the previous 30 days jumped by 500% from 2002 to 2015.

“Sage is targeting us because we have been successful in calling attention to some of the dangers that are associated with abortion, and specifically chemical abortion,” said James Studnicki, Lozier vice president for data analytics and the lead author on all three studies.

In an online statement, Sage said it retracted Monday the three articles “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.”

“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,” said the Monday statement.

Sage also said that the three articles “were originally reviewed by a researcher who was also affiliated with the Charlotte Lozier Institute at the time of the review” in violation of Committee on Publication Ethics guidelines.

In a Nov. 29 response, an attorney for Lozier disputed the methodology concerns raised in the review and said his clients “fully complied with the disclosure requirements” by reporting funding from Lozier and one researcher’s affiliation with AAPLOG.

“To date, Sage has advanced no valid objection to the studies’ findings and no legitimate reason for their retraction, making it seem that researchers who find negative abortion conclusions will be targets in a larger ideological fight not grounded in science,” said the institute.

🧵 On February 5th, @Sage_Publishing announced it would retract three of our studies.

All three use Medicaid records-linkage data, the highest quality abortion-related data available in the U.S.

This should be of great concern to the entire research community.
1/15 pic.twitter.com/b8Mi6IqPhD

— Charlotte Lozier Institute (@LozierInstitute) February 7, 2024

Tessa Longbons, Lozier senior research associate, accused the publication of a “double standard” on the abortion issue, saying that “our study and credibility have been challenged not because of our research, but simply because of who we are.”

The institute traced the retractions to a complaint filed by Chris Adkins, an associate professor at the South University School of Pharmacy in Savannah, Georgia, over the 2021 study, which found an increased likelihood that women would visit emergency rooms within 30 days of having an abortion.

Mr. Studnicki, a 50-year researcher who holds a Doctor of Science and Master of Public Health from Johns Hopkins University, linked the retraction to the increased visibility of the 2021 study in Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology, a Sage publication.

The study also found that “chemical abortion is consistently and progressively associated with more postabortion ER visit morbidity than surgical abortion.”

“These findings have been used in legal action in many of the states,” Mr. Studnicki said. “We have become visible. People are quoting us, and for that reason we are dangerous, and for that reason they want to cancel our work. What happened to us has little or nothing to do with real science, it has everything to do with political assassination of real science.”

For years, he said, abortion research has been dominated by “pro-abortion investigators” who “have been making the case that abortion is safe. For them, it was fixed science.”

Since the Dobbs v. Jackson decision in June 2022 overturning Roe v. Wade, however, he said he has detected “a sense of desperation among those in the abortion industry.”

“They’ve always had the literature to themselves,” Mr. Studnicki said. “All of the major health associations are pro-abortion, most of the journals are pro-abortion, all the academic departments in the universities are pro-abortion.”

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said in December that the “overwhelming weight of scientific evidence has conclusively demonstrated that mifepristone is safe and effective.”