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In response to a lawsuit brought by anti-abortion groups last April, federal judge and Evil Alan Tudyk Matthew Kacsmaryk banned the distribution of mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in chemical abortions.
The for-lack-of-a-better-word logic of the decision was that the Food and Drug Administration had not properly vetted mifepristone when it came on the market 20 years ago, and that unforeseen emergencies from using the drug could lead to the medical system being “overwhelmed.”
The fact that this overwhelming had not yet happened in the 20 fucking years the drug had been in widespread use was of course beside the point, since the rabidly anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ+ Evil Alan Tudyk was placed on a federal court for one purpose, which was to rubber-stamp whatever culture war bullshit venue-shopping conservatives could slap in front of him, regardless of the merits of the legal case or whether the plaintiffs had standing or anything else approaching legal precedent or common sense.
Now, just in time for the Supreme Court to hear an appeal in the case of Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA, one of the scientific papers EAT relied on for his decision has been retracted by its publisher. We’d say “whoops,” but really, the paper could have been written in crayon on the side of a cardboard box, and Kacsmaryk would have still cited it and SCOTUS still would not have cared.
PREVIOUSLY ON THIS TOPIC!
Still. From NPR:
Sage, the publisher of the journal, retracted the study on Monday along with two other papers, explaining in a statement that “expert reviewers found that the studies demonstrate a lack of scientific rigor that invalidates or renders unreliable the authors’ conclusions.”
It also noted that most of the authors on the paper worked for the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research arm of anti-abortion lobbying group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, and that one of the original peer reviewers had also worked for the Lozier Institute.
That second graf is important because, according to the publisher’s statement, the paper’s authors had not bothered to disclose that wee conflict of interest. It’s a bit like if a bunch of doctors insist football players never get concussions, and then a couple of years later we find out that the doctors worked for the NFL-funded There Is No Risk of Head Injuries in Football Institute and also the guy who reviewed their study also got paid by the same excellent institute.
One of the papers’ authors claims his work is being canceled because his findings have been cited in legal cases, which, yeah we know, buddy, that’s the problem. Like the rest of the anti-abortion movement, he seems shocked that he didn’t get the last word forever on the subject.
Not that it is likely to matter when the Supreme Court rules. The conservatives on the court have developed a habit of lying about evidence that contradicts them, or literally making shit up out of whole cloth and then citing it as supportive of their decisions.
LIKE THIS BUT IT HAPPENED WAY MORE THAN ONCE.
This case will be no different, law professor Mary Ziegler told NPR:
“We’ve already seen, when it comes to abortion, that the court has a propensity to look at the views of experts that support the results it wants … The majority [opinion] relied pretty much exclusively on scholars with some ties to pro-life activism and didn’t really cite anybody else even or really even acknowledge that there was a majority scholarly position or even that there was meaningful disagreement on the subject.”
Now all the conservatives on the Court and their clerks have to do is continue to not read any non-right-wing media that might have reported this story, or if they do, continue to not grow consciences, and they’ll be all set.
And no, none of these papers was one of the two we told you about when the ruling first came down last April. You know, one that had been written by an electrical engineer with no medical background and the other by a psychologist whose work has been consistently derided as sloppy and full of errors by no less an authority than the American Psychological Association.
It’s bad enough the wingnuts fought and continue to fight to make sure no woman in America has the right to control her life. Watching them do it on the back of made-up evidence they know is completely made up and just don’t care is just an extra cherry on this fecal sundae.
[NPR]
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