CV NEWS FEED // Two studies sponsored by a known pro-life scientific resource center, which had been posed as evidence in a case supporting the removal of chemical abortion pills from the market, have been retracted from their publisher.
The academic publisher Sage announced on February 5 that the two Charlotte Lozier Institute studies would be removed from its catalog due to “undeclared conflicts of interest and unreliable findings.”
The evidence would have been presented in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration appeal case set to go before the Supreme Court next month. The case challenges the medical safety of the drug mifepristone, which is part of the two-step regimen in chemical abortion.
Mifepristone terminates the life of a child by starving him or her of the critical female hormone progesterone produced by the mother. The second half of the regime, misoprostol is then administered, inducing the mother to give birth to her deceased infant.
Sage opened its investigation into the two studies provided for the case last year, citing Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines. The publication retracted three studies altogether from its journal “Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology,” which were all sponsored by the Charlotte Lozier Institute.
The publication dropped the following studies:
- “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)
To date, Sage has not clarified the substance of its objections against the research studies.
