Ten biomedical researchers filed suit Thursday against a renowned academic journal company after it was involved in what the researchers called a politically motivated retraction earlier this year of three scientific papers on the incidence of complications from the abortion pill mifepristone .
Two of the retracted papers, written by physicians and academics affiliated with the anti-abortion Charlotte Lozier Institute and the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, were cited in April 2023 by U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in his order to suspend the Food and Drug Administration ’s approval of mifepristone.
Three papers written by the 10 authors were originally published in 2019, 2021, and 2022, respectively, in Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology from Sage Journals.
Sage retracted all three papers this February, approximately one month before the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case against the FDA’s approval and regulation of the abortion pill.
“Politics should never sway science, especially when that science is vital for saving and protecting lives,” said Alliance Defending Freedom special counsel Phil Sechler, who is representing the authors. “Sage punished these highly respected and credentialed scientists simply because they believe in preserving life from conception to natural death.”
The primary study cited by Kacsmaryk in the case, published in 2021, used long-term Medicaid data to track emergency room visits for patients who had received either chemical or surgical abortions. It found that from 1999 to 2015, a patient was 22% more likely to visit the emergency room for any reason in the month following a chemical abortion than a surgical abortion.
The authors also noted in that paper that more than 60% of all abortion-related ER visits in 2015 were coded as spontaneous miscarriages when the patient was actually experiencing complications from abortion pills.
According to the lawsuit documents, this 2021 paper “remains the second most-read article in HSRME’s history.”
Sage cited concerns over misrepresentation of data and conflict of interest as the justification for retracting the papers, despite the fact that the authors disclosed their affiliations with CLI and AAPLOG in the body of the papers.
“To this day, Sage has never responded to the Authors’ scientific rebuttal,” wrote the authors’ attorneys in the lawsuit filing.
Sage journals did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.
James Studnicki and Ingrid Skop, two of the papers' authors and named parties in the lawsuit, told the Washington Examiner shortly after their papers were retracted in February that they suspected political motivations.
“We’re seeing journals that should have quality scientific standards jettisoning their standards in order to promote abortion,” said Skop.
Skop was involved in the case against the FDA’s deregulation of mifepristone and is the medical affairs director for CLI, the research arm of the anti-abortion group SBA Pro-Life America.
In the case, ADF attorneys argued for AAPLOG that OB-GYN hospitalists, such as Skop, had suffered harm from the Biden administration’s decision to remove in-person screening requirements before dispensing mifepristone.
The Supreme Court did not rule on the merits of the science or whether the FDA had the authority to deregulate mifepristone but instead found that the doctors who brought the suit did not have the justification to bring the complaint to the court, a narrow problem called associational standing.
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ADF contends in the lawsuit filed Thursday that Sage has “destroyed the author’s hard-earned professional reputations” through the highly publicized retraction, resulting in the “ongoing loss of subsequent business and scientific publishing opportunities.”
“The authors’ well-earned reputations as highly qualified scientists and researchers have been immeasurably harmed,” said Studnicki, director of data analytics at CLI, in a statement Friday. “We’re hopeful this opportunity to compel Sage to arbitrate in good faith will shed light on their meritless actions to silence our research.”
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