'Unreliable': Studies cited by judge in 2023 abortion pill case have been retracted by publisher

One of the most important issues to be decided by the Supreme Court this term will be the continued availability of an FDA-approved medication used in more than half of all abortions occurring in the United States. For over two decades, that medication, mifepristone, is typically used in tandem with another medicine, misoprostol, as a safe and effective means of terminating pregnancies in this country.

Because it can end a pregnancy without a visit to a facility that provides abortion care, the so-called abortion pill reduces opportunities for right-wing zealots to terrify, threaten, or otherwise prevent patients from exercising their reproductive rights. Laws prohibiting medication abortions have of course proliferated in Republican-dominated states, but those laws can realistically extend only to a state’s borders. 

In their intense desperation to halt the sale of mifepristone, forced-birth proponents have relied on fatuous claims about the drug’s safety in order to bolster their arguments for banning it altogether, or severely restricting access to it. To bolster those claims, a network of like-minded physicians and scientists has emerged. They generate seemingly authoritative research papers specifically for the purpose of influencing and providing plausible authority to receptive judges, such as Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the Northern District of Texas.

Those judges point to that “research” as justification for their rulings, often citing the papers in their legal opinions. A case currently before the Supreme Court, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, followed this pattern, with Kacsmaryk specifically citing two research papers purporting to show that the FDA was negligent in approving mifepristone, and one of the pair to justify the standing of forced-birth organizations to sue the FDA. In a ruling last April, Kacsmaryk invalidated FDA approval of mifepristone; that drastic action was modified by the Court of Appeals pending review by the Supreme Court, which agreed last December to hear the case.

However, since Kacsmaryk penned his confident screed declaring mifepristone medically unsafe and unilaterally invalidating its FDA approval, the research papers he relied upon have been retracted by their publisher—rendering them essentially worthless as sources of authority.