What ’s at stake for science in Supreme Court’s ‘abortion pill’ case?

Next month, the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) will hear oral arguments in a case that could have profound implications for the authority of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—and that will certainly affect access to abortion. The case, which involves disputes over the safety of the FDA-approved abortion drug mifepristone, is an appeal of two lower court decisions that agreed with a coalition of plaintiffs who challenged the scientific decision-making of the drug regulator. The legal drama was heightened this week, when the journal Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology retracted two articles that raised questions about the safety of mifepristone. Both were cited by the conservative district court judge in Texas who first ruled to suspend mifepristone’s FDA approval in the case that has now made its way to the high court. Sage Publishing, which produces the journal, said it retracted both studies for “a lack of scientific rigor” that made the papers’ conclusions dubious or invalid; an “unreliable” peer-review process in which one reviewer was affiliated with the antiabortion Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI), a funder of the described research; and because the authors disclosed no conflicts of interest although all but one were affiliated with antiabortion groups. (The journal also retracted a third abortion-related paper that shared many of the same authors but was not cited in any legal ruling.) The authors...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research