Scientific publisher Sage Journals has retracted three papers on abortion, including a controversial 2021 study on the drug mifepristone, which is at the center of a U.S. legal battle.
A 2021 study found that mifepristone, one of two pills used in medication abortions, significantly increased a woman's risk of going to the emergency room after an abortion. The study, along with another paper that was retracted in 2022, was cited by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmalik in an April 2023 ruling invalidating the drug's approval by the Food and Drug Administration.
Mifepristone was approved in 2000 by the Food and Drug Administration, the federal agency that evaluates the safety and effectiveness of medicines, and has since been used by at least 5.9 million women in the United States. This drug blocks a hormone called progesterone, which is necessary for the pregnancy to continue. It is used in conjunction with another pill, misoprostol, to induce an abortion within 10 weeks of pregnancy.
Three retracted studies were published in journals Medical service research and management epidemiology In July 2023, Sage issued a “expression of concern” about the 2021 paper and said it would launch an investigation into the paper.
Sage said readers contacted the journal with concerns about the misleading presentation of data in a 2021 paper on mifepristone. The official also questioned whether the author's relationships with pro-life organizations, including the Charlotte Rozier Institute, create a conflict of interest that the author should disclose in the article.
In a retraction notice published on February 5, Sage said that independent reviewers with expertise in statistical analysis had evaluated the concerns and that the paper's presentation of the data in specific numbers led to inaccurate conclusions. He said he concluded that there is a connection. Sage said the reviewers also found “issues with the composition of the cohort studied that may affect the paper's conclusions.”
As part of the publisher's investigation, Sage said two subject matter experts conducted an independent peer review of the three papers after publication, and that they “demonstrated a lack of scientific rigor.” He said it was found. In the 2021 and 2022 papers, reviewers found flaws in the study design and methodology, errors in the authors' analysis of the data, and misleading representations of the data. In a 2019 article, experts identified unsupported assumptions and misleading representations of results.
“The retraction is not scientifically justified, as any trained, objective scientist can easily demonstrate,” James Studnicki, lead author of all three studies, said in an email. He told WIRED via email.
Studnicki, vice president and director of data analysis at the Charlotte Rozier Institute, shared with WIRED a copy of the point-by-point rebuttal he and his co-authors submitted to Sage in response to the retraction.
In a 2021 study on mifepristone, Studnicki and her co-authors used data from Medicaid claims for 423,000 medications and abortions between 1999 and 2015. More than a quarter of these women visited a hospital emergency room within 30 days of their abortion. During the study period, emergency department visit rates related to medication abortions were found to have increased much faster compared to rates after surgical abortions.
