Research at the heart of a federal case against the abortion pill retracted | Hacker News Reader

Research at the heart of a federal case against the abortion pill retracted

text.npr.org

Are there any documents laying out the specific issues found in the papers? It sounds like there's a lot wrong with them but I'm curious how much worse than your median paper they actually are. There are a lot of politically motivated studies that could be argued to have unsupported assumptions and present data in a misleading way that have not been retracted.

Here's the retraction itself: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23333928231216699

There is some additional detail in the reporting from Ars Technica[0]:

> The study looked at all emergency department visits, not only visits related to abortion. This could capture medical care beyond abortion-related conditions, because people on Medicaid often lack primary care and resort to going to emergency departments for routine care. When the researchers tried to narrow down the visits to just those related to abortion, they included medical codes that were not related to abortion, such as codes for ectopic pregnancy, and they didn't capture the seriousness of the condition that prompted the visit. Medication abortions can cause bleeding, and women can go to the emergency department if they don't know what amount of bleeding is normal. The study also counted multiple visits from the same individual patient as multiple visits, likely inflating the numbers. Last, the study did not put the data in context of emergency department use by Medicaid beneficiaries in general over the time period.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/02/anti-abortion-groups...

It's not only about fake science, don't forget the authors and a reviewer lied about their affiliations and conflicts of interest. When a Journal Editor and a publisher realize that they were deceived by plain lies, I would expect them to react as strongly as they did.

Of course, but that's all pretty clear cut (at least in this example) and well spelled out in the retraction.

There are some specifics about which parts of the paper had problems, but I can’t find the original paper to see how those parts look (failed to find at libgen, doesn’t seem to be open-access from what I can tell)

There's at least one bit of total nonsense in here, namely this:

> The decision that overturned Roe v. Wade is an example, she says. "The majority [opinion] relied pretty much exclusively on scholars with some ties to pro-life activism and didn't really cite anybody else even or really even acknowledge that there was a majority scholarly position or even that there was meaningful disagreement on the subject."

I read Dobbs v. Jackson in its entirety, including the dissent. This statement is not-even-wrong, in that the decision was given based on the proper limits of federal power, and whether a right to an abortion was something which could be derived from the Constitution and relevant case law. It had nothing to do with scholarly opinions on abortion at all.

Disagreeing with the decision of the court isn't license to make things up like this.

It may hold if we read that as meaning in places where the opinion cites scholars. That is, when it relies on scholars, it cites only a minority scholarly view with no mention of the majority.

And I see a handful of citations in the notes of the majority opinion that appear to be just that, though admittedly not many. Not sure if there are any others written into the body text such that they didn’t need to be footnotes.

It's a good thing science isn't politicized. If it was this retraction would be suspect too.

If you're implying that the retraction is suspect, could you point out a particular section?

Everything in the human sphere is 'politicized', but that doesn't mean politics is the only game in town, i.e. that all science is politicized and thus the retraction should be assumed to be political.

Gaming the process this blatantly is ground for immediate retraction in any sane journal. Politics do not matter at this point. This sort of things happens regularly for many papers, not only papers some people happen to find convenient in their misguided arguments.

On what grounds?

Lol, are you saying the politicization is that bunk science was retracted and not that bunk science was fabricated for SCOTUS to lean on?

Everyone in the pharmacy/pharma world saw this coming. Everyone. I’m sure our super not corrupt SCOTUS will reverse their ruling any day.

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