#Charlotte Lozier Institute

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day:

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita says that abortion reports aren’t medical records, and that they should be available to the public in the same way that death certificates are. While Rokita pushes for public reports, New Hampshire lawmakers are fighting over a Republican bill to collect and publish abortion data, and U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville has introduced a bill that would require the Department of Veterans Affairs to collect and provide data on the abortions performed at its facilities. Just last week, Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed legislation that would have required abortion providers to ask patients invasive and detailed questions about why they were getting abortions, and provide those answers in a report to the state.   All of these moves are part of a broader strategy that weaponizes abortion data to stigmatize patients and to prosecute providers. And while most states have some kind of abortion reporting law, legislators are increasingly trying to expand the scope of the data, and use it to dismantle women’s privacy.

Rokita’s ‘advisory opinion’, for example, argues that abortion data collected by the state isn’t private medical information and that in order to prosecute abortion providers, he needs detailed reports to be public. In the past, the state has issued reports on each individual abortion. But as a result of Indiana’s ban, there are only a handful of abortions being performed in the state. As such, the Department of Health decided to release aggregate reports to protect patient confidentiality, noting that individual reports could be “reverse engineered to identify patients—especially in smaller communities.” Rokita—best known for his harassment campaign against Dr. Caitlin Bernard, the abortion provider who treated a 10-year-old rape victim—is furious over the change. He says the only way he can arrest and prosecute people is if he gets tips from third parties, presumably anti-abortion groups that scour the abortion reports for alleged wrongdoing. He wants the state to either restore public individual reports, or to allow his office to go after abortion providers without a complaint by a third party. (Meaning, he could pursue investigations against doctors and hospitals without cause.)

Most troubling, though, is his insistence that women’s private abortion information isn’t private at all. Even though individual reports could be used to identify patients, Rokita claims that the terminated pregnancy reports [TPRs] aren’t medical records, and that they “do not belong to the patient.” [...] As I flagged last month, abortion reporting is becoming more and more important to anti-choice lawmakers and groups. Project 2025 includes an entire section on abortion reporting, for example, and major anti-abortion organizations like the Charlotte Lozier Institute and Americans United for Life want to mandate more detailed reports.

[...]  As is the case with funding for crisis pregnancy centers and legislation about ‘prenatal counseling’ or ‘perinatal hospice care’, Republicans are advancing abortion reporting mandates under the guise of protecting women. And in a moment when voters are furious over abortion bans, anti-choice lawmakers and organizations very much need Americans to believe that lie. We have to make clear that state GOPs aren’t just banning abortion, but enacting any and every punitive policy that they can—especially those that strip us of our medical privacy. After all, it was less than a year ago that 19 Republican Attorneys General wanted the ability to investigate the out-of-state medical records of abortion patients. Did we really think they were going to stop there?

@jessicavalenti writes a solid column in her Abortion, Every Day blog that the GOP's agenda to erode patient privacy of those seeking abortions is a dangerous one.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Just a few years ago, maternal mortality was the rare reproductive justice issue that seemed to transcend partisan politics. In late 2018, Republicans and Democrats in Congress even came together to approve $60 million for state maternal mortality review committees (MMRCs) to study why so many American women die from causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. Donald Trump—not exactly famous for his respect toward pregnant women and new mothers in his personal life—signed the bill.

But some Republicans’ enthusiasm for these committees began to wane at around the same time abortion rights advocates began warning that draconian restrictions on reproductive care would only push the shamefully high US maternal mortality rate—the worst among affluent countries—even higher. Nor did conservatives, like Idaho lawmakers, appreciate the policy recommendations that came out of many MMRCs.

Texas, whose record on maternal mortality (and maternal health more broadly) has been an embarrassment since long before Dobbs, has a history of controversial attempts to play down potentially unwelcome findings from its MMRC. After the Dobbs decision, when the state committee was working on its report examining maternal deaths in 2019, Texas officials decided to slow-roll its release until mid-2023—too late for lawmakers to act on its recommendations. “When we bury data, we are dishonorably burying each and every woman that we lost,” one furious committee member told the Texas Tribune. Ultimately, officials released the report three months late, in December 2022. Soon afterward, the Legislature reconfigured the MMRC, increasing its size—but also ejected one of its most outspoken members.

Now Texas officials have stirred up the biggest furor yet, appointing a leading anti-abortion activist to the panel. Dr. Ingrid Skop, an OB-GYN who practiced in San Antonio for 25 years, will join the MMRC as a community member representing rural areas (even though she is from the seventh-largest city in the US). But she also represents a largely overlooked segment of the anti-abortion movement: researchers who seek to discredit the idea that abortion restrictions are putting women’s lives in danger. To the contrary, Skop and her allies argue that abortions are the real, hidden cause of many maternal deaths—and that abortion restrictions actually save mothers’ lives.

One of several doctors suing to revoke the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, the medication abortion drug at the center of one of this term’s blockbuster Supreme Court cases, Skop has been a familiar face on the anti-abortion expert-witness circuit for more than a decade. She has frequently testified in favor of strict abortion bans in court cases, state legislatures, and before Congress. In a high-profile case this winter, she submitted an affidavit stating that a Dallas woman named Kate Cox— who was seeking a judge’s permission to terminate a nonviable pregnancy—did not qualify for an abortion under Texas’s medical exception. The Texas Supreme Court rejected Cox’s petition, and to get medical care, the 31-year-old mother of two had to flee the state. Apparently, Skop’s hard-line stance against abortion-ban exemptions extends to children. At a 2021 congressional hearing, she testified that rape or incest victims as young as 9 or 10 could potentially carry pregnancies to term. “If she is developed enough to be menstruating and become pregnant, and reached sexual maturity,” Skop said, “she can safely give birth to a baby.”

Skop’s relatively new role as vice president and director of medical affairs for the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research arm of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, has solidified her standing in the anti-abortion firmament. Lozier, which has positioned itself as the anti-abortion alternative to the Guttmacher Institute, described Skop’s role as “coordinat[ing] the work of Lozier’s network of physicians and medical researchers who counter the abortion industry’s blizzard of misinformation with science and statistics for life.” Elsewhere on its website, Lozier notes that Skop’s “research on maternal mortality, abortion, and women’s health has been published in multiple peer-reviewed journals.”

What her Lozier bio doesn’t mention is that three of the studies Skop co-authored about the purported risks of abortion were retracted by their publisher this February. Attorneys representing Skop and her fellow anti-abortion doctors had cited the studies in the FDA-mifepristone case. As my colleague Madison Pauly reported, an independent review of the papers found “fundamental problems,” “incorrect factual assumptions,” “material errors,” “misleading presentations,” and undisclosed conflicts of interest between the studies’ authors (including Skop) and anti-abortion advocacy groups (including Lozier). In a rebuttal on its website, Lozier called the publisher’s move “meritless,” adding, “There is no legitimate reason for [the] retractions.”

Skop’s work on maternal mortality hasn’t received the same attention as those papers—yet. But her reflections on maternal deaths in the US have raised plenty of eyebrows.

Skop has argued repeatedly that abortions are directly and indirectly behind the rise in maternal mortality in the US. In a 53-page “Handbook of Maternal Mortality” she wrote for Lozier last year, she says that CDC maternal mortality data can’t be trusted in part because “there is much unreported maternal mortality and morbidity associated with legal, induced abortion, often obscured due to the political nature of the issue.” She claims that a history of abortions puts women at risk in pregnancy, childbirth, or during the postpartum period—whether from maternal complications she contends are linked to prior abortions, or from mental health problems, such as drug addiction and suicide, purportedly caused by abortion regret.

In another paper co-written with some of the same co-authors as in her retracted studies, Skop and her colleagues call for an overhaul of how states and the CDC collect maternal mortality data, urging the inclusion of “mandatory certification of all fetal losses,” including abortions.

And whereas the vast majority of public health experts predict that maternal deaths and near-deaths will increase in states with abortion bans, Skop takes the opposite view. In yet another Lozier paper, she lists 12 reasons why states with abortion bans will have fewer maternal deaths. For instance, she argues, because of abortion restrictions, women will have fewer later-term abortions, which tend to be more dangerous to women than first-trimester procedures. (In fact, researchers report, that state bans have led to an increase in second-trimester abortions.) She claims that since women who don’t have abortions won’t have mental health problems supposedly associated with pregnancy loss, their alleged risk of postpartum suicide would be reduced. (In fact, the idea that abortion regret is widespread and dangerous has been thoroughly debunked.) Skop makes a similar argument about abortion’s purported (and disproven) link to breast cancer, arguing that fewer abortions will mean fewer women dying of malignant tumors.

Much of Skop’s advocacy work has been done in collaboration with colleagues who share her strong ideological views. MMRCs, by contrast, have a public health role that is supposed to transcend politics—their focus is on analyzing the deaths of expectant and new mothers that occur within a year of the end of the pregnancy. Typically, committee members come from a wide range of professional backgrounds: In Texas, these include OB-GYNs, high-risk pregnancy specialists, nurses, mental health providers, public health researchers, and community advocates. Panels also aim to be racially and geographically diverse, the better to understand the communities—Black, Indigenous, rural, poor—where mothers are at disproportionate risk of dying. In a country that hasn’t prioritized maternal health, MMRCs are uniquely positioned to identify system failures and guide policy changes that can save lives.

Texas’s most recent maternal mortality report found that 90% of maternal deaths were preventable, racial disparities in maternal outcomes weren’t improving, and severe childbirth complications were up 23%—all before the state’s abortion bans took effect.

It remains to be seen how someone with Skop’s background and agenda will fit in with her new colleagues, especially at this dire moment for women in the state. Maternal health advocates aren’t optimistic: “This appointment speaks volumes about how seriously certain state leaders are taking the issue of maternal mortality,” Kamyon Conner, executive director of the Texas Equal Access Fund, told The Guardian. “It is another sign that the state is more interested in furthering their anti-abortion agenda than protecting the lives of pregnant Texans.”

Skop, contacted through Lozier, didn’t respond to a request for comment. In a statement to the Texas Tribune, Skop said she was joining the Texas MMRC because questions about maternal mortality data deserve “rigorous discourse.” “There are complex reasons for these statistics, including chronic illnesses, poverty, and difficulty obtaining prenatal care, and I have long been motivated to identify ways women’s care can be improved,” she said. “For over 30 years, I have advocated for both of my patients, a pregnant woman and her unborn child, and excellent medicine shouldn’t require I pit one against the other.”

Meanwhile, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists criticized Skop’s appointment, asserting that members of any maternal mortality review committee should be “unbiased, free of conflicts of interest and focused on the appropriate standards of care.”

“The importance of the work done by MMRCs to inform how we respond to the maternal mortality crisis cannot be overstated,” the group said in a statement. “It is crucial that MMRC members be clinical experts whose work is informed by data, not ideology and bias.”

[mariacallous]

Scientific publisher Sage Journals has retracted three papers on abortion—including a controversial 2021 study on mifepristone, the medication at the center of a US legal battle.

The 2021 study found that mifepristone, one of two pills used in a medication abortion, significantly increased the risk of women going to the emergency room following an abortion. The study, along with another retracted paper from 2022, was cited by US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in the April 2023 ruling that invalidated the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the drug.

Mifepristone was approved in 2000 by the Food and Drug Administration, the federal agency that evaluates the safety and efficacy of drugs, and has been used by at least 5.9 million women in the US since then. The drug blocks a hormone called progesterone that’s needed for a pregnancy to continue. It’s used alongside another pill, misoprostol, to induce an abortion within 10 weeks of pregnancy.

The three retracted studies were published in the journal Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology in 2019, 2021, and 2022. In July 2023, Sage issued an “expression of concern” about the 2021 paper, saying it was launching an investigation into the article.

According to Sage, a reader contacted the journal with concerns about misleading presentations of data in the 2021 article on mifepristone. The person also questioned whether the authors’ affiliations with pro-life advocacy organizations, including the Charlotte Lozier Institute, present conflicts of interest that the authors should have disclosed in the article.

In a retraction notice published on February 5, Sage said an independent reviewer with expertise in statistical analyses evaluated the concerns and concluded that the article's presentation of the data in certain figures leads to an inaccurate conclusion. The reviewer also found that “the composition of the cohort studied has problems that could affect the article's conclusions,” according to Sage.

As part of the publisher’s investigation, Sage said, two subject matter experts conducted an independent post-publication peer review of the three articles and found that they “demonstrate a lack of scientific rigor.” In the 2021 and 2022 articles, the reviewers found problems with the study design and methodology, errors in the authors’ analysis of the data, and misleading presentations of the data. In the 2019 article, the experts identified unsupported assumptions and misleading presentations of the findings.

“The retractions are not scientifically warranted as is easily demonstrable to any trained, objective scientist,” James Studnicki, the lead author on all three studies, told WIRED via email.

Studnicki, the vice president and director of data analytics of the Charlotte Lozier Institute, shared with WIRED a copy of a point-by-point rebuttal he and his coauthors submitted to Sage in response to the retractions.

In the 2021 study on mifepristone, Studnicki and his coauthors used data from Medicaid claims of 423,000 medication and procedural abortions between 1999 and 2015. Of those, over a quarter visited a hospital emergency room within 30 days of the abortion. During the study period, they found that emergency room visits associated with medication abortion rose much faster when compared to rates following a surgical abortion.

In his ruling last year, Kacsmaryk wrote that anti-abortion doctors and medical groups had legal standing to sue over mifepristone’s approval because “they allege adverse events from chemical abortion drugs can overwhelm the medical system and place ‘enormous pressure and stress’ on doctors during emergencies and complications.”

Ushma Upadhyay, a public health social scientist at UC San Francisco who studies medication abortion, says she has had concerns about the 2021 study since it was first published. “In my mind, the largest problem with the paper is that it conflates emergency department visits with serious adverse events,” she says. A serious adverse event related to medication abortion includes requiring a blood transfusion, needing a major surgery, or being admitted to the hospital—none of which the study looked at.

In their response to Sage Journals, the paper’s authors argue that emergency room visits are a “broad proxy indicator” for abortion-related complications. But Upadhyay says it’s to be expected that some people visit the ER after getting a medication abortion, since the pill regimen causes bleeding. Especially since patients often take the medication at home and may not live near an abortion provider, they may go to the ER if they have questions about side effects or to confirm that the abortion was successful, she says.

Decades of research has shown that mifepristone is safe and has a low rate of serious complications. The FDA has recorded 32 deaths following its use but cautions that these events “cannot with certainty be causally attributed to mifepristone” because not enough information is known about the patients’ health and care they received.

The 2022 study, which was based on the same dataset as the 2021 paper, found that patients who have medication abortions and subsequently visit the emergency room are frequently misclassified as miscarriage patients, which conceals abortions. The study was also cited in Kacsmaryk’s ruling last year.

The 2019 paper looked at abortion providers and their hospital admitting privileges—meaning formal agreements between providers and hospitals that allow them to directly admit patients to the hospital. It found that half of abortion providers in Florida lacked such privileges, which the authors argued raises safety concerns about their medical qualifications. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has said that admitting privileges are not tied to patient care or a clinician’s competence.

After Kacsmaryk’s attempt to reverse mifepristone’s approval in April last year, the US Supreme Court granted a stay to keep the drug available. The high court is expected to hear the case next month. Until then, the drug's future remains uncertain.

[partisan-by-default]

The move worries reproductive justice advocates who say the state’s abortion ban – among the strictest in the US – has placed pregnant women’s lives in jeopardy. The appointment could undermine the committee’s ability to accurately examine the impact of the law on deaths during and in the immediate aftermath of pregnancy, they say.

“This appointment speaks volumes about how seriously certain state leaders are taking the issue of maternal mortality,” said Kamyon Conner, executive director of the Texas Equal Access Fund, an abortion assistance group that advocates for reproductive health equity. “It is another sign that the state is more interested in furthering their anti-abortion agenda than protecting the lives of pregnant Texans.”

Dr Ingrid Skop, a San Antonio-based OB-GYN, has long been vocal about her views on abortion.

Skop serves as vice-president and director of medical affairs for the national anti-abortion research group Charlotte Lozier Institute and is a member of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists. She is also a plaintiff in a US supreme court lawsuit seeking to revoke the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the key abortion drug mifepristone, which she argues is “dangerous” despite years of evidence showing the drug is safe. She has authored a number of research papers that were ultimately retracted for misleading errors.

[mongowheelie]

Meet the anti-abortion group using white coats and research to advance its cause

Flawed research

[nando161mando]

Texas doctor who said nine-year-olds can safely give birth appointed to maternal mortality committee

Skop – who has called the supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade “a victory in the battle but not the end of the war” – has argued in favor of forcing rape and incest victims as young as nine or 10 to carry pregnancies to term.

Skop serves as vice-president and director of medical affairs for the national anti-abortion research group Charlotte Lozier Institute and is a member of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists. She is also a plaintiff in a US supreme court lawsuit seeking to revoke the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the key abortion drug mifepristone, which she argues is “dangerous” despite years of evidence showing the drug is safe. She has authored a number of research papers that were ultimately retracted for misleading errors.

[tocitynews]

Texas Health Department Appoints Anti-Abortion OB-GYN To Maternal Mortality Committee –Associated Press reporting

Skop, who has worked as an OB-GYN for over three decades, is vice president and director of medical affairs for the Charlotte Lozier Institute, an anti-abortion research group. Skop will be the committee’s rural representative.

Skop has said medical associations are not giving doctors the proper guidance on the matter. She has also shared more controversial views, saying during a congressional hearing in 2021 that rape or incest victims as young as 9 or 10 could carry pregnancies to term.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which says abortion is “inherently tied to maternal health,” said in a statement that members of the Texas committee should be “unbiased, free of conflicts of interest and focused on the appropriate standards of care.” The organization noted that bias against abortion has already led to “compromised” analyses, citing a research articles co-authored by Skop and others affiliated with the Charlotte Lozier Institute.

Earlier this year a medical journal retracted studies supported by the Charlotte Lozier Institute claiming to show harms of the abortion pill mifepristone, citing conflicts of interests by the authors and flaws in their research. Two of the studies were cited in a pivotal Texas court ruling that has threatened access to the drug.

[tattooed-alchemist]

Skop serves as vice-president and director of medical affairs for the national anti-abortion research group Charlotte Lozier Institute and is a member of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists. She is also a plaintiff in a US supreme court lawsuit seeking to revoke the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the key abortion drug mifepristone, which she argues is “dangerous” despite years of evidence showing the drug is safe. She has authored a number of research papers that were ultimately retracted for misleading errors.

Skop – who has called the supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade “a victory in the battle but not the end of the war” – has argued in favor of forcing rape and incest victims as young as nine or 10 to carry pregnancies to term. “If she is developed enough to be menstruating and become pregnant and reach sexual maturity, she can safely give birth to a baby,” Skop told the House oversight committee in 2021. Pregnancy at such a young age is shown to carry significant health risks, including pre-eclampsia and infections.

[ear-worthy]

Mock Trial Podcast: Should SCOTUS Restrict Access To The Abortion Pill?

On May 9, 1960–64 years ago today - the FDA approved the world's first commercially produced birth-control pill. Timed to that anniversary, nonpartisan public radio show Open to Debate is releasing a mock trial on the question "Should Courts Restrict Access to the Abortion Pill?"

The Open To Debate podcast plays a critical role in our society today.The mission of Open to Debate is to restore critical thinking, facts, reason, and civility to America’s public square. Open to Debate is a platform for intellectually curious and open-minded people to engage with others holding opposing views on complex issues.

The full episode was released on May 9th (look for it here, on NPR stations, or via the Open to Debate podcast). Below are three clips on YouTube:

• Watch: Conscience vs. Complications in Medication Abortion

• Watch: Legal Remedies for Medication Abortion Policies

• Watch: Personal Perspectives on Abortion Rights

In a post-Roe v. Wade world, mifepristone, a medication that 63% of women undergoing an abortion use, is under consideration by the Supreme Court. Mifepristone was approved as a two-drug regimen for use up to seven weeks of pregnancy and initially required in-person clinical visits, but changes by the FDA were made in 2016 and 2021 to expand accessibility via telehealth and the length of its administration. FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine seeks to address whether the FDA's approval process was thorough and whether the drug should continue to be available.

Those in favor of restrictions argue that the FDA approved mifepristone without adequate consideration of long-term health impacts, failing to adhere to stringent regulatory standards. They also consider restricting access to abortion pills a moral imperative, forcing some doctors to treat patients for a procedure against their beliefs.

Arguing in favor of restrictions is Catherine Glenn Foster, Senior Fellow in Legal Policy at the Charlotte Lozier Institute. She has worked on topics from euthanasia and assisted suicide to abortion and maternal health, health and safety regulations, conscience protections, and constitutional aspects of the right to life and has authored and testified on numerous domestic, foreign, and international legislation and initiatives, appearing on multiple occasions before the Senate, the House, and other federal and state bodies.

Those against restrictions point out the approval was based on extensive research and clinical trials, which should not be undermined without substantial scientific evidence. They also argue access to mifepristone is essential for women's health, providing a safer alternative to surgical abortion and enabling privacy and autonomy in healthcare decisions.

Arguing against restrictions is Julia Kaye, Senior Staff Attorney at the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project. She was lead counsel in two lawsuits that led the FDA to allow patients to obtain mifepristone through telehealth and pharmacy dispensing. She has also led or co-counseled litigation in numerous states challenging abortion bans, mandatory abortion delay requirements, laws preventing qualified nurse practitioners and midwives from providing abortion or birthing care, and other political interference with patients’ health and autonomy.

 Listen to Open to Debate wherever you get podcasts, or watch the video version at opentodebate.org. 

[lcrtl]

A prominent OB-GYN from Texas debunked the claim that abortion drugs are safer than Tylenol during a U.S. Senate committee hearing Wednesday. Dr. Ingrid Skop, a practicing OB-GYN and vice president and director of medical affairs at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, said women deserve to know the truth about the risks of mifepristone, an abortion […]

[loulou1943]

A prominent OB-GYN from Texas debunked the claim that abortion drugs are safer than Tylenol during a U.S. Senate committee hearing Wednesday. Dr. Ingrid Skop, a practicing OB-GYN and vice president and director of medical affairs at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, said women deserve to know the truth about the risks of mifepristone, an abortion […]

[the-doneverly55]

It’s true that many women use abortion for birth control. Yet the percentage of women who sacrifice their own children to maintain a lifestyle shocked even me. An analysis of state abortion statistics by Charlotte Lozier Institute revealed an appalling, widespread practice of women using abortion as a means of birth control. Not all states […]

[cheerfullycatholic]

Full article about when life begins; https://lozierinstitute.org/a-scientific-view-of-when-life-begins/

[spiritualdirections]

I’d thought that Catholics would have to wait for an ethically produced vaccine to be produced, since the two leading candidates were produced with cell lines taken from aborted fetuses. But this article suggests that that’s not true:

...Moderna's vaccine is based on the virus' RNA, and uses a spike protein, or peplomer, from SARS-CoV-2 rather than cell lines derived from aborted fetuses. The RNA is injected into the recipient, which induces their cells to produce the spike protein. This triggers the production of antibodies and T cells by the recipient.

Scientists not from Moderna had initially made DNA vectors with the gene sequence of the spike protein, and injected them in HEK-293 cells to produce the spike protein. The HEK 293 cell line is derived from a baby who was aborted in the Netherlands in the 1970s.

The production of the DNA vectors was studied and evaluated by experts at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the University of Texas, who determined that the spike protein was a good candidate for testing. Moderna was not involved in the DNA construction, nor was it involved in the evaluation of the construction.

Dr. John Brehany, director of institutional relations at the NCBC[ National Catholic Bioethics Center], told CNA in July that while Moderna thus has some association with the use of cell lines from elective abortions, it is not responsible for that use, and its vaccine was not produced using HEK 293 cells.

I understand this to say that the spike protein was originally made by researchers outside the company, using aborted fetus lines. Once people figured out that these spike proteins could be a promising part of a vaccine, Moderna and Pfizer developed their own spike proteins, not using aborted fetus lines. So their cooperation with evil amounts to using information that others discovered while using aborted fetuses. It that’s correct, then I can see why Catholic bioethicists have determined that these vaccines are being ethically produced.

[gettothestabbing]

The use of abortion as a method of family planning has been cited by such authorities as the American Public Health Association, which listed child spacing as a reason for its support for taxpayer funding of abortion. "APHA considers the availability of safe, legal, and affordable abortion care to be essential for safeguarding maternal health, reducing maternal mortality and morbidity, and enabling healthy spacing of pregnancies," the association states. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists also listed "spacing" to justify its support for abortion. And a branch of the pro-abortion organization NARAL promoted a series of articles exploring how "abortion makes parenting possible."

But the study found that the data do not support the conclusion that women use abortion for child spacing.

Researchers looked at 17 states where Medicaid, the entitlement program designed to help low-income Americans, includes coverage of abortions through state taxpayer funding. The time frame was 1999 to 2014. Out of the 4,875,511 Medicaid-eligible women and girls, 50,012 followed a pattern of a live birth, then an abortion, then another live birth. "[Our] findings support the conclusion that it is quite uncommon for Medicaid eligible women to utilize abortion for the purpose of child spacing," the study states.

The study was commissioned by the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research arm of the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List. Its authors said that the argument for using abortion for family planning is not supported by the data. In fact, they said, the opposite appears to be true.

"The data is clear … abortion is almost never used as a family planning tool," Stephen Billy, executive director of the Charlotte Lozier Institute, said.

"What pro-abortion researchers would like you to believe is that abortion is a happy circumstance that leads to a child-spaced family. What actually happens is that an abortion leads to more pregnancies, but those pregnancies lead to more abortions," said James Studnicki, the lead author of the study. "Abortion begets abortion."