Ten academics are challenging a journal’s decision to retract their papers that studied the risks of abortion.
Ten academics are challenging a journal’s decision to retract their papers that studied the risks of abortion.
It was announced this week that researchers had filed an arbitration demand against Sage Publications after it retracted three of their papers.
The research, published in the Sage journal Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology, had already passed the standard peer-review process.
A statement issued on the researchers’ behalf said: “Freedom of speech in medicine is critical to scientific progress.
“The authors are now being mistreated in their industry and their research proposals are being inexplicably turned down. That is wrong, and the scientific community deserves better.”
The arbitration filing accuses Sage of having “unjustly retracted” three papers published between 2019 and 2022. The authors, who argue that their professional reputations were harmed by the decision, also requested that Sage repeal the retractions.
The filing states: “The combined reputational and economic harm to the Authors from these unlawful actions is enormous and incalculable…
“Because of Sage’s retractions, the Authors and their research have been attacked by the media, by other authors, and even by a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Authors have had new research proposals inexplicably turned away by other journals that now fear associating with them. The Authors have years – even decades – of fruitful research ahead of them, but they are now being treated as pariahs.”
One of the papers found that visits to emergency rooms following chemical abortions had increased by over 500% between 2002 through 2015.
Another study looked at the dangers of doctors misreporting abortion complications as a miscarriage because of concealment by the patient or medical misrepresentation.
It has been contended that Sage pulled the articles after a US district judge cited them in a 2023 decision to suspend the US Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, a drug commonly used in chemical abortions.
Sage claims that it based its retractions on the authors not disclosing their pro-life ties, and that an appraisal – after the articles had been approved by peer review – found “unjustified or incorrect factual assumptions”.
The authors deny Sage’s claims.
Last year, Professor Udo Schüklenk, the editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal Bioethics, slammed the “social media facilitated outrage” that led to the retraction of pro-life researchers’ work.
“What puzzles me about this behaviour is that it is antithetical to what academic freedom is all about”, said Schüklenk. “In this journal, we have published during the last few years a fair number of papers by a small group of – arguably – activist anti-choice academic writers… [and] pro-choice academic social media activists lambasted the journal for publishing such content…
“Those concerns strangely never seem to arise vis a vis content these same academic social media activists find agreeable.”
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