The Media Research Center’s Tom Olohan wrote in a May 1 post, published at the Free Speech America site:
Pro-lifers have been warning the public that the abortion pill hurts women for years. Here’s why Big Tech and its fact-checkers have much to answer for.
A massive study published on Monday found that around 11.2% of 154,554 women underwent a “serious adverse event” after taking the abortion pill. This percentage is 22 times higher than the less than 0.5% statistic pushed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that loosened restrictions on the abortion pill during the Biden administration. The Foundation for the Restoration of America commissioned the study. And while this study is not the first to show that over one in ten women who take the pill are seriously harmed, social media platforms and fact-checkers have censored criticism of the abortion pill for years.
The study may have been “massive,” but it’s not terribly credible. The study was issued by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and both it and the Foundation for the Restoration of America are right-wing political groups, not medical researchers. Further, as the Washington Post reported, the study did not undergo the type of formal peer review process; a spokesperson claimed the study was “internally reviewed and adjudicated by a panel of physicians, who carefully evaluated the clinical classifications, coding, and outcome assessments to ensure medical accuracy and consistency” — which is not peer review. The report also refused to reveal the database it used for its information.
The study’s numbers also don’t do a good job of standing up to scrutiny:
- The study’s list of “Other abortion-specific complications” includes “homicidal ideations” and “suicidal ideations,” but no instances of those were recorded.
- The study hyped emergency room visits, even though the study’s rate was almost exactly the same as what is disclosed on the pill’s warning label.
- The infection rate is much higher than that stated on the label because infections stemming from pre-existing conditions were included.
- The study includes data on ectopic pregnancies even though the pill is not for use in an ectopic pregnancy.
In other words, Olohan is relying on a highly biased and dubious study to push his agenda. Indeed, he spends much of the rest of his post whining that anti-abortion content in social media gets scrutinized. He showed his own extreme anti-abortion bias as well, whining that YouTube was “referring to butchering a baby in the womb as ‘a procedure to end a pregnancy” and insisting that terms like “abortion care” and “medical termination of pregnancy” were “horrifying euphemisms.”