Rewire.News launched our False Witnesses gallery in November 2014, after we began noticing that some of the same few expert witnesses were repeatedly testifying in court (and earning thousands in taxpayer dollars) or in legislatures, despite some of their dubious claims and questionable research. We are revisiting this series at a time when the constitutional fate of many reproductive rights hangs in the balance, particularly with a U.S. Supreme Court likely tilting against access to them. We have updated and extended our gallery from 14 to 20 individuals, whose backgrounds and expertise levels vary but whose anti-choice agendas align. The new figures introduced in this edition are Freda Bush, Maureen Condic, George Delgado, Anthony Levatino, David Prentice, and Martha Shuping. In this gallery, readers will find detailed information about the key “alternative facts” put forward by people and groups who are opposed to abortion, as well as the individuals who have developed and spread those myths. Many of the doctors in this series overlap in their affiliations with anti-choice legal and medical groups. Many find themselves on the same speaking panels and co-signing the same legal briefs. Several of them appear in a recent Canadian film, Hush, a documentary that is supposed to be an objective look at the health risks of abortion, but primarily airs the views of doctors and academics who are also politically active anti-choice advocates. Some are associated with groups that support new members of the Trump administration. For instance, Dr. Martha Shuping belongs to the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, an organization that also claims new U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price as one of its members. Notably, this organization promotes baseless claims linking vaccines to autism and abortion to breast cancer. Several of the individuals in this series belong to the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG), a nonprofit group that promotes controversial viewpoints about reproductive health while advocating for the criminalization of abortion. AAPLOG claims approximately 2,500 members, compared with the main professional organization of OB-GYNs, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), which claims approximately 58,000 members. The day after President Donald Trump’s electoral victory, AAPLOG announced in an email to members that it would “be submitting a list of qualified pro-life physicians willing and able to serve the new administration.” In a subsequent February email to members, AAPLOG encouraged them to prepare to testify as potential experts in state litigation, noting that the organization had, so far in 2017, “already received requests from over 10 different states to identify physician experts capable of testifying in favor of or in defense of bills and laws protecting unborn human life.” In the same email, the organization also announced it will be hosting an “Expert Witness Workshop” co-sponsored by the conservative legal group the Alliance Defending Freedom at a conference in fall 2017. And of course, the Trump administration itself is aggressively anti-choice. Vice President Mike Pence is an ardent opponent of reproductive rights, and Trump promised to fill Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s vacant seat with a justice that would overturn the ruling that formalized the Constitution’s protection of a patient’s right to choose whether to continue their pregnancy. In January, Trump nominated federal appeals court Judge Neil Gorsuch, who notably authored the federal court opinion later adopted by the Supreme Court arguing that the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate violates corporations’ religious freedom. The False Witnesses are crucial in all of these efforts, as their activities lend a veneer of scientific credibility to what are, in reality, ideologically driven policies. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Medical Association say there is “simply no medical basis to impose a local admitting privileges requirement on abortion providers.”

Dr. James C. Anderson is an emergency-room physician specializing in family medicine and an associate director at Chesterfield Family Practice Center in Richmond, Virginia. Additionally, he is a clinical professor within the Department of Family Medicine & Population Health at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine. Signature Falsehood: It is necessary for abortion providers to have hospital admitting privileges in order to protect patients. Setting the Record Straight: The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Medical Association say there is “simply no medical basis" for local admitting privileges requirements on abortion providers. Background Credentials BS, University of Virginia, 1974

MD, University of Virginia, 1978

Board certified in family practice, 1981

Board certified in advanced cardiac life support, 1984

Board certified in advanced trauma life support, 1992

Board certified in emergency medicine by the American Association of Physician Specialists, 1996

Col., U.S. Army Reserve Medical Corps (2002-2012) Affiliations American Academy of Family Physicians, member

American Medical Association, member

Christian Medical and Dental Society, member

Family Policy Council, chairman

Medical Society of Virginia, member

Richmond Academy of Medicine, member

Richmond Christian Medical & Dental Society, executive board member

Virginia Academy of Family Physicians, member

Virginia Physicians for Life, chairman Connected To Vincent Rue $16,350 The Alabama Office of the Attorney General paid Anderson between 2013 and 2014, according to the state’s online expenditure records, to testify in defense of the state’s admitting privileges law. $17,224 The Alaska Department of Law paid Anderson for expert-witness services in 2011 and 2012 to defend parental notification requirements in Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest v. State of Alaska. Pursuant to the state’s contract with Anderson—obtained by Rewire through a public records request—the state agreed to pay Anderson “a daily rate of $3,500 for authorized deposition or trial testimony in this matter and an hourly rate of $300 for all other authorized work performed in this matter,” as well as “reasonable and necessary expenses incurred in performing the Contract, including travel expenses.” His contract was not to exceed $20,000. $6,750 The North Dakota Office of the Attorney General paid Anderson between January 2011 and September 2014 to serve as an expert witness to defend anti-abortion litigation. $24,106 The Texas Office of the Attorney General paid Anderson for work performed in 2014 and assigned for 2015. The Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts coded these payments as “other witness fees.” $4,200 The Wisconsin Department of Justice paid Anderson in 2013 and 2014 for his expert witness testimony defending the state’s admitting privilege’s law. Anderson has participated in many Christian organizations that advocate for abstinence until marriage and against access to safe abortion care (e.g., Abstinence—Now Until Marriage and March for Jesus). Controversy Anderson was chastised by a federal judge while testifying on behalf of a sweeping Texas law that has resulted in many clinic closures across the state. Anderson admitted that his declaration was “wordsmithed” by serial anti-abortion legal consultant Vincent Rue, who has himself been discredited. As the Austin Chronicle reported, “When questioned about Rue’s influence on his testimony, Anderson downplayed the degree of involvement, saying the legal draft was a ‘team effort’ and ‘a collaboration.’ Anderson said Rue provided sources for his testimony, including material from the Susan B. Anthony List, a national anti-choice group. When asked about the group’s ideological motivations, Anderson conceded the source ‘risks bias, but still validates the need for the law.’” Anderson told Rewire that he wrote “my whole reports.” He said in the example of the Texas case, “wordsmithing” referred to “grammar and spelling.” “I think when people can’t address the issue, then they try to attack your integrity,” Anderson said in a phone interview. “And I think that’s why everybody is trying to make it a big deal that I didn’t write my report or somebody didn’t write their report. … Vince Rue is just an employee of the different states. I enjoyed working with him. But I wrote the reports.” “I think the admitting privileges is protective of women,” he added. “There are so many physicians that have been ill-trained or haven’t had enough training to do safe, competent abortions. And the scrutiny of the medical admitting privileging process is very protective of women.” Anderson’s testimony has also been discounted by the Alabama Federal District Court, which cast doubt not only on his accuracy but on his honesty, as well. In an opinion from August 2014 in Planned Parenthood Southeast, Inc., et al., v. Luther Strange, Judge Myron H. Thompson wrote: Drs. [John] Thorp and [James] Anderson each opined that proper care for even the simplest complication would require detailed knowledge about the patient’s history, reproductive goals, and other information. However, the court discredits Dr. Anderson’s testimony on this point due to concerns about his judgment or honesty as described in the forthcoming supplemental opinion. In late October, Thompson issued a supplemental opinion detailing how the court determined whether or not to throw out parts of expert witness testimony. In this opinion, Thompson explained that the court admitted most of Anderson’s testimony but said “the court did not find his opinions credible,” primarily because Anderson had testified that a supplemental report he signed had been drafted by Vincent Rue and that he had not verified the content in the report. Anderson had also testified that he knew little of Rue’s background. “Anderson’s court testimony about the supplemental report raised serious questions about his credibility,” Thompson wrote. “It became apparent that Rue’s involvement in drafting this supplemental report reached beyond the typical involvement of an attorney or litigation consultant in helping an expert put his opinions into words or providing background research. Anderson presented the supplemental report as his own work by virtue of his signature at the bottom.” “The court was struck by the flimsiness of Anderson’s basis for reliance on Rue and by his failure to obtain basic information about the affiliations, credentials, or employment of the consultant whose report he submitted as his own,” Thompson continued. “[E]ither he has extremely impaired judgment; he lied to the court as to his familiarity with Rue; or he is so biased against abortion that he would endorse any opinion that supports increased regulation on abortion providers. Any of these explanations severely undermines Anderson’s credibility as an expert witness.” In Alaska’s 2003 lawsuit involving a parental involvement statute, plaintiff Planned Parenthood of Alaska argued that Anderson’s delivered testimony “carries very little weight in assessing the safety of abortion in Alaska. He has not treated minors for the past 9 years, and his experience is limited to Virginia. … Dr. Anderson informs patients of his personal preference for them to carry to term … and, despite his belief that parents should be involved in pregnancy-related care, contraception, and STD treatment, has actively campaigned only for a parental involvement for abortion. … Dr. Anderson further believes that parents refusing consent for abortion would be a positive effect of the act.” Influence Anderson has testified in support of anti-choice policies in courts across the country, particularly state laws that require abortion providers to acquire admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. Among the cases Rewire has identified, Anderson has testified regarding laws passed or challenged in Alabama, Alaska, Mississippi, North Dakota, Texas, and Wisconsin. Anderson has given similar testimonies in each case, essentially arguing that being able to provide continuity of care in a hospital following an emergency is best medical practice. He has also argued that abortion providers should be required to have admitting privileges at local hospitals in order to ensure that the same person who performs an abortion can continue the patient’s care should the patient require hospitalization. As an expert witness in July 2012, defending a Mississippi law requiring that abortion providers be board certified in obstetrics and gynecology and that they maintain admitting privileges at a local hospital, Anderson argued (as he did in North Dakota): I have worked in local Emergency Rooms across Virginia for over thirty years. When women have come to the Emergency Room with complications related to an abortion, never once have I received a phone call initiated by the provider conveying information about the abortion, the young woman’s condition or potential complications. I have always had to evaluate the situation, come to my own conclusions and initiate what I thought was appropriate treatment. This definitely created some time delays that were not in the patient’s best interest. I have called many abortion clinic physicians but never once has the provider come the Emergency Room to assume care. I have always had to call a staff physician. This then creates another delay since the staff physician is taking care of his/her own patients but now must change his/her schedule to assume the care of someone else’s patient. These delays can have life-threatening implications when dealing with hemorrhage or infection. Anderson also testified: If a physician cannot obtain privileges for the specific requested procedures at his or her local hospital, then in my expert opinion, the physician is not qualified to do the surgical procedures that have life-changing or life-threatening impact. Mississippi’s clinic was unable to fully comply with the law because the nearby hospitals denied privileges to the clinic’s providers; still, a Fifth Circuit judge struck down the law as unconstitutional because it would have had the effect of making abortion inaccessible in the state. In his Mississippi testimony, Anderson made sweeping claims containing many assumptions and generalizations about what women writ large would do when faced with health-care decisions. “If a woman knows her physician does not practice at a local hospital, then she is faced at that moment with having to change physicians and possibly have to wait in a crowded Emergency Room to see a doctor she has never met,” he said. “If she knows her physician does not practice at the hospital, she will likely put off going to the hospital as long as possible.” Anderson’s statements were cited as footnotes to the state’s assertion that the Mississippi laws were justified to protect women. In a July 2012 legal brief, Mississippi Special Assistant Attorney General Benjamin Bryant cited quotes from Anderson given in a declaration submitted for the court, wherein he argued that the admitting privileges and OB-GYN requirements were beneficial to protecting the health and safety of women. Bryant also cited Anderson’s declaration in reference to a claim that there is no evidence plaintiffs would be unable to comply with the law.

Joel L. Brind is an endocrinologist and a professor of human biology and endocrinology at Baruch College, City University of New York. Additionally, Brind is the CEO of Natural Food Science LLC, a private company he founded in 2010, which makes glycine supplement products. Signature Falsehood: Abortion is linked to breast cancer. Setting the Record Straight: The claim that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer has been refuted by the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Background Credentials BS, Yale University, 1971

PhD, biochemistry, immunology, and physiology, New York University, 1981 Affiliations Breast Cancer Prevention Institute, co-founder and board director

Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society’s World Congress of Families, speaker

Natural Food Science LLC, founder and CEO Connected To Angela Lanfranchi $10,000 Contracted by the State of Alaska Department of Law between September 15, 1997, and January 1, 2015, to testify in a lawsuit and associated appeal involving a state law that denied Medicaid funding for “medically necessary” abortions unless the woman was at risk of dying or her pregnancy had been the result of rape or incest. Since the early 1990s, Brind has co-authored studies attempting to prove the abortion-breast cancer link. He has testified before state legislatures and in the courts in favor of abortion restrictions. In 1999 Brind co-founded the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute with Angela Lanfranchi. Based in Somerville, New Jersey, this organization describes itself as a nonprofit that “educates health care professionals and the general public through research publications, lectures, and the internet, on ways to reduce breast cancer incidence.” But the group seems to have a pretty singular focus on promoting a cause-and-effect relationship between abortion and breast cancer and hormonal birth control and breast cancer. The Breast Cancer Prevention Institute reported approximately $35,000 in net assets in 2011 to the Internal Revenue Service; between 2003 and 2011 the group received approximately $1,500 in small donations from the Charles and Mary Crossed Foundation; the Rochester Area Community Foundation; and General Electric’s charitable entity, the GE Foundation, according to tax filings. Brind believes wholeheartedly that abortion significantly increases the risk for breast cancer, even though major national cancer and medical institutions have been unable to find evidence of such a risk within the medical literature. In a phone interview with Rewire, Brind said scientific literature on breast cancer he read in the early 1980s, combined with his work on sex steroid synthesis and his subsequent research, convinced him of a causal relationship between abortion and breast cancer. “Abortion is the single most avoidable risk factor for breast cancer,” he said. Brind contends that many studies show a positive correlation between abortion and breast cancer but that pro-choice politics have stifled these studies. “Abortion increases the risk of breast cancer,” he said. “There’s absolutely zero doubt about it in my mind. The strength of the evidence is such that if it weren’t politically loaded, there would be zero doubt about it in anybody’s mind.” Though Brind has testified to this link in state legislatures and in the courts, he told Rewire he does not think the procedure should be banned based on this purported risk, but that women seeking an abortion should be informed that an abortion will increase their risk for breast cancer. He said he is “pro-life” and would like to see abortion become a rare event. Brind did say, however, that “abortion is not good for women,” citing other invented theories that abortion causes mental illness and that it negatively affects subsequent pregnancies. “I’m not really terribly concerned about the legality of abortion,” he said. “It’s all a matter of information with being able to make an informed choice,” he added. “If women actually knew that abortion is really not very safe, then even if it’s legal, it would be rare. And that would be a very good turn of events. Because people don’t do things that they perceive as dangerous.” Brind rejected the notion that he is trying to promote a false scientific theory in an effort to end abortion. Controversy Among the early research that convinced Brind that abortion causes breast cancer was a 1980 study wherein biologists exposed female rats to a cancer-causing chemical and found a higher rate of cancer among the rats that had been given abortions compared to those that had given birth, reported Barry Yeoman and Michael Lewis in the February 2003 issue of Discover magazine. Attempting to prove the abortion-breast cancer correlation, Brind enlisted two endocrinologists at Pennsylvania State College of Medicine—both abortion opponents—and Vernon Chinchilli, a biostatistician at Penn State, and they conducted a meta-analysis of several studies that include data on induced abortion and incidence of breast cancer. Brind and his co-authors found a relative risk of 1.3 on a scale where 1.0 means no risk and 2.0 means a demonstrated risk. The article, which was published in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health in October 1996, concluded that, “the results support the inclusion of induced abortion among significant independent risk factors for breast cancer,” even though “the increase in risk was relatively low.” The article was met with wide skepticism and accusations that there was a lack of consistency in the data among the studies the team analyzed. Yeoman and Lewis reported that Chinchilli had expressed doubts that they could make conclusions about the relationship between breast cancer and abortion based on their work. Soon after Brind’s study was published, an epidemiologist in Denmark published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine that analyzed the records of 1.5 million Danish women over a 43-year period and found that women who had abortions developed breast cancer at the same rate as those who had not had abortions. In 2002, the National Cancer Institute scrubbed from its website a statement saying that current scientific evidence does not point to a higher risk of breast cancer among women who have abortions. The scrubbing was prompted by a letter U.S. Rep. Christopher Smith (R-New Jersey) wrote to the Secretary of Health and Human Services citing Brind’s 1996 study, according to Barry Yeoman and Michael Lewis’ reporting. Subsequently, the National Cancer Institute held a workshop in 2003 to investigate thoroughly the correlation between breast cancer and “reproductive events.” Among the conclusions of the workshop was that “induced abortion is not associated with an increase in breast cancer risk.” Brind was the sole dissenter of this conclusion at the workshop; he told Rewire that there likely would have been other dissenters had they not feared losing grant money from the National Cancer Institute, which he said holds the purse strings for cancer research. Brind claims the workshop was biased and does not consider the organization’s findings valid. Again, he was the sole dissenter and the sole member to have expressed such views. Influence Brind’s work has been influential in providing a basis for legislation, even though major medical institutions do not support his conclusions. As Barry Yeoman and Michael Lewis reported in the February 2003 issue of Discover magazine, as of 2003, Brind had testified about an abortion-breast cancer link in courthouses and statehouses in Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, North Dakota, and Ohio, and at least 18 states had considered laws requiring clinics to “disclose” the link, with Mississippi and Montana passing such measures. Today, at least five states require abortion providers to tell women that abortion increases the risk for breast cancer before they can have an abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Brind has testified in support of abortion restrictions and against both medication abortion and the birth control pill in several state and federal lawsuits; most recently his Breast Cancer Prevention Institute filed amicus briefs in support of plaintiffs suing the federal government so as not to comply with the birth control benefit. In 1997, Brind served as the star witness for a religious group called Christ’s Bride Ministries, which had posted ads in subway stations, on subways, and on buses in Pennsylvania that said, “Women Who Choose Abortion Suffer More & Deadlier Breast Cancer.” After the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority removed the ads on the basis that they were promoting misinformation, Christ’s Bride Ministries sued. Brind testified that the ads reflected the truth. Though Christ’s Bride Ministries won the lawsuit on free-speech grounds, that case was later cited in support of a lawsuit filed against an abortion clinic in Fargo, North Dakota. In 1999, an anti-choice activist named Amy Jo Kjolsrud sued the clinic claiming it had violated the state’s false advertising statute by stating in its brochures that there was no evidence that abortion causes breast cancer. Brind also testified in that lawsuit, arguing that the clinic was peddling false information. The North Dakota Supreme Court dismissed the case on the grounds the plaintiff had no standing and thereby affirmed the trial court’s finding that the abortion clinic had not violated the statute. Brind has testified in support of an Alaska parental involvement abortion law. In 2003, plaintiffs in the case criticized the use of Brind as an expert witness. They pointed out that Brind has no formal education or training in epidemiology, and that his single peer-reviewed article on the topic of abortion and breast cancer suffered from serious methodological flaws. They further argued that Brind’s “background and experience, were of limited value to the Court in assessing the evidence regarding an alleged link between abortion and breast cancer, which is based on epidemiological studies.” Brind continues to write about this disproven abortion-breast cancer link; recently he promoted a Chinese study claiming such a correlation in conservative publications such as Life News and National Review Online. He told Rewire that he regularly conducts workshops for the National Right to Life Committee and writes for the organization’s journal.

Dr. Donna J. Harrison is the executive director of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG), an organization of approximately 2,500 obstetrician-gynecologists who oppose abortion rights. (By contrast, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has approximately 57,000 members.) She lives in Eau Claire, Michigan. Signature Falsehood: Emergency contraception causes abortion and is harmful. Setting the Record Straight: Emergency contraception cannot disrupt an established pregnancy, according to the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco. Rather, it prevents a pregnancy from occurring. Background Credentials Board certified in obstetrics and gynecology

BS, biochemistry, Michigan State University

BA, chemistry, Michigan State University

MD, University of Michigan

Residency, St. Joseph Mercy Hospital Affiliations American Association of Pro Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG), executive director and director of research and public policy

American Board of Obstetrics & Gynecology, diplomate since 1992

Med Students for Life, board adviser Connected To Byron Calhoun

Monique Chireau $5,100 Idaho paid Harrison, according to the Idaho Office of the Attorney General, pursuant to a contract signed in July 2012, obtained by Rewire through public records requests. Harrison’s obligations under the contract include “analyzing and preparing court testimony and cross-examination of the parties related to the litigation,” and “to the extent requested by the Attorney General, prepar[ing], gather[ing], and develop[ing] information and data for use by other consultants performing services for the Attorney General.” $47,326 North Dakota paid Harrison to serve as an “expert witness for abortion litigation,” between January 2011 and September 2014. She testified in defense of a 2011 state law limiting the use of abortion-inducing drugs. Harrison is an anti-choice activist who frequently claims that abortion is a harmful procedure; she especially opposes medication, as opposed to surgical, abortion. Harrison’s status as a medical professional and an OB-GYN lend credibility to her anti-choice views, and she is often quoted by mainstream media outlets, such as the New York Times, CNN, and NPR as a reliable source on the issues of abortion and contraception. Yet despite Harrison’s medical degree, her claim to fame is that of an ideologue and an anti-choice activist, who is paid by taxpayers to defend laws limiting women’s access to health care using discredited or fringe studies rather than broadly accepted medical evidence. Harrison is outspoken in her views that, despite all evidence to the contrary, emergency contraceptives such as Plan B and ella can cause abortions. The accepted medical definition of pregnancy is the implantation of a fertilized egg, and the accepted medical definition of abortion is a process that terminates an established pregnancy, not one that merely prevents implantation. Plan B, colloquially known as the “morning-after pill,” works to prevent ovulation and thus does not terminate an existing pregnancy, but rather prevents one. Though the data on how exactly ella works is currently less definitive than that on Plan B, studies have shown that ella only works on women who have not ovulated. Anti-choice activists frequently refer to ella as the “week-after pill” because it can be used up to five days after intercourse. Harrison was quoted in an NPR story last year saying ella “kills embryos.” “[I]t kills embryos before they implant, and it kills embryos after they implant,” she said. In large part, Harrison’s claims that Plan B and ella prevent fertilized eggs from implanting in a woman’s uterus and thus constitute abortions rest on speculation unsupported by evidence. Specifically, Harrison says that the high efficacy rates of these drugs must mean that they’re preventing pregnancies post-ovulation. Harrison also points out that ella and the abortion-inducing drug Mifeprex are chemically similar, and wrongly assumes that they therefore work the same way. Harrison declined to speak to Rewire for this story, and any future stories. In fact, she said she would consider further inquiries on her work from our reporters to constitute a form of harassment. “In light of the previous articles that I have read on Rewire, I decline to talk to you or any other reporter from your magazine, and I will consider any further attempts to contact me as an act of harrassment [sic],” Harrison said in an email. Controversy Harrison served as an expert witness in MKB Management Corp v. Burdick, an unsuccessful constitutional challenge to a 2011 North Dakota law restricting medication abortions. Among other provisions, the law mandated that abortion-inducing drugs could only be administered using the Food and Drug Administration protocol outlined on the original label of the drugs—despite the fact that the FDA approves “off-label” use of its drugs. The plaintiffs—the sole remaining abortion clinic in North Dakota, Red River Women’s Clinic in Fargo—argued that there was no medical basis for the restriction. District Judge Wickham Corwin ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor in 2013 and heavily criticized Harrison’s testimony. He said Harrison’s argument that the FDA has prohibited or discouraged the off-label use of the abortion-inducing drug mifepristone “proceeds on an impossibly flawed premise.” The state appealed the case to the North Dakota Supreme Court; the court upheld the law in October 2014. Plaintiffs had filed a motion requesting that part of Harrison’s testimony be stricken from the record, arguing that she lacked the expertise to make certain claims and that some of her conclusions lacked factual basis. In response to the motion, Judge Corwin agreed with some of plaintiffs’ arguments and concluded, “No direct testimony from Dr. Harrison will be permitted regarding the regulatory role played by the FDA, the process that led to the approval of mifepristone or Mifeprex, or the legal effect of any of this.” Corwin disputed Harrison’s main argument that the FDA prohibits or discourages the off-label use of the abortion-inducing drug mifepristone. He explained that the FDA regulates the marketing and distribution of drugs but cannot regulate the practice of medicine or how physicians administer the drugs. He also called out Harrison’s references to malpractice and patient abandonment in her affidavit as “gratuitous, irrelevant, and inappropriate.” Influence Harrison’s false claims that birth control causes abortion were at the center of the recent battles over the birth control benefit in the Affordable Care Act. The benefit requires, among other things, that all insurance plans cover a range of preventive care without a co-pay, including all forms of contraception approved by the Food and Drug Administration. A number of religious organizations and privately held corporations claiming “religious exemptions” objected to the provision, claiming despite all evidence that the ACA requires them to cover abortion-inducing medication in violation of their religious beliefs. This view ultimately prevailed before the U.S. Supreme Court in the Hobby Lobby decision, in which the arts-and-crafts chain was found to have religious beliefs protected by the Constitution. During the course of the litigation and the public debate surrounding it, opponents of the birth control benefit relied heavily on the false argument that birth control causes abortion perpetuated by Harrison and others. In addition to influencing the arguments others make in court, Harrison’s arguments have had direct impact in legal proceedings, as well as congressional and state legislative hearings. In a petition to the Supreme Court filed June 2013, Harrison’s previous declarations were cited in the Oklahoma case Cline v. Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice, related to banning the off-label use of the medication abortion drug RU-486 (also known as mifepristone).

Jacqueline C. Harvey is a scholar of public policy and bioethics, an adjunct professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, and an associate scholar at the Charlotte Lozier Institute. In addition to articles opposing abortion, Harvey has written extensively in opposition to so-called assisted suicide, which is also known as “death with dignity.” Signature Falsehood: Abortion may be more accessible than other elective outpatient surgeries. Setting the Record Straight: Not only did Harvey invent her theory, but research by the Guttmacher Institute shows that in 2014, about 90 percent of U.S. counties (representing 39 percent of the U.S. female population) had no abortion clinics. In the years since that research was completed, even more clinics have shuttered due to repressive abortion restrictions. Background Credentials BS, social work, University of North Texas, 2003

MS, social work, University of Texas at Arlington, 2005

PhD, philosophy, public administration, and management, University of North Texas, 2012 Affiliations Charlotte Lozier Institute, affiliate

Reproductive Research Audit, contributor Connected To Michael New Harvey writes for Reproductive Research Audit (RRA), an online project of the social conservative Center for Morality in Public Life, a nonprofit founded in 2010, which also publishes Ethika Politika—another conservative blog. RRA’s stated mission is “to shine a light on the methodology of scientific studies on reproductive health issues, exposing their bias, flaws and propensity to ignore data that does not support a pre-determined political agenda,” according to its website. The site has an explicitly conservative Christian perspective, also apparent from the group’s LinkedIn profile. Controversy Despite RRA’s stated goal of exposing the flaws in others’ research, Harvey’s own scholarship in at least one instance was so flawed that one of her papers had to be scrubbed from the site. In July 2013, Reproductive Research Audit published an article written by Harvey that attempted to discredit a Guttmacher Institute study published in the August 2013 issue of the Journal of Women’s Health. This study, authored by Rachel Jones and Jenna Jerman, reported how far women had to travel to access abortion services in 2008. Harvey—who later admitted that she had not read the full study—invented numbers and produced a faulty analysis claiming Guttmacher’s study had actually shown that average distances to abortion clinics were not very far (contrary to what the study showed). “In fact, abortion may be more accessible than other elective outpatient surgeries, even medically-necessary procedures,” Harvey wrote in the article, which was scrubbed from RRA’s website but is still available online, thanks to the Way Back Machine. “It may actually be closer to the patient than even her own workplace.” But Harvey’s claims about the Guttmacher study, her analysis, and her conclusion were clearly wrong. The version of the Guttmacher article that Harvey read did not include the researchers’ methodology. So, she made one up. In her original piece, Harvey wrote: This study indicates that 71 percent of patients traveled fewer than 25 miles and 85 percent traveled fewer than 50 miles to obtain an abortion (likely round trip).” She continued: “Before explaining why this study indicates ease of access to abortion, there are reasons to suspect that Jones & Jerman’s 25 mile figure is likely a round trip sum, deceptively presented as the distance between the woman’s home and the nearest abortion provider. In fact, the Guttmacher researchers had not used a round trip as the basis of their calculations. According to Jones and Jerman’s paper, they used the “traveltime” command in Stata—a piece of data analysis and statistical software—to calculate the distance between two sets of points. “[T]he starting and ending points were generated from the latitude and longitude based on the centroid of the woman’s zip code and the centroid of the zip code of the provider where she obtained the abortion,” Jones and Jerman wrote. When Joerg Dreweke, Guttmacher’s senior policy communications associate, called out the errors on Twitter, RRA published a correction on its website, in which Harvey admitted that she had not read the full study—but an abstract—and had actually speculated on how the researchers likely conducted their research. Harvey explained that she never read the study in its entirety because she didn’t want to spend the money (also she doesn’t trust the Guttmacher Institute): I opted not to purchase the paid version of this article since the public 9-page document presented at a conference showed identical results to the paid abstract and media coverage. Likewise, these results were consistent with another study that presented what were likely round-trip figures (the methodology were omitted) and yielded strikingly similar results as well. This gave me a false impression that there were no substantive differences in the paid version since paid articles published by personnel affiliated with the Guttmacher Institute routinely contain such misrepresentations and omissions. After the Guttmacher Institute sent Harvey a free copy of the study, RRA published a correction to the story, in which Harvey amended her claim about the Guttmacher study, demonstrated by the revised headline (the strikethroughs are original): CORRECTION: Guttmacher Study Shows: Distance to Get an Abortion May Be Shorter Than Distance to Get to Work But still blatant errors persisted. Harvey’s conflation of the terms “median” and “average” continued to produce false results. Dreweke reached out yet again, tweeting, “Tks for correction. But you’re still comparing apples to oranges: median distance for wmn to mean dist for commuters.” Harvey’s response? “You are right. Mean / Median. Also, rush + international travel /= good work. Lesson learned. I will address this soon.” But she never did. RRA just took the article down. Michael New (Harvey’s romantic partner, if their tweets are to be believed) authored a subsequent article on the Guttmacher study in September in which he praised the researchers’ methodology as “thorough and rigorous” but argued with their interpretations. “To state the obvious, one should get the basic facts right when attempting to critique others’ work,” Dreweke told Rewire in an email. “It speaks for itself that Dr. Harvey scrubbed her botched critique of the Guttmacher study from her website.” Reproductive Rights Audit did not respond to our request for comment. Influence Notwithstanding this documented history of fabrication, equivocation, and apparent lack of understanding of basic statistical concepts, Harvey has provided written testimony to the Texas legislature in support of HB 2, whose effects have left 16 remaining clinics in the whole state.