Anti-abortion scholars are suing Sage Publications after it retracted their scholarly articles based on lame reasons it doesn’t and wouldn’t apply to pro-abortion or progressive-tinged articles.
Dr. James Studnicki and his co-authors sued Sage Publications to compel arbitration, after the academic publishing firm retracted three articles, citing “pretextual and discriminatory reasons” described in their court petition.
Two of their articles studied how abortion drugs affect emergency room visits, while their third article studied abortion providers and admitting privileges, The College Fix reported. The California Superior Court for Ventura County has scheduled a status conference about whether to arbitrate for December 1.
“Sage’s wrongdoing has [resulted in] enormous and incalculable harm to the Authors’ professional reputations, as Sage intended,” says the scholars’ petition to compel arbitration.
The three papers were recently published in the academic journal Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology. Dr. Studnicki had been on the journal’s board, but lost his position following the retraction of the articles. The three retracted articles can be obtained for free at a webpage of the Charlotte Lozier Institute, assaultonscience.org.
Studnicki used to be a professor at the University of North Carolina and Johns Hopkins University.
One of the retracted studies is a a 2021 study that discovered that emergency room visits were linked to abortion drugs. It “remains the second most-read article in [the journal’s] history,” notes the petition to compel arbitration. But it attracted controversy after a judge in Texas cited it in a 2023 ruling blocking the FDA from relaxing its regulations governing abortion pills.
The authors note that Sage treated them worse than pro-abortion authors, such as not letting them be associated with groups that have a position on abortion, and requiring disclaimers that were not required for other researchers. They repeatedly attempted to get the retractions arbitrated pursuant to binding arbitration provisions in their publication agreement with the journal. But Sage refused to comply with the arbitration provisions.
Alliance Defending Freedom attorney Phil Sechler says Sage “did not offer a legitimate reason” for retraction. “The research was excellently done and adhered to Sage’s editorial policies,” Sechler says. The authors’ links to an anti-abortion group — the Charlotte Lozier Institute — did not undermine the articles’ reliability and accuracy, because there was a double-blind review process, Sechler said. The reviewer and author were unaware of each other’s identities and there were other reviews not affiliated with anti-abortion groups, Sechler added.
“Political affiliation is not a valid reason for retracting an article,” Sechler observed. “Sage should know that censorship is just bad science.” The scholars are thus “asking to arbitrate this case in front of an unbiased [arbitrator] with no further delays.”
