A Completely Bogus Study Is at the Heart of the Ruling to Ban the Abortion Pill

The bombshell ruling that could take abortion pills off the national market was based in part on a “study” of anonymous posts on an anti-abortion website.

Texas federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ruled Friday that mifepristone, one of the medications used to induce an abortion, had been improperly approved and should be yanked from the U.S. market. Another judge has already filed a dueling injunction to keep the drug available.*

The lawsuit was filed in November by a coalition of anti-abortion groups and individuals, who specifically chose Kacsmaryk for his history of anti-abortion decisions, arguing that the Food and Drug Administration had improperly approved mifepristone for widespread use more than 20 years ago. More than 100 scientific studies show that mifepristone is safe.

In his ruling, Kacsmaryk cites a study that posits “fourteen percent of women and girls reported having received insufficient information” about the side effects of having an abortion. The study also says that “eighty-three percent of women report that chemical abortion ‘changed’ them—and seventy-seven percent of those women reported a negative change.”

That study analyzed anonymous posts on an anti-abortion website called “Abortion Changes You,” which runs a blog with stories from people who regret having abortions. The sample size is 98 blog posts, but the study authors only analyzed 54 posts and then just cherry-picked quotes from the rest.

“Perhaps this sample might not be reflective of the entire universe of women who have abortions?” suggested legal expert Adam Unikowsky, who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in his Substack “Adam’s Legal Newsletter.”

“This is roughly like reporting a statistic that ‘83% of people are fans of Judge Kacsmaryk’ without mentioning that the entire sample consisted of posters on JudgeKacsmarykFanClub.com.”

What’s even more dangerous is the fact that both the website and the Institute of Reproductive Grief Care, the organization that runs the site, couch themselves in reasonable-sounding language. Founder Michaelene Fredenburg talks repeatedly about the need for a better support system for the men and women grieving pregnancy loss.

This is true. An abortion is a deeply personal choice, and it does not come without an emotional toll. There still seems to be a social taboo about discussing abortions and miscarriages, and people who experience them are often left without a network to support them.

But it should still be a choice. And one man has used a biased study to try to take that away.

* This story was updated to clarify the dueling injunction.

A shooting at a bank in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, has left at least five people dead and eight wounded.

Calls of shots fired at Old National Bank were reported at around 8:30 a.m. Monday morning. At 10:16 a.m., the Louisville Metro Police Department said there was no longer a threat and that the shooter was “neutralized.”

Police have said that five people have died and another six are injured and have been taken to the hospital; among the injured are reportedly two LMPD officers. The death toll of five people includes the shooter.

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear has said he is on his way to Louisville.

The shooting comes weeks after a school shooting in nearby Nashville, Tennessee, left three children and three adults dead, prompting massive protests at the state Capitol and nationwide. Two Tennessee Democrats, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, were expelled from the state House after interrupting House proceedings in solidarity with the protesters.

This post has been updated.

Free-speech warrior Elon Musk is suppressing Substack’s own Twitter account, as well as any links to the newsletter company’s website, including newsletters and posts from prominent independent writers such as Judd Legum, Erin Reed, and even Matt Taibbi, one of a select few journalists to whom Musk gave the so-called Twitter Files.

The move appears to be in retaliation for a new feature Substack announced on Wednesday called Notes, which would let users share posts, comments, images, and links in a timeline-style feed—similar to how Twitter functions. The following day, Twitter began blocking Substack writers from being able to embed tweets in their newsletters. Then, on Friday, Twitter began fully blocking users from being able to distribute links to their Substack pages at all.

Twitter users are still able to post links to Substack newsletters, but other users are unable to like, retweet, or reply to those posts, severely limiting the reach of such posts. Moreover, as of this story’s writing, users are unable to like, retweet, or reply to any posts from Substack’s main Twitter account—whether they include a Substack link or not. The account itself appears to still have the ability to tweet, however.

Substack’s founders have said they are “disappointed that Twitter has chosen to restrict writers’ ability to share their work,” adding that writers “deserve the freedom to share links to Substack or anywhere else.”

Musk’s move comes after Twitter welcomed its “2.0” era by releasing much of its source code related to recommendation algorithms, including ones that drive the pitiful “For You” timeline. The code revealed that Twitter had broken down authors into four categories: Elon Musk, “Power User,” Democrat, and Republican; Musk’s posts in particular were being pushed onto Twitter users.

Concurrent to the source code release, Twitter was set to begin phasing out existing verified accounts and welcoming users to obtain blue checks only by paying for them. The plan was set to roll out on April 1 but has yet to come to fruition.

Musk’s attack on Substack is part of pattern, since he bought Twitter in October, to suppress content on an essentially ad hoc basis—from enabling the Indian government to silence dissent to reinstating white nationalists and haphazardly banning journalists.

At the same time, Musk handed over internal company documents to Taibbi and others for a controversial and misleading series of tweet-threads and newsletters about how Twitter was run prior to Musk’s reign. On Friday, Taibbi asked Musk about the apparent attack on Substack and said he did not hear back.

Hours later, Taibbi said he heard from Twitter—likely Musk himself—that Twitter is indeed responding to Substack’s new feature, which it views as a “hostile rival.” Taibbi asked his mysterious source at Twitter how he was supposed to market his work and was given the option to just post his articles on Twitter instead of Substack. In response, Taibbi announced he’s “obviously staying at Substack” and “will be moving to Substack Notes next week.”

A federal appeals court ruled Friday that a public high school teacher in Indiana did not have the right to ignore transgender students’ names and pronouns just because of his religious beliefs.

John Kluge worked as a music teacher at the Brownsburg Community School Corporation for four years. In 2017, he refused to abide by the school’s new policy to use trans students’ chosen names and pronouns, claiming it violated his Christian beliefs. He was initially granted an accommodation to refer to all students by their last names, which distressed both trans and cisgender students because they figured out his reasons. The school withdrew the accommodation, and he resigned at the end of the school year in 2018.

Kluge sued the school that same year for religious discrimination and retaliation. Brownsburg argued in response that he had caused it “undue hardship” by his refusal to use students’ chosen names and pronouns, which made some students feel “targeted and uncomfortable” and ultimately hindered their ability to learn. The school also said Kluge’s stance opened it up to gender discrimination lawsuits.

A district court ruled in Brownsburg’s favor in July 2021, and the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the decision Friday. “Brownsburg was within its rights … to withdraw the requested accommodation when it became apparent that it was not working in practice and was causing harm to students,” the court said in the ruling.

What’s more, the ruling said, Kluge’s retaliation claim “fails as a matter of law because he failed to produce any evidence supporting” his case.

The ruling is an important win for trans rights, which are under attack across the country. Twenty states, such as Florida, Texas, and Montana, have banned trans girls from playing on girls’ sports teams. Most recently, on Wednesday, Kansas’s Republican-controlled legislature overrode Democratic Governor Laura Kelly’s veto of a bill banning trans girls from playing girls’ sports.

But it’s not all bad news: On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled that a 12-year-old trans girl in West Virginia must be allowed to compete on her school’s girls’ cross-country and track teams.

West Virginia implemented a law banning trans girls from girls’ teams in 2021, but that law is being challenged in court. The Supreme Court said that the law cannot be enforced until the case is decided.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas thinks he doesn’t have to disclose his vacations funded by a billionaire Republican megadonor because the two of them are “close personal friends.”

The justice has spent decades secretly enjoying opulent getaways courtesy of Harlan Crow—and he disclosed none of them, in violation of a decades-old federal law, ProPublica revealed in a bombshell report Thursday.

But Thomas insisted in a weak statement Friday that he doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong. “Early in my tenure at the Court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable,” he said.

People were not having it.

“What a joke this person is supposed to sit in judgment of anyone else’s adherence to laws,” reporter Laura Rozen tweeted. “Could pick someone out of the phone book at random with more credibility.”

Lawyer Joyce Vance pointed out that “personal hospitality is a nice dinner or maybe a weekend visit at a close friend’s lake house. It’s not persistent travel where you rub shoulders with conservative folks with litigation interests before SCOTUS on an at-least-annual basis.”

Some people were shocked that Thomas’s main defense was essentially, “Oops!”

Thomas and his wife, Ginni, have come under increased scrutiny for their fuzzy ethics. Ginni Thomas was closely involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election. In January 2022, her husband was the only justice to vote against the release of communications that ultimately revealed her involvement.

Part of the problem is that the Supreme Court is largely self-policing, and some of them are doing a very bad job of it.

Read more about Thomas’s wrongdoing here.