Flawed paper on negative impact of abortion used to help over turn Roe vs. Wade not withdrawn so reviewing panel resigns (contrast with paper on gender dysphoria)

[IwantToRetire]

An independent panel resigned in a row over controversial research about the impact of abortion on the mental health of women, BBC News has been told.

The research, which is still being used in US legal cases about limiting access to abortion, was published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, in 2011.

Last year the panel, which was set up to investigate complaints about the paper, recommended it be withdrawn.

But journal-owner, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, overruled it.

The Royal College said the work had already been fully investigated.

However, BBC Newsnight and the BMJ understand all three panel members, and two other members of the journal's editorial board, resigned in protest. They have called into question the journal's editorial independence.

Full article here https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66249015

And segment on newsnight at about 20 mins in at BBC iPlayer - Newsnight - Triple By-Election Showdown

oh good lord. no one said anything about them gathering new data, you're responding to stuff you imagined reading. I'll leave you in peace to continue doing so, you clearly don't need anyone else's participation to have an argument.

All research has flaws. I see no reason to believe this paper was especially flawed (if it was it is unlikely to have been published). There might be thousands of papers which could be withdrawn on exactly the same grounds, but which haven't been because nobody's yet been sufficiently annoyed by their conclusions.

We could vastly tighten the standards for publication in the first place, but then a lot of scientists would be out of a job, or find their job looks very different. And overall progress of knowledge would be slower.

The wider problem across multiple areas of public policy is politicians and civil servants' inability to recognise the weaknesses of research, even when these are acknowledged by the researchers themselves. There's too much focus on the headline story of the articles and not enough on all the uncertainties and caveats.

Takes two to argue, and you’ve been doing your fair share.

When I did my PGCE (specialising in Biology at Secondary), we studied how to teach sex education and reproduction. We were told that the percentage of girls getting pregnant was roughly the same across all schools - it was just the outcome that was different ie. be very conscious that you maybe teaching scared pregnant girls and girls that have had abortions. Crudely put, in more upper/middle class areas where girls were expected to go on to higher education - the greater the % of abortions. This seems logical. It would also seem logical that there would be a greater % of girls who felt shamed/pressured to have an abortion (and keep it silent) from the middle class group. Same with women.

I have not read the study but surely if you are starting out knowing that then you have so many multi factorial components and that the abortion decision is already pre-decided to some degree by the social class, then it would be very difficult to come to any conclusions. Fair play if the research factored in the social economic class.

To be clear, did the authors actually claim that abortion was having a negative impact? Or did they just claim a link?

Anyway, I think Roe vs Wade clearly deserved to be overturned because it was judicial overreach and you don't want judges making major ethical decisions for society. (If they were clearly told to protect abortion rights then different situation.)

What if it went the other way, and the Supreme Court "discovered" that the constitutional rights of the foetus meant that they couldn't be lawfully aborted?

It's not a good thing for courts to be using legal reasoning to reach such important decisions without it being clearly and explicitly mentioned in the law.

To be clear, did the authors actually claim that abortion was having a negative impact? Or did they just claim a link?

From what I understand the authors of the systematic review took an observed correlation and claimed it was causation- a causal link.

OK thanks. That certainly seems questionable unless they have some clever reasoning to rule out other factors.

Yes it is highly suspect and you can’t reason or rationalise it. They’d have to have collected new data to adjust for confounding factors and then re-run the comparisons in all the studies they included.

Which isn’t what you do on a systematic review. In fact, you can’t do it.

OK thanks. That certainly seems questionable unless they have some clever reasoning to rule out other factors.

But it is literally impossible to do that in this case.

Sometimes it's possible to disentangle iatrogenic effects of treatment for an illness from the effects of the illness itself - if you compare two groups who had different treatments, as the most obvious example. Or if you compare a group who had the treatment with a group who had no treatment. Or if the illness is a long term condition you can measure short term effects of treatment. It's often a bit statistically dodgy but there are accepted ways of doing these things.

There is no other treatment for unwanted pregnancy other than abortion. It's also not ethically possible to force some women to give birth so that you can compare their mental health outcomes with women who had abortions, (and it quite clearly wouldn't give these researchers the propaganda they wanted if they did.) It's literally impossible to disentangle the effects of abortion from the effects (and to a lesser extent causes) of unwanted pregnancy and no study claiming a causal link should ever have reached the bar for publication.

Without going into what is said to be acceptable standards of research etc., I have tried to make a timeline of this issue.

First of all it seems that on other occassions Priscilla Coleman has had her research challenged.

Her research has mostly met with a poor reception from her professional colleagues, and at least one of her manuscripts (originally published in Frontiers in Psychology) was retracted from the scientific literature due to not meeting the standards of the journal.

And a quick google reveals that over the years she has mainly spoken at pro life events.

The specific research paper in the news story was challenged at the time.

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists noted that Coleman's results conflict with those of four previous literature reviews, all of which found that women who have abortions did not face an increased risk of mental health problems. The College suggested that Coleman's results were due to her failure to control for pre-existing mental-health problems, which tend to be more prevalent in women having abortions. This meta-analysis was also criticized by Julia Steinberg and a number of other researchers, who wrote in 2012 that it contained seven significant errors, as well as three shortcomings of the included studies. Steinberg et al. concluded that these errors and shortcomings "render the meta-analysis’ conclusions invalid."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priscilla_K._Coleman

And also https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2012/03/98547/link-between-abortion-and-mental-health-problems-debunked

And in a US court last year:

In an August 2022 Michigan court case challenging a 1931 abortion ban, Coleman was hired by abortion opponents to provide testimony. The judge in the case, Jacob James Cunningham, stated: "Dr Coleman's testimony is dismissed as not credible, in a practical sense, completely called into question during cross-examination, nor helpful in assisting the court in defeating the plaintiff's request for a preliminary injunction. The court affords testimony no weight," and also stated: "Specifically, testimony established that 22 studies were aggregated in the metadata study. Of those 22, 11 were authored by the witness and only 14 data sets were used. Presumably, the testimony revealed 11 of them created by the witness herself."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priscilla_K._Coleman

And in another instances has threatened other journals thinking of retracting her articles with legal action. https://retractionwatch.com/2022/11/09/author-critical-of-study-involving-abortion-hires-lawyers-after-journal-flags-paper/

In 2022, with the research influencing women's healthcare in the US, some of the same scientists wrote again to request the work be retracted.

The British Journal of Psychiatry then formed an independent panel, which spent four months assessing the complaints. The panel questioned the methodology used in the research - one concern was the data had been combined in a way that saw women counted multiple times.

Ultimately the panel recommended the paper should be retracted. However, that never happened.

However, BBC Newsnight and the BMJ understand all three panel members, and two other members of the journal's editorial board, resigned in protest. They have called into question the journal's editorial independence.

Some panel members have expressed concern that legal threats may have influenced the College's actions.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66249015

All of which to a lay person is very confusing.

If this study has been so universally questioned since being published in 2011 (12 years ago) why is it still being used and quoted?

Or as someone said upthread, why hasn't another researcher or university, carried out a more recent study?

Have got used to recognising that news is filtered through the preconceived ideas of the presenters / channel, but seems almost more unsettling that research into areas of health and treatment are also slanted. Or known to be slanted and still used.

This isn't specifically about the OP. I just wanted to share a picture of a billboard I spotted in my hometown on my last visit to the States (before Roe was overturned).

It's also not ethically possible to force some women to give birth so that you can compare their mental health outcomes with women who had abortions

Ethical or not, in USA you can do this comparison. Randomised controlled trials are considered the ‘gold standard’ (systematic reviews of RCTs being best) but it is quite common to make comparisons between groups rather than individuals. For example, teaching styles in schools, public health messaging in different areas, drug treatment programs in some cities but not others. In USA some states prevent abortion. This is not as good as RCTs as there are a lot of confounding variables.

but it is quite common to make comparisons between groups rather than individuals

I think you’re responding to me? The differences between women who get abortions and women who don’t get abortions that they want can’t be controlled for. Rich women in states that ban abortions will get them anyway. Poor women in states that don’t might fall through the cracks. There’s no way to compare like with like because reproductive autonomy is correlated with every other kind of autonomy and privilege. Women who can’t control their own reproduction are in a shit place in every sense. No honest researchers would even try it.

And more to the point these researchers also wouldn’t try it, because anyone even slightly plugged into reality knows perfectly well that women who had abortions they wanted would show up as happier and healthier than women who had to bear a child they didn’t want.

(I suppose you could in theory do something like comparing women who just made the cut-off for abortion with women who just missed it. Though I don’t think many women in that situation would agree to participate in a study, for very good reasons, and you’d mostly be measuring who was savvy enough to know what dates to tell the doctors.)

And more to the point these researchers also wouldn’t try it, because anyone even slightly plugged into reality knows perfectly well that women who had abortions they wanted would show up as happier and healthier than women who had to bear a child they didn’t want.

There are enough threads on MN to show it isn’t as straightforward as that. Yes for many it will be a clear cut decision but for many it isn’t. For many circumstances drive them to abortion or vice versa. Many who end up with a child they were unsure about in early pregnancy are also happy. The happiness or otherwise around their decision in either direction is often driven by external factors; money, family, health care, any future children, and very often the potential/actual father. I think it is definitely a valid area of research.

You were talking about comparing by group! Even if it was just because of the mother of all impossible to control for confounding variables, ability to access abortion, the abortion group would be happier. But there’s also the fact that even wanted childbirth isn’t good for anyone’s health and almost never good for short term happiness.

The happiness or otherwise around their decision in either direction is often driven by external factors; money, family, health care, any future children, and very often the potential/actual father.

ability to access abortion, especially where it’s banned, is also dictated by all of these, and by other very relevant factors such social networks, education, and general capability and resourcefulness.

You’re conflating “decision” with forced birth, but there’s no way to make the forced-birth group comparable to the access-to-abortion group. And even if you were talking about decisions, there’s no way to make the “wasn’t sure but decided to keep it” group comparable to the “wasn’t sure and decided to get an abortion” group.

Forced birth is a misnomer for anything other than an very early abortion. Abortion, especially late term abortion, involves ‘birth’. It is a purposefully provocative term that has no place in abortion research any more than ‘pro life’.

okay! Since you don’t like the words “forced birth” (you clearly do like forced birth, just not the words) you can use whatever term you like to describe women who are forced to give birth against their will. It’s entirely irrelevant what terminology you use.

Abortion is the appropriate term. sometimes abortion requires being forced to give birth against your will.

abortion is the appropriate term... for the group of women who didn't have abortions, that I referred to as the forced-birth group? Okay! I'm not going to argue with that.