The author of an article on unwanted pregnancies that has received an expression of concern for reasons that remain unclear says she has hired lawyers to defend herself against “defamation.”
Priscilla K. Coleman, a professor of human development and family studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio – whose controversial work on the link between abortion and mental health problems has come under scrutiny – told us that she plans “to actively pursue all options available including legal avenues to rectify the situation” after Frontiers in Social Health Psychology slapped the EoC on her 2022 article.
The paper in question was titled “The Turnaway Study: A case of self-correction in science upended by political motivation and unvetted findings.” The Turnaway Study is an ongoing look by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco at the effects on women – including the physical, emotional, and economic toll – of carrying unwanted pregnancies. The main finding, according to its site, “is that receiving an abortion does not harm the health and wellbeing of women, but in fact, being denied an abortion results in worse financial, health and family outcomes.”
The abstract for Coleman’s review reads, in part:
Despite serious departures from accepted scientific practices, journals in psychology and medicine have published dozens of articles generated from the study’s data. The high volume of one-sided publications has stifled dialogue on potential adverse psychological consequences of this common procedure. Following a critical analysis of the Turnaway Study, an overview of the strongest studies on abortion and mental health is offered. This comprehensive literature comprised of numerous large-scale studies from across the globe has been largely overlooked by scientists and the public, while the Turnaway Study dominates the media, information provided to women, and legal challenges involving abortion restrictions. In the final section of this article, literature reviews by professional organizations are considered, demonstrating that the biased science characterizing the Turnaway Study is aligned with a pervasive and systemic phenomenon wherein deriving reliable and valid results via careful attention to methodology and scrutiny by the scientific community have been supplanted by politics.
But critics pointed out a problem with the review process at the journal:
As Twitter commenters noted, the four reviewers on the article are anti-abortion activists and/or researchers, as was the editor, Stephen Sammut, a psychologist at the Franciscan University of Steubenville.
According to the statement from the journal, dated Oct. 5, 2022:
With this expression of concern, Frontiers acknowledges complaints received regarding this article. This statement will remain while an investigation is carried out in full accordance with our procedures. It will be updated, and any necessary further action will be taken, at the conclusion of the investigation.
We emailed the editor of the journal for comment on the situation but have not yet received one.
Coleman said she was blindsided by the journal’s decision:
The situation is perplexing because the paper is a narrative review article with evidence-based commentary. There was no empirical analysis of new data and my understanding of this type of notification is that it occurs when other researchers become aware of falsified data, mathematical or statistical errors, or perhaps misinterpretation or misrepresentation of data. Everything stated in my article can be externally verified and as an actively recruited expert witness for numerous state and federal cases in the U.S. involving abortion restrictions, I have testified under oath as to the veracity of the information and opinions expressed in the Frontiers article.
About those court appearances: In August, two months before the EOC appeared, a Michigan judge called Coleman – who had appeared as an expert witness on behalf of anti-abortion advocates – “not credible … nor helpful in assisting the court in defeating the plaintiff’s request for a preliminary injunction.”
Coleman added that she believes the journal’s move was likely motivated:
to malign and silence me in the courtroom. I am concerned about defamation, am motivated to preserve my 30-year reputation, and I plan to actively pursue all options available including legal avenues to rectify the situation. I have retained representation from a group of Cleveland attorneys, and I am actively working on retaining a lawyer in Geneva should it become necessary.
Coleman told us that her lawyers had sent Frontiers a letter demanding removal of the notice, but she declined to share that with us – while in the process seeming to threaten us, too:
I will not share the letter and I will pursue all avenues available to me should your article, which is premature at this time cause me any additional reputational harm.
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].
Perhaps it is time to start questioning the basic assumptions on which the current scientific paradigm is based. The postulate of reproducibility begs the question: reproducible by whom? And how? In any experimental procedure data must be gathered, processed and interpreted. Each step entails large amounts of discretion. It is far from clear that the final result is in any way objective. This issue pops up in virtually any research realm from solid state physics to psychology.
I thought it was interesting how the author of this piece focused only on a Michigan case, with an extremely liberal judge. My research has been deemed reliable and utilized in courts across the U.S. as a basis for informed consent, waiting period, and mandatory counseling laws. Particularly noteworthy, my research factored heavily into the decision in Planned Parenthood Minn., N.D., S.D. v. Rounds, 686 F.3d 889 (8th Cir. 2012). The suicide advisory was ruled non-misleading and relevant to women’s decisions regarding abortion, as not placing an undue burden on abortion rights, and as not a violation of physicians’ free speech rights. The 8th Circuit judges noted the quality of studies in the record, “With regard to whether the required disclosure is truthful, the State submitted into the record numerous studies published in peer-reviewed medical journals that demonstrate a statistically significant correlation between abortion and suicide. The studies were published in respected, peer-reviewed journals such as the Obstetrical and Gynecological Survey, the British Medical Journal, the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, the Southern Medical Journal, and the European Journal of Public Health, and there is no indication that the peer-review process was compromised for the studies at issue.”
Another more recent example, the First District Court of Appeals for the State of Florida (No. 1D18-623), cited favorably to my declaration as an expert witness, assisting the State in defending a 24-hour waiting period bill. Earlier this year, Circuit Judge Angela Dempsey ruled in favor of the 24-hour waiting period on summary judgment.
Coleman quotes a judge who ruled her way: “peer-reviewed medical journals that demonstrate a statistically significant correlation between abortion and suicide.”
Notice the word “correlation.”
Every person worthy of being called an intellectual, a scientist, a professor, or just an educated citizen should know that correlation is not causation. Politicians, advocates, the ignorant, and unfortunately some judges, often blur the distinction.
Pro-life advocates like Coleman suffer from the worst form of confirmation bias on this front. A great many pro-lifers (especially religious, non-medial “pregnancy crisis centers”) use her publications to insinuate that abortion results in or causes suicide. The Turn-away study refutes that implication, and shows that Coleman’s work is flawed. Naturally, she doesn’t like that.
In the 1970s there was a “statistically significant correlation” between the decline of the Stork population in Sweden and the decline in that country’s birth rate. That does not mean anything with respect to causation, which is of course absurd. By the way, that example was used 40 years ago to refute a poorly reasoned publication in 1979 of a presumably pro-life doctor Philip Ney attempting to claim that increases in Canadian abortion rates were the cause of increases in child abuse rates. See
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/070674378002500113
A paper regularly trotted out by pro-lifers is Gissler et al.’s paper studying the risk of suicide after abortion, birth, and miscarriage, conducted using data on Finnish women from 1987 to 1994. In the actual data, 73 women, 30 of them committed suicide within a year of birth, and 29 committed suicide within a year of an abortion (the remainder had miscarriages). But that paper’s statistics are about risk (correlation), which is a different beast. And the authors of the study were completely upfront about it. Their conclusion, and I quote, was:
“The increased risk of suicide after an induced abortion indicates either common risk factors for both or harmful effects of induced abortion on mental health.”
The authors were not able to control for mental health problems among these suicidal women PRIOR to becoming pregnant. And there are other risk factors, not the least of which is whether a woman with an unwanted pregnancy comes for a religious background where she is shamed for being pregnant, rather than supported.
Some of Coleman’s other work is also not reputable science. Search the web using: Priscilla Coleman meta-study debunked
Here is a good synopsis, circa 2017, of pro-life “scientific” shenanigans, including mention of Coleman’s studies, and Gissler’s later conclusion that abortions per se don’t cause suicides:
https://mashable.com/article/abortion-mental-health-science
With all due respect, Dr. Coleman, and if I may, whether Courts have used a particular scientific studies, that says ABSOLUTELY nothing on the scientific merit of a study. Sadly and unfortunately, in this country, Court decisions don’t really rely on science, and there is proof for that in every medical and scientific areas. Me, and many other medical scientists, only wish legislators and Courts rely on scientific papers to a greater extent, and that, sadly, is not the case. You are mentioning about the link between abortion and suicides, and I feel an ethical obligation to comment on this, because your assertion, that abortion increases the risk of suicides, is false, blatantly misleading and untrue, and it is a tremendous danger to public health and to the well-being of women nationwide. Most studies that were properly and rigorously conducted, concluded that abortions do NOT increase suicide risk. On the contrary: most studies showed that restricting and denying abortions cause harm to women and families in many ways, which include heightened distress and anxiety, increased poverty, increased marital or family conflict, higher rates of unemoployability, etc etc. That’s what properly controlled and conducted scientific studies have reported. Perpetuating the abortion-suicide link is, in my humble opinion, unethical, unscientific, and irresponsible behavior. Thank you for your kind consideration.
So a peer reviewer believes XYZ, therefore the article under scrutiny is invalid, and we don’t even need to get into the details of the study? That’s fair enough in today’s anti-intellectual woke climate, but then why not apply the same standard to the Turnaway study, or other pro-abortion studies? Will there be abortion industry links, Soros funding, or tissue procurement company funding? Would Guttmacher or Planned Parenthood links to the peer reviewers disqualify the article?
Dr Coleman has been around long enough to know the “rules” if you try to publish about the harms of induced abortion: cross your t’s and dot your i’s. Her articles are solidly articulated for this reason, the stats and logic are tight. This is why twitter garbage has to attack the peer reviewers, they can’t find anything in her research to logically attack, which at the very least suggests Dr. Coleman’s research is solid.
As a family doctor, I can’t ignore patients with prior abortions. Many of them grieve and suffer for years, silently. If you ask them about it, they often will say they have not been able to talk about with anyone, because everyone assumes the prior abortion was not a big deal so “get over it”. This problem will worsen as this cohort ages and has loose ends on palliative care. Many will need healing from remote abortions before they die. In a sense, Dr. Coleman’s research states the obvious.
Yes, if someone is going against the bulk of prior research (e.g., https://reproductiverights.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/American-Psychological-Association-Mental-Health.pdf), and against the guidelines of major professional bodies (ACOG, both APAs), then they need to have a lot of evidence, and their work will come under scrutiny, as it should in all areas. Hence, pal review is not appropriate, and ignoring pre-existing differences is a fatal flaw. Dr. W., I hope you extend your same compassion to those whose lives have been made harder by denied access to abortion.
So my point is that the pro-abortion committees at ACOG and APA who make the bulk of the research, with their pal reviews, get a pass on the scrutiny. When someone does scrutinize and finds the “bulk” of research is substandard, the Turnaway study sucks, and Warren Buffet funds this crap, then former frat-boys and Hollywood execs get a tad huffy when they remember the girls they dropped off at the abortion clinics. Some of them are old women now, some of them are not, like Keisha Atkins who was killed by Shannon Carr, one of the “compassionate” abortionists in the tradition of Kermit Gosnell and Ulrich Klopfer and other bright stars of the NAF.
The new coleman’s study in my opinion should never been published as I describe here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/363672218_Critique_of_Coleman's_new_study_The_Turnaway_Study_A_case_of_self-correction_in_science_upended_by_political_motivation_and_unverified_findings
The study contains many flaws and misrepresents many of those “large scale studies” she cites in favour of the link between abortion and mental health
Finally a valid critique with some substance. I disagree with most of your conclusions, but yours was respectfully done. These studies have been going on for years. It is difficult, if not impossible, to double blind or placebo control an obstetrics study. Are post-abortive suicide rates increased or not? If so, would the abortion industry care? If not true, would it change the ontology of an unborn child?
From the brief descriptions in this article, one should be able to fill in the blanks by looking at the typical patterns exhibited by those in the mental health and rehab industries.
Those who want to make this issue primarily about abortion rights are sadly mistaken and serve to further entrench the bankrupt liberal philosophy that has led astray people for over 100 years now.
Two things should be immediately obvious to anyone that understands these things. First of all, even pro-abortion advocates will tell you that abortion is a painful and traumatic experience and to deny this is patently unscientific. But the second more important point here would be the overall unscientific nature of the mental health and rehab industries in general and the tendency for giant psychopharmaceutical companies to predetermine diagnosis regardless of context or even facts sometimes.
This typical example of the corrupt liberal perspective that pervades the discipline of psychiatry shows precisely the game that they’re playing. The subconscious conclusion one would derive here, and I’m mainly talking here to progressives, those on the left, people who generally do not adhere to conservative philosophies, and who value the importance of abortion rights, the assumption here is that psychological research validates the necessity for abortion rights. However the reality of what they are saying (or I should qualify by saying, most likely saying since I haven’t actually read the articles) is that recognizing the necessity for abortion rights validates psychological research.
The final result is that psychiatry, specifically the medical model of psychiatry, a reactionary and conservative philosophy to be sure, inserts itself into the abortion debate on the side of abortion rights, precisely to stymie and hamstring the strongest voices and arguments as to why abortion and reproductive Rights are so important.
It’s primary claim that abortion has no adverse effects on psychological well-being automatically sets up abortion advocates for failure since that claim is on its face patently absurd and it ultimately disempowers women who would actually need abortion services in spite of that.
The failures and abuses of these strategies are well documented and can most notably be observed in the failed anti-smoking strategies of the late 90s and early 2000s, the opiate epidemic, and the current crisis affecting the abortion rights movement and the women’s movement broadly speaking.
Until the psychiatric and psychological mainstream, both in the world of business and University research, frees itself from the pseudoscientific perspective outlined by the medical model, they will be no help to women and men alike.