Sofia Resnick Posts

Political science professor Michael J. New, adjunct scholar for the Charlotte Lozier Institute, talks about effective abortion restrictions at the Values Voter Summit, Sept. 15, 2012.
New reiterated his comments in an interview with The American Independent following the panel discussion, specifically noting that abortion laws that require two separate trips to the clinic drive up the costs for women trying to get an abortion, “especially for women in rural areas.”

Anti-abortion protest (Flickr/Anna Levinzon)

On a Friday morning in September 2005, 22-year-old Brittany Wilson sat in a Planned Parenthood clinic a mile away from her home in Sioux Falls, S.D., and bawled her eyes out.

Ten days before, she had called the clinic to schedule an abortion. Three days before her appointment, she had called back to listen to some state-mandated information about the risks of abortion and her legal rights. And moments before, she had driven to the clinic alone and paid $447. But she was crying, she would later say, because she did not want this abortion.

The Planned Parenthood staffer whose job it was to make sure this abortion was voluntary and informed noticed Brittany’s distress and asked her if she had considered adoption. Brittany said she did not “want to do that.”

Through the staffer, the doctor told Brittany she didn’t have to have the abortion that day. Brittany said, “I’m alright,” and went out to lunch.

Later that day, a doctor vacuumed out her 7-week-old fetus.

In the months and years that followed, Brittany would say in federal court that her boyfriend had forced her to have an abortion she didn’t want. She blamed Planned Parenthood for letting it happen. Brittany did not sue the abortion provider, but testified in defense of a 2005 state law requiring abortion providers to inform clients of certain state-determined risks of abortion — some of which are disputed by mainstream scientific organizations — including the claim that abortion puts women at higher risk for depression and suicide. (The legal challenge over the 2005 law was finally resolved this year, with all of the controversial provisions being upheld on appeal.)

In her testimony – given during a deposition under oath and later in a handwritten declaration – Brittany asserted that Planned Parenthood had not given her enough information to help her make an informed decision. She also said that after her abortion, she had an emotional breakdown and started drinking heavily; she indicated that she had already been taking medicine to treat depression before the abortion.

Brittany’s story is again being used in federal court — this time to defend a South Dakota law that addresses the issue of coerced abortion. Anti-abortion advocates have claimed that coerced abortion has reached crisis levels in the United States, despite a lack of scientific evidence showing that to be the case. The law – pieces of which went into effect in July – is part of a national legislative trend pushed by anti-abortion leaders, which in large part relies on the testimony of women who regret their abortions.

This year alone, at least 11 states have considered abortion bills that deal with coercion, according to Americans United for Life, an anti-abortion policy group in Washington, D.C. AUL specializes in anti-abortion model legislation and has developed an anti-coercion bill, titled “Coercive Abuse Against Mothers Prevention Act.”

Often, anti-coercion policies are introduced as part of a package of restrictions and regulations and either dictate that an abortion provider must screen women for coercion, as in the case of a recently passed law in Wisconsin, or that an abortion provider must post signs in abortion clinic waiting rooms saying that it is illegal for anyone to pressure a woman into having an abortion, as in the case of a new law in Arizona. An omnibus anti-abortion bill in Michigan, which would enact similar coercion-related policies, passed the state House earlier this year and is now being considered by the state Senate.

South Dakota’s new law, which was passed last year and modified this year, goes far beyond simply mandating that the abortion doctor screen for coercion. If the law survives the legal challenge, women will have to wait 72 hours after they schedule the abortion, meaning they will have to make two trips to the state’s only abortion clinic in Sioux Falls, which provides abortions once a week on average. During that waiting period, women will have to submit to an interview at one of three state-sanctioned “pregnancy help centers,” all of which are faith-based and are vocally opposed to abortion. The point of this interview, as stated in the bill, is so the pregnancy help center can “discuss [the pregnant woman’s] circumstances that may subject her to coercion.” Additionally, the pregnancy help centers can use the interview as an opportunity to  “inform the pregnant mother … what counseling, education, and assistance that is available to the pregnant mother to help her maintain her relationship with her unborn child.”

Some of these new anti-coercion laws, including South Dakota’s, contain provisions making it easier to sue abortion doctors for failing to adequately screen for coercion.

Supporters of anti-coercion abortion bills argue that these policies are meant to protect women. But critics claim that – like laws that single out abortion clinics by imposing difficult-to-meet construction requirements – anti-coercion policies are really meant to make accessing abortion more complicated in the short term, and illegal in the long term.

The South Dakota lawmaker behind the state’s new anti-coercion abortion law and the 2005 informed-consent abortion law told The American Independent that the underlying intention of these bills was to create a legal framework for more abortion restrictions.

“This law, and even the 2005 law, basically legally speaking, this doesn’t deal with the same legal theories that Roe v. Wade dealt with,” Rep. Roger Hunt (R-Brandon) said. “This presents brand-new legal arguments … relative to abortions. The basic idea is that these laws would allow the Supreme Court to give states the right to adopt similar legislation.”

Legal scholars, such as Yale University law professor Reva Siegel, have described the rationale underpinning these types of laws as the “woman-protective” anti-abortion argument. Siegel, who has written extensively about anti-coercion efforts in South Dakota and elsewhere, observed in a 2008 Duke Law Journal article that the anti-abortion movement has begun to “supplant the constitutional argument ‘Abortion kills a baby’ with a new claim ‘Abortion hurts women.’”

Anti-coercion or anti-abortion?

Many public-health professionals who support abortion rights oppose these types of abortion laws because they say anti-coercion policies that single out abortion sidestep the broader issue of domestic and sexual violence, which many believe is the root of coercion.

Dr. Elizabeth Miller, a medical doctor and associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh, has been researching domestic and sexual violence issues for more than 20 years. She told TAI that while her research has uncovered some evidence of coerced abortion, there is not enough data to show it being a pervasive problem.

What the data shows, she said, is that sexual coercion – women being forced into sexual activity – is a pervasive problem. She said that sexual coercion often leads to unwanted pregnancies, followed by abusive partners trying to control the outcome of the pregnancy, be it by trying to force the woman to continue with the pregnancy or to abort. Reproductive coercion can take the form of men sabotaging their partners’ birth control methods or otherwise forcibly impregnating them.

Very little research has been done exclusively on coerced abortions, and Miller told TAI there is not enough data to compare the rates of forced pregnancies and forced abortions.

A 2010 study co-authored by Miller surveyed approximately 1,300 men recruited from three community health centers in lower-income Boston-area neighborhoods. About 32 percent of participants reported having perpetrated physical or sexual violence against a female partner; 33 percent reported having been involved in a pregnancy that ended in abortion; 8 percent reported having at one point sought to prevent a female partner from seeking abortion; and 4 percent reported having at one point “sought to compel” a female partner to seek an abortion.

“Coerced abortion is a very small piece of the puzzle of a much larger problem, which is violence against women and the impact it has on her health,” Miller said. “To focus on the minutia of coerced abortion really takes away from the really broad problem of domestic violence.”

Jay Silverman, a professor of medicine and global health at the University of California at San Diego, told TAI that recent laws addressing coerced abortion are nothing more than anti-abortion laws that have been “barely dressed up” as public-health policies intended to protect women.

“It’s not that [coerced abortions] could not exist,” said Silverman, who frequently collaborates with Miller and coauthored the 2010 study. “It’s that the issue is to assist women by working to help identify instances of domestic violence. … In the climate where there is so much political hostility related to women’s reproductive rights, [singling out abortion] really inhibits a comprehensive agenda from being established.”

‘Abortion is not an option’

In the years since her abortion, Brittany Weston (she has since married) has given birth to a child and now lives in Yankton, S.D. Weston says it was her former boyfriend, Joe (an alias), who, in her words, “pressured” her into having the abortion seven years ago. In a declaration dated July 1, 2011, Weston wrote, “If the Planned Parenthood counselors had any interest in determining that I was being forced to have an abortion, I would not have had an abortion and would have my child today.” And when she testified in favor of South Dakota’s new coercion law at a state House Judiciary Committee hearing (minute 22:13) in February 2011, she said: “I wanted Planned Parenthood to rescue me from the man who was forcing me to have an abortion. All they did was his bidding.”

Weston has said that from February to May 2006, she attended a post-abortion therapy program at the Alpha Center, a crisis pregnancy center in Sioux Falls. In April 2006, about a year after Planned Parenthood’s South Dakota affiliate filed a lawsuit against the state’s just-passed informed-consent abortion law, Weston was called as a witness by the counsel representing two CPCs (known in South Dakota as “pregnancy help centers”). The Alpha Center and Care Net Pregnancy Resource Center in Rapid City had entered the case as “intervenors” – meaning that alongside the defendants, these centers could take discovery and question witnesses. Those very same centers are once again intervenors in the current lawsuit.

Based on the two sworn affidavits Weston submitted in both lawsuits and a deposition she gave in the first lawsuit, this is what Weston says happened:

In July 2005, Weston had nearly completed her college degree and had started dating Joe, who was 41 years old, had two kids, and worked as a therapist counseling adolescent children. Two months later, when she was about to start a new full-time job, Weston discovered she was pregnant. The way she tells it, “I quickly told the nurse [at a local health clinic] in a forceful manner that ‘abortion is not an option.’”

When she later asked Joe for his emotional and financial support, she says he told her, “We can’t have a kid.” He said he didn’t want to pay child support for a third child, and for reasons that are not explained in Weston’s testimony, she says Joe told her that if she had the baby and it became known that he was the father, he would lose his job.

“At no time did I ever want an abortion,” she wrote in her initial affidavit, dated May 16, 2006. “Joe wanted me to have one. When I agreed to get an appointment for an abortion at Planned Parenthood, I scheduled the abortion for Joe, not for me.”

In that affidavit, she also said that when she reviewed her medical records related to the abortion, she was “surprised – even dismayed” to learn that the abortion doctor had certified that Weston had “given informed consent freely and without coercion to this abortion.”

“In fact, whatever consent, if any, was given at all, it was under pressure, against what I wanted, and it was not informed in any meaningful way,” Weston wrote.

Weston’s explanation of how Joe pressured her into having an abortion is essentially that he persuaded her, and told her to keep the pregnancy a secret. “I was very emotionally dependant on Joe and I thought I needed his approval,” she wrote.

Speaker of the House John Boehner, courtesy of the Speaker's office.

A Republican-controlled congressional body this week used a controversial new parenting study to argue that the Defense of Marriage Act is constitutional.

The Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group of the U.S. House of Representatives, commonly known as BLAG, filed a brief Tuesday with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Karen Golinski, who is suing to force the federal government to recognize her marriage. BLAG has been involved in this and other marriage cases since last year, when President Obama decided the Department of Justice would no longer defend the constitutionality of a key section of DOMA.

BLAG’s brief marks the second time the study — which was conducted by University of Texas professor Mark Regnerus with the financial backing of socially conservative groups — has been used to defend DOMA in the case. The day after Regnerus’ study was released to the public last month, a conservative medical group highlighted it in a  “friend of the court” brief. The American College of Pediatricians filed that brief at the request of the Alliance Defending Freedom, an influential religious right legal organization.

In its June 11 amicus brief, the American College of Pediatricians had referred to Regnerus’ study as “the most current research on child outcomes for children raised by same-sex couples” and wrongly asserted that Regnerus had found a number of “statistically significant differences where children raised by two women fared worse than children raised by married biological parents.”

In fact, Regnerus’ study has been widely criticized for comparing children raised by intact biological families to children raised by parents who had a same-sex relationship at some point, regardless of whether the child was actually raised by a stable, same-sex couple.

Golinski, who is represented by the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, responded in a brief earlier this month defending previous research concluding that children raised by same-sex parents fared no worse than those raised by opposite-sex parents. Golinksi’s brief criticized the American College of Pediatricians’ use of Regnerus’ study:

[The American College of Pediatricians] cites a recent paper by Mark Regnerus purporting to present empirical evidence of differences in outcomes for children raised by lesbian and gay parents. … This study, however, compared children of “intact biological famil[ies]” not to children raised by “intact” same-sex couples but instead primarily to children raised by single parents and in unstable family settings, with loosely-applied criteria for categorizing a parent as lesbian or gay. The paper itself concedes that it cannot answer any “questions of causation.” This paper does nothing to undercut the consistent social science findings over decades of research.

On Tuesday, BLAG answered with a brief that cites Regnerus’ study in defending what it describes as one of the rational bases behind DOMA: “the centuries-old wisdom that children generally benefit from being raised by their own biological mothers and fathers, and that law and government should encourage and support that outcome.”

BLAG’s brief describes the Regnerus study as one of “two significant studies” published in recent weeks “undermining Ms. Golinski’s social science theory.” BLAG adds:

Unlike virtually all of the previous studies in this area, the Regnerus study included a representative sample that was large enough to draw statistically powerful conclusions regarding comparative outcomes of people whose parents had homosexual relationships and those who were raised by their married biological mothers and fathers—and it discovered that the former group reported significantly worse outcomes on a large number of key indicators.

BLAG also pushes back on criticism of Regnerus’ study, citing a joint statement from 18 social scientists who have defended it. BLAG’s brief further states:

In any event, the study’s alleged shortcoming—that adults raised from infancy by same-sex couples are so rare that it is impossible to obtain a large sampling of them … “despite significant efforts” to do so… —only highlights the fact that all of the research in this field is in its infancy. That fact underscores the rationality of Congress’ decision to proceed with caution.

The other recent study BLAG cites in support of the premise that children are better off when raised by two heterosexual parents was published in the Journal of Marriage and Family in May. That study, authored by Daniel Potter of the American Institutes for Research, found that children raised in same-sex-parent families scored lower on academic tests than children raised in two-parent households by a straight couple. Potter found that children raised by same-sex couples scored similarly to children in other types of “nontraditional families” — meaning families that involve stepparents, single parents, cohabiting parents, or another nontraditional structure.

The University of Texas says it should not have to release documents related to a controversial parenting study conducted by one of its professors, citing as one of its reasons an “ongoing compliance investigation” into allegations of scientific misconduct.

A university spokesperson described the review as an automatic inquiry that was triggered by an outside complaint. According to the spokesperson, such an inquiry, which must be completed in 60 days, is standard procedure when a complaint is filed. The results will be used to decide whether a more serious investigation is warranted.

About two weeks after UT associate professor of sociology Mark Regnerus published his findings from the “New Family Structures Study” – which he claims show that children raised by gay parents fare worse than those raised by straight parents – a pro-gay-rights blogger filed a complaint with UT, accusing Regnerus of several counts of misconduct. The complaint followed sweeping criticisms from journalists and scholars that the study was methodologically flawed.

On June 14, The American Independent filed an open records request with the university asking for all documents pertaining to the genesis the New Family Structures Study, as well as all communication between Regnerus and personnel from the Witherspoon Institute and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the two conservative organizations that funded the study. TAI also requested any communications that might exist between Regnerus and certain outside groups and activists that oppose same-sex marriage.

On June 21, New Civil Rights Movement blogger Scott Rose filed a “scientific misconduct complaint” with the university, accusing Regnerus of an assortment of ethics violations in conjunction with the study.

On June 28, the university informed TAI it would file a brief with the Texas Office of the Attorney General seeking to withhold documents we requested. Then on July 6, the university forwarded TAI its brief to the attorney general (embedded below), in which university attorney Neera Chatterjee argues the school should be able to withhold all of UT’s records on the New Family Structures Study “during the pendency of the investigation and review.” According to the brief, releasing the documents “would interfere with, and potentially compromise, the University’s ability to continue its investigation in a meaningful way because it will be more difficult for the University to receive accurate and complete information from the individuals relevant to the investigation.”

The brief cites a provision in Texas law that exempts from disclosure information if it is collected or produced “in a compliance program investigation and releasing the information would interfere with an ongoing compliance investigation.”

According to the brief, as part of this compliance investigation, the university’s research integrity officer, Robert Peterson, “has begun the inquiry by sequestering relevant documents and meeting with Dr. Regnerus to inform him that a formal inquiry has been started.” Chatterjee added that Peterson has started putting together an inquiry panel that already includes two faculty members and that two additional faculty members will be selected.

Still, the university’s public relations team has specifically objected to the use of the word “investigation.”

Rose forwarded TAI an email that David Ochsner, director of public affairs for the College of Liberal Arts, sent to New Civil Rights Movement editor David Badash, objecting to a July 1 post that had originally described the university’s inquiry as an “investigation.” Ochsner’s email reads, in part: “The University of Texas at Austin has not ‘opened an investigation.’ What Mr. Rose is referring to is a response from our Office of Sponsored Projects to his recently filed complaint. That in no way constitutes the opening of an official investigation by the university.”

And in an article published by UT’s student newspaper, The Daily Texan, Ochsner is quoted as saying, “Anytime somebody makes an allegation like that, it automatically triggers what we call an inquiry, which is just a preliminary fact-finding exercise. … In an inquiry, we’re just acknowledging that there has been an allegation made.” The paper reported that Ochsner “said the study is still in the inquiry phase and a formal investigation will not begin unless compelling evidence of scientific misconduct is discovered.”

When TAI recently reached out to UT, media relations director Gary Susswein reacted with surprise when told the Regnerus inquiry had been described by the school’s counsel as an “investigation.”

“This is in the inquiry stage only,” he said. “If there is an allegation of misconduct, there is first an inquiry to determine if an investigation is warranted.”

Susswein called back later and clarified his initial statement.

“It is not inaccurate to refer to the ongoing inquiry as a compliance investigation,” he said.

He justified the media department’s confusion, explaining that official school policy distinguishes between an “inquiry” and an “investigation.” In an email, Susswein wrote:

Here is an excerpt from the policies that lay out the difference between an inquiry (which is automatically triggered by by any complaint of scientific misconduct and is standard operating procedure) and an investigation (which would follow an inquiry if warranted). Again, these are our internal definitions. We are in the inquiry stage.

Inquiry means gathering information and initial fact-finding to determine whether an allegation or apparent instance of scientific misconduct warrants an investigation.

Investigation means the formal examination and evaluation of all relevant facts to determine if misconduct has occurred, and, if so, to determine the responsible person and the seriousness of the misconduct.

The attorney general’s office will now determine whether the school must turn over the information requested.

In the brief, Chatterjee also cites other potential exceptions to the state’s disclosure law, including the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, which protects against the release of student-identifiable information, and a provision exempting certain scientific and other information from disclosure.

Banner photo: the University of Texas at Austin (Flickr/Jeff Gunn)

UT brief to OAG