This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
A prominent publisher of science research is being challenged in court after moving to suppress science-based details about the dangers of abortion, according to a new report at the Federalist.
The fight now in Superior Court in Ventura, California, is over a decision by Sage Publications to move to retract three key studies "exposing the dangers of the nation's most popular abortion drug regiment," the report explained.
It's happening just as the U.S. Supreme Court is approaching a case involving the drug, mifepristone.
The report explained 10 of the researchers who delivered in three scientific papers their conclusions about the threat to lives have now filed a petition to compel arbitration.
They accuse the publisher of "pretextual and discriminatory" comments that were created to support retracting the findings on the abortion pill. The authors provided science to back their original writings, but Sage ignored it.
"One of the studies in question, which the lawsuit notes is 'the second most-read article' in the journal's history, specifically determined mifepristone is responsible for a 500 percent increase in abortion-related emergency room visits," the Federalist reported.
The censorship campaign is suspect for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact the papers were done in 2019, 2021 and 2022 and "originally passed peer review for publication without a hitch."
In fact, Sage emailed Dr. James Studnicki, who headed the 2021 and 2022 projects, and commended him for his "fine contributions."
But this year, amid a re-election year that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris both have participated in, with their extreme pro-abortion positions, the publisher suddenly claimed that it was acting on a "reader's concern" that the authors had a conflict of interest over some "pro-life organizations."
"Abortion activist researchers publish plenty of papers on the topic without scrutiny. Yet Sage, after what it called an 'independent review,' ultimately followed through with the retractions," the report said.
The challenge, now in court, charges, "Sage's wrongdoing has been causing enormous and incalculable harm to the Authors' professional reputations, as Sage intended. Because of Sage's retractions, the Authors and their research have been attacked by the media and by other authors, and the Authors have had new research proposals inexplicably turned away by other publications that now fear associating with them. The Authors have years — even decades — of fruitful research ahead of them, but they are now being treated as pariahs."
The Charlotte Lozier Institute found that Sage's claims provided "no evidence" of any major "errors, miscalculations or falsehoods" in the reports.
Further, the authors "fully complied" with the publications "conflict disclosure requirements."
The researchers had called for arbitration on the disagreement but the report said Sage delayed the process by making demands that were unrelated to the issue at hand.
"Even more concerning, Sage has used its intransigence as a weapon to try to pressure the Authors into unilaterally surrendering their discovery rights. Sage's egregious actions require this Court's intervention to compel arbitration," the lawsuit charges.
