Traditionally, attacks on women’s reproductive rights were largely frontal in nature. Opponents argued that abortion was wrong on religious or moral grounds, and thus should be made illegal. While they continue to make those arguments, in recent years they’ve added some new arrows to their quiver. More and more, anti-choicers are seeking to restrict abortion rights or otherwise undermine support for them by relying on a particular type of “science”: science that isn’t really science at all.
When medical researchers put together a study, a lot of time and effort goes into it. Generally speaking, a study launches with strict parameters: a certain number of volunteer participants, a certain period of time. Thus, when a study is terminated early, it’s a big deal. Sometimes, for example, the benefits of the particular medication or treatment being tested are, happily, so obvious and significant that it would be unethical to deny it to people in the control group, let alone to the larger public (as in these cancer treatment trials). Other studies, however, are ended early for the opposite reason: The harm caused is so obvious, it would be unethical to continue.
This is relevant because a recent study of the efficacy of a bogus “abortion pill reversal” ended early—and not because the researchers were happy with the treatment’s effects.