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Column: Two key antiabortion studies have been retracted as junk science. Will the Supreme Court care?

Published

2 years ago

February 8, 2024

Column: Two key antiabortion studies have been retracted as junk science. Will the Supreme Court care?

If the effort to ban medication abortion now before the Supreme Court demonstrates anything, it’s that the damage caused in our society by junk science can be disastrous indeed.

That’s the implication of the retraction of two scientific studies, announced Monday by the journal publisher Sage. The studies provided the purported rationale for a Texas federal judge’s ruling overturning the approval of the abortion drugs by the Food and Drug Administration.

It’s impossible to overstate the potential ramifications of the ruling issued April 7 by federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of Amarillo, Texas, which invalidated FDA approvals of the drug mifepristone dating back to 2000.

Experts identified…unjustified or incorrect factual assumptions, material errors in the authors’ analysis of the data, and misleading presentations of the data that…demonstrate a lack of scientific rigor and invalidate the authors’ conclusions in whole or in part.

— Retraction notice of research on mifepristone

Kacsmaryk’s ruling was the basis for an outstandingly loopy decision by the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals on Aug. 19, which narrowed his ruling somewhat but not entirely. The Supreme Court has scheduled oral arguments on the case for March 26.

The worst-case scenario is that the Supreme Court will follow Kacsmaryk in revoking the FDA’s approval. That would block access to what has become the most common abortion method in the U.S. Providers would have to shift to other medications that are not as effective as mifepristone.

The court could also narrow the reach of the FDA’s actions in 2000, when it declared mifepristone safe and effective, and in 2016 and 2021, when it allowed patients to order the drug online and receive it by mail or from pharmacies rather than at doctors’ offices.

The court could restore previous rules limiting the use of mifepristone to the first seven weeks of gestation instead of the current 10 weeks. It could require that it be administered only through a physician’s prescription and only directly by doctors.

The damage could go further. An expansive Supreme Court ruling could cripple the FDA’s authority to determine the safety and efficacy of drugs and subject its judgments to increasingly partisan challenges. It could bring an antique, long-disregarded 150-year-old antipornography law to legal prominence.

Let’s start at the beginning, with Kacsmaryk’s 2023 ruling. As I’ve reported in the past, Kacsmaryk’s jurisprudence has been a blot on the judicial system since he joined the court in 2019 as a Trump appointee. Kacsmaryk is the only federal judge in the Amarillo district of the federal court in the Northern District of Texas.

That has made his courthouse a favored venue for right-wing litigants. A former functionary of a conservative Christian legal group, he has been a dependable foe of efforts to protect LGBTQ+ legal rights and access to contraceptives.

His record made him the ideal judge for a coalition of antiabortion groups including the American Assn. of Pro-Life Obstetricians & Gynrecologists and the Christian Medical & Dental Associations waging an attack on medication abortion.

Kacsmaryk’s April 7 ruling bristled with antiabortion terminology such as the terms “unborn human” and “unborn child”; abortion providers were labeled “abortionists.” By contrast, a ruling protecting access to mifepristone issued the same day by federal Judge Thomas Owens Rice of Washington state, an Obama appointee, used neutral language, such as a reference to “institutions and providers who provide abortion care.”

Kacsmaryk accepted common talking points of the antiabortion movement as legal conclusions. He cited the Comstock Act, an antipornography law enacted in 1873, no fewer than 29 times. He accepted as read the antiabortion movement’s contention that it barred the shipment of mifepristone through the U.S. mail, even though federal courts had rejected that interpretation for more than 100 years.

He questioned the FDA’s judgment that the drug was safe and effective, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The core of Kacsmaryk’s findings questioning the FDA’s approval of the drug came from two studies led by James Studnicki, director of data analytics at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, which says in the mission statement on its website that it “advises and leads the pro-life movement with groundbreaking scientific, statistical, and medical research.”

Among the institute’s principal aims is “to warn women about the dangers of chemical abortion and expose the harms of the FDA’s current abortion pill policy that simply ignores the known risks.”

Kacsmaryk cited the Studnicki papers to endorse the plaintiff organizations’ conclusions that adverse reactions to mifepristone could “overwhelm the medical system and place ‘enormous pressure and stress’” on doctors due to “significant complications requiring medical attention,” and that women taking the drug were reporting to emergency rooms at much greater rates than those who had undergone surgical abortions.

Sage’s retraction notice explodes those claims. The papers were published in 2021 and 2022 in Sage’s Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology journal. (A third Studnicki paper published in 2019 but not cited by Kacsmaryk was also retracted.)

Sage’s inquiry was triggered by Chris Adkins, a pharmaceutical sciences professor at South University School of Pharmacy in Savannah, Ga.

Among the flaws Adkins pointed to was that one study appeared to inflate claims about adverse reactions to the drug by failing to distinguish ER visits for routine complaints from those due to the drug. Nor did the Studnicki research factor in the increases in medication abortions starting in 2000 or the increase in Medicaid enrollments in the same period, which was a factor in the growth of medication abortions.

Sage said that in its pre-retraction review, “experts identified fundamental problems with the design … and methodology” of the questioned papers, as well as “unjustified or incorrect factual assumptions, material errors in the authors’ analysis of the data, and misleading presentations of the data that … demonstrate a lack of scientific rigor and invalidate the authors’ conclusions in whole or in part.”

Sage also noted that the papers declared that the authors had no conflicts of interest in researching and writing the papers. In fact, all but one of the authors of the studies Kacsmaryk cited were affiliated with the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the American Assn. of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, or the Elliot Institute, which are antiabortion advocacy organizations. Although the authors had disclosed their affiliations, Sage reported, they had not acknowledged that these posed a conflict.

Studnicki objects to the retractions, responding that the action is “unjustified” and that his data are “accurately reported.”

Kacsmaryk’s ruling has caused immense confusion in the administration of mifepristone. The 5th Circuit appeals court overturned his rejection of the FDA’s original 2000 conclusion that mifepristone is safe and effective, but upheld his overturning of the FDA’s loosening of restrictions on the use of the drug issued in 2016 and 2021. It stayed injunctions on those uses until the Supreme Court rules, however.

The appeals court opinion featured one of the more curious flights of fancy by a federal judge — a separate opinion by Appellate Justice James C. Ho, another Trump appointee. He advocated overturning the 2000 FDA approval as well as the 2016 and 2021 revisions, on the grounds that abortions cause “aesthetic injury” to doctors forced to participate in the procedure, even if only by treating patients for adverse reactions.

“Unborn babies are a source of profound joy for those who view them,” Ho wrote. “Doctors delight in working with their unborn patients — and experience an aesthetic injury when they are aborted.”

The real injury that could arise from the Supreme Court’s consideration of mifepristone would be to the use of science to validate judicial opinions by substituting junk science for rigorous research.

More than 20 years of medical practice has established that the drug is safe and effective for its purpose — indeed, safer than many other drugs in common use in the U.S. Revoking its approval would be based on no scientific evidence at all, only on politics. And that won’t be good for anyone.

Business

They graduated from Stanford. Due to AI, they can’t find a job

Published

10 hours ago

December 19, 2025

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They graduated from Stanford. Due to AI, they can’t find a job

A Stanford software engineering degree used to be a golden ticket. Artificial intelligence has devalued it to bronze, recent graduates say.

The elite students are shocked by the lack of job offers as they finish studies at what is often ranked as the top university in America.

When they were freshmen, ChatGPT hadn’t yet been released upon the world. Today, AI can code better than most humans.

Top tech companies just don’t need as many fresh graduates.

“Stanford computer science graduates are struggling to find entry-level jobs” with the most prominent tech brands, said Jan Liphardt, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University. “I think that’s crazy.”

While the rapidly advancing coding capabilities of generative AI have made experienced engineers more productive, they have also hobbled the job prospects of early-career software engineers.

Stanford students describe a suddenly skewed job market, where just a small slice of graduates — those considered “cracked engineers” who already have thick resumes building products and doing research — are getting the few good jobs, leaving everyone else to fight for scraps.

“There’s definitely a very dreary mood on campus,” said a recent computer science graduate who asked not to be named so they could speak freely. “People [who are] job hunting are very stressed out, and it’s very hard for them to actually secure jobs.”

The shake-up is being felt across California colleges, including UC Berkeley, USC and others. The job search has been even tougher for those with less prestigious degrees.

Eylul Akgul graduated last year with a degree in computer science from Loyola Marymount University. She wasn’t getting offers, so she went home to Turkey and got some experience at a startup. In May, she returned to the U.S., and still, she was “ghosted” by hundreds of employers.

“The industry for programmers is getting very oversaturated,” Akgul said.

The engineers’ most significant competitor is getting stronger by the day. When ChatGPT launched in 2022, it could only code for 30 seconds at a time. Today’s AI agents can code for hours, and do basic programming faster with fewer mistakes.

Data suggests that even though AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic are hiring many people, it is not offsetting the decline in hiring elsewhere. Employment for specific groups, such as early-career software developers between the ages of 22 and 25 has declined by nearly 20% from its peak in late 2022, according to a Stanford study.

It wasn’t just software engineers, but also customer service and accounting jobs that were highly exposed to competition from AI. The Stanford study estimated that entry-level hiring for AI-exposed jobs declined 13% relative to less-exposed jobs such as nursing.

In the Los Angeles region, another study estimated that close to 200,000 jobs are exposed. Around 40% of tasks done by call center workers, editors and personal finance experts could be automated and done by AI, according to an AI Exposure Index curated by resume builder MyPerfectResume.

Many tech startups and titans have not been shy about broadcasting that they are cutting back on hiring plans as AI allows them to do more programming with fewer people.

Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei said that 70% to 90% of the code for some products at his company is written by his company’s AI, called Claude. In May, he predicted that AI’s capabilities will increase until close to 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs might be wiped out in five years.

A common sentiment from hiring managers is that where they previously needed ten engineers, they now only need “two skilled engineers and one of these LLM-based agents,” which can be just as productive, said Nenad Medvidović, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California.

“We don’t need the junior developers anymore,” said Amr Awadallah, CEO of Vectara, a Palo Alto-based AI startup. “The AI now can code better than the average junior developer that comes out of the best schools out there.”

To be sure, AI is still a long way from causing the extinction of software engineers. As AI handles structured, repetitive tasks, human engineers’ jobs are shifting toward oversight.

Today’s AIs are powerful but “jagged,” meaning they can excel at certain math problems yet still fail basic logic tests and aren’t consistent. One study found that AI tools made experienced developers 19% slower at work, as they spent more time reviewing code and fixing errors.

Students should focus on learning how to manage and check the work of AI as well as getting experience working with it, said John David N. Dionisio, a computer science professor at LMU.

Stanford students say they are arriving at the job market and finding a split in the road; capable AI engineers can find jobs, but basic, old-school computer science jobs are disappearing.

As they hit this surprise speed bump, some students are lowering their standards and joining companies they wouldn’t have considered before. Some are creating their own startups. A large group of frustrated grads are deciding to continue their studies to beef up their resumes and add more skills needed to compete with AI.

“If you look at the enrollment numbers in the past two years, they’ve skyrocketed for people wanting to do a fifth-year master’s,” the Stanford graduate said. “It’s a whole other year, a whole other cycle to do recruiting. I would say, half of my friends are still on campus doing their fifth-year master’s.”

After four months of searching, LMU graduate Akgul finally landed a technical lead job at a software consultancy in Los Angeles. At her new job, she uses AI coding tools, but she feels like she has to do the work of three developers.

Universities and students will have to rethink their curricula and majors to ensure that their four years of study prepare them for a world with AI.

“That’s been a dramatic reversal from three years ago, when all of my undergraduate mentees found great jobs at the companies around us,” Stanford’s Liphardt said. “That has changed.”

Business

Disney+ to be part of a streaming bundle in Middle East

Published

22 hours ago

December 18, 2025

Press Room

Disney+ to be part of a streaming bundle in Middle East

Walt Disney Co. is expanding its presence in the Middle East, inking a deal with Saudi media conglomerate MBC Group and UAE firm Anghami to form a streaming bundle.

The bundle will allow customers in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE to access a trio of streaming services — Disney+; MBC Group’s Shahid, which carries Arabic originals, live sports and events; and Anghami’s OSN+, which carries Arabic productions as well as Hollywood content.

The trio bundle costs AED89.99 per month, which is the price of two of the streaming services.

“This deal reflects a shared ambition between Disney+, Shahid and the MBC Group to shape the future of entertainment in the Middle East, a region that is seeing dynamic growth in the sector,” Karl Holmes, senior vice president and general manager of Disney+ EMEA, said in a statement.

Disney has already indicated it plans to grow in the Middle East.

Earlier this year, the company announced it would be building a new theme park in Abu Dhabi in partnership with local firm Miral, which would provide the capital, construction resources and operational oversight. Under the terms of the agreement, Disney would oversee the parks’ design, license its intellectual property and provide “operational expertise,” as well as collect a royalty.

Disney executives said at the time that the decision to build in the Middle East was a way to reach new audiences who were too far from the company’s current hubs in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

Business

Erewhon and others shut by fire set to reopen in Pacific Palisades mall

Published

1 day ago

December 18, 2025

Press Room

Erewhon and others shut by fire set to reopen in Pacific Palisades mall

Fancy grocer Erewhon will return to Pacific Palisades in an entirely rebuilt store, as the neighborhood’s luxury mall, owned by developer Rick Caruso, undergoes renovations for a reopening next August.

Palisades Village has been closed since the Jan. 7 wildfire destroyed much of the neighborhood. The outdoor mall survived the blaze but needed to be refurbished to eliminate contaminants that the fire could have spread, Caruso said.

The developer is spending $60 million to bring back Palisades Village, removing and replacing drywall from stores and restaurants. Dirt from the outdoor areas is also being replaced.

Demolition is complete and the tenants’ spaces are now being restored, Caruso said.

“It was not a requirement to do that from a scientific standpoint,” he said. “But it was important to me to be able to tell guests that the property is safe and clean.”

Erewhon’s store was taken down to the studs and is being reconfigured with a larger outdoor seating area for dining and events.

When it opens its doors sometime next year, it will be the only grocer in the heart of the fire-ravaged neighborhood.

The announcement of Erewhon’s comeback marks a milestone in the recovery of Pacific Palisades and signals renewed investment in restoring essential neighborhood services and supporting the community’s long-term economic health, Caruso said.

A photograph of the exterior of Erewhon in Pacific Palisades in 2024.

(Kailyn Brown/Los Angeles Times)

“They are one of the sexiest supermarkets in the world now and they are in high demand,” he said. “Their committing to reopening is a big statement on the future of the Palisades and their belief that it’s going to be back stronger than ever.”

Caruso previously attributed the mall’s survival to the hard work of private firefighters and the fire-resistant materials used in the mall’s construction. The $200-million shopping and dining center opened in 2018 with a movie theater and a roster of upmarket tenants, including Erewhon.

“We’re honored to join the incredible effort underway at Palisades Village,” Erewhon Chief Executive Tony Antoci said in a statement. “Reopening is a meaningful way for us to contribute to the healing and renewal of this neighborhood.”

Erewhon has cultivated a following of shoppers who visit daily to grab a prepared meal or one of its celebrity-backed $20 smoothies.

The privately held company doesn’t share financial figures, but has said its all-day cafes occupy roughly 30% of its floor space and serve 100,000 customers each week.

Erewhon has also branched out beyond selling groceries.

Its fast-growing private-label line now includes Erewhon-branded apparel, bags, candles, nutritional supplements and bath and body products.

Erewhon will also open new stores in West Hollywood in February, in Glendale in May and at Caruso’s The Lakes at Thousand Oaks mall in July 2026.

About 90% of the tenants are expected to return to the mall when it reopens, Caruso said, including restaurants Angelini Ristorante & Bar and Hank’s. Local chef Nancy Silverton has agreed to move in with a new Italian steakhouse called Spacca Tutto.

In May, Pacific Palisades-based fashion designer Elyse Walker said she would reopen her eponymous store in Palisades Village after losing her 25-year flagship location on Antioch Street in the inferno.

Fashion designer Elyse Walker announced the reopening of her flagship store

“People who live in the Palisades don’t want to leave,” Walker said at the time. “It’s a magical place.”

Caruso carried on annual holiday traditions at Palisades Village this year, including the lighting of a 50-foot Christmas tree for hundreds of celebrants Dec. 5. On Sunday evening, leaders from the Chabad Jewish Community Center of Pacific Palisades gathered at the mall to light a towering menorah.

A total of 6,822 structures were destroyed in the Palisades fire, including more than 5,500 residences and 100 commercial businesses, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Caruso said he hopes the shopping center’s revival will inspire residents to return. His investment “shows my belief that the community is coming back,” he said. “Next year is going to be huge.”