NIH defunds project of researcher behind flawed Turnaway abortion study

The National Institutes of Health has canceled funding for a study led by Diana Greene Foster, the pro-abortion researcher behind the much-touted (yet seriously flawed) Turnaway Study, who was chosen for a 2023 MacArthur Fellowship “Genius Grant.”

Foster said her team was expecting to receive $2.5 million in NIH funds over five years. Now, she is attempting to replace that funding. “I am madly fundraising to replace these canceled funds,” she said. “I would rather be spending the time implementing the study than beginning the fundraising again.”

According to The 19th, Foster is looking to expand her pro-abortion research with a follow-up to the Turnaway Study. Reporter Shefali Luthra said this study would use “quantitative analysis and in-depth interviews to follow people who sought abortions in or outside of the medical system after federal abortion rights were terminated, as well as those who carried their pregnancies to term.” Presumably, this would include women undergoing DIY at-home abortions, which the abortion industry heavily promoted both before and after the fall of Roe v. Wade.

Canceled funding

“Our study would rigorously examine how state abortion bans — with and without health exceptions — affect treatment of medical emergencies, like preterm prelabor rupture of membranes, preeclampsia and ectopic pregnancy, through surveys and interviews with physicians in emergency departments across the U.S.,” Foster told The 19th. “This is a topic for which we desperately need data.”

Yet, the question remains: what kind of data is desired? Will Foster’s “study” be largely anecdotal, as ProPublica’s highly deceptive reporting in which it blamed pro-life laws for women’s injuries and deaths in a series of articles? Will the data be entirely one-sided, as ProPublica’s was when it made assertions about ‘preventable deaths‘ and injuries in abortion-restrictive states without comparing that data to that of abortion-permissive states?

It is ironic to claim that “data” is needed, as the abortion industry and its allies fight tooth and nail to prevent any legitimate data-gathering with regard to the reporting of abortion numbers each year, how many complications result from abortion, and other valuable information. They appear to operate from the assumption that abortion itself does not harm women, but an absence of abortion does — a biased notion from the start. It sounds from Foster’s description as if her study is likely to continue to operate from this faulty premise.

A letter Foster received from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) said her work doesn’t align with the federal government’s interests. “Research programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans,” it read.

Debunking The Deceptive & Pro-Abortion Turnaway Study | Can't Stay Silent

Flawed research

Foster’s Turnaway Study is frequently heralded by pro-abortion advocates as proof that women who have been unable to abort their children are worse off for it, and that most women do not regret having abortions. The study claims that “receiving an abortion does not harm the health and wellbeing of women,” and that “being denied an abortion results in worse financial, health, and family outcomes.”

But the serious problems with the study are routinely ignored. 877 women were asked to participate, yet they weren’t selected at random; instead, the women were hand-selected by staff at 30 abortion facilities across the country. They were then interviewed by phone every six months over a five-year period, to see how their abortions were impacting their emotional status. There were no distinctions made between women who had undergone multiple abortions and women who had undergone just one abortion, and no comparison was made between women who sought abortion and women who chose parenting from the beginning.

Additionally, the study did not acknowledge that, of the women “turned away,” a quarter of them went on to have abortions in other states.

The sample size has also been criticized as being far too small. Though thousands of women were recruited, only 27% agreed to participate, even though they were given an incentive to do so. By the final year of the study, only 17% remained, with the other 83% having dropped out over the years, making it impossible to determine how abortion affected the majority of women. And the women who were most likely to continue participating were the ones who experienced relief; women who had negative feelings about their abortions were the most likely to drop out.

Despite all of this, the results were hardly as solid as Foster would have people believe.

Just one in eight women who were ‘turned away’ from their abortions (12.5%) said they still wished they had been able to have an abortion six months later; only one in 25 (4%) wished they still would have had the abortion five years later. Most of the women who gave birth said they were happy they did — yet Foster and her acolytes in the media didn’t market the study as “96% of women didn’t regret giving birth.” They instead framed it around pro-abortion messaging and propaganda.

Biased researchers

The Turnaway Study was conducted and paid for by pro-abortion activists and researchers. Foster is a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where she works as an “investigator” for the Bixby Center for Reproductive Health, which trains future abortionists, and is the Director of Research for ANSIRH (a pro-abortion research group based at UCSF). Foster’s work seeks to support even late abortions, and she has testified before Congress in an effort to see restrictions against abortion eliminated.

Study author Daniel Grossman is the current director of Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH). He is an abortionist and former board member of both NARAL Pro-Choice America and the National Abortion Federation, and has served on California’s Future of Abortion Council. Grossman is one of the architects of the dangerous no-test protocol, in which women undergo chemical abortions alone, at home, with no medical supervision.

UCSF — Foster’s home base — has promoted abortion for decades, leading studies through ANSIRH and training abortionists through the Bixby Center in an effort to promote and expand abortion. Those supporting UCSF along with the Turnaway study are the same funders who have supported the abortion pill’s manufacturer(s).

In other words, neither Foster nor those who fund UCSF, ANSIRH, and Bixby can be deemed objective. Why should her research, which seeks to portray the killing of preborn human beings through abortion only as a positive act, be supported with taxpayer funding from the NIH?