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Today’s News & Views Slowly But Surely -- Part One of Two All too often in journalism errors travel at the speed of light while corrections [or, at least, additional context] plug along at a snail's pace. Nonetheless it is to the credit of National Right to Life that newspapers are doing follow-up stories which are adding context and depth to their initially uncritical portraits of a recent Journal of the American Medical Association study of fetal pain. As you remember from Wednesday's TN&V, JAMA published a seven-page-long article, purporting to be "A Systematic Multidisciplinary Review of the Evidence." Its dubious-on-its-face conclusion was, "Evidence regarding the capacity for fetal pain is limited but indicates that fetal perception of pain in unlikely before the third trimester." Aha, so much for the assertion that the unborn starts to feel pain no later than 20-22 weeks, right? No, in fact. The study was riddled with questionable conclusions and biased at it source. In Part Two, I've attached a trenchant critique of the study compiled by National Right to Life. Let me just quote one particularly telling point: "The JAMA authors arrive at their 'conclusion' through a highly tendentious methodology that could, for the most part, also be used to argue that there is no proof that animals really feel pain and no proof that premature newborn humans really feel pain (although the authors do not address those subjects)." In Part One, I'm focusing on the happy fact that news that the research was fatally flawed is getting out. To its great credit, the Philadelphia Inquirer made clear in its very first story on Wednesday that the five-member team (four physicians and a lawyer who is also a medical student) was hardly a model of disinterested scholarship. Marie McCullough wrote, "Their seven-page report in today's Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) has a weakness, though: It does not mention that one author [Dr. Eleanor A. Drey] is the director of a clinic that provides abortion services, while the lead author — a medical student [Susan Lee] — once worked for NARAL Pro-Choice America." By this morning, even the New York Times had caught up. The lead paragraph in Denise Grady's story is, "Two of five authors of an article published in a medical journal on Wednesday saying that fetuses probably cannot feel pain before the 29th week of pregnancy did not tell the journal that they had abortion-related activities that might be seen as a conflict of interest, the journal's editor said Wednesday." Naturally, the bulk of the remainder of the story is designed to minimize the significance of the revelation. By contrast in its story today the Chicago Tribune asks all the tough questions the Times could not be bothered with. Its first and third paragraphs read, "A controversial research article about when fetuses feel pain is sparking a heated debate about the nexus between science and politics and what information authors should disclose to scientific journals. ...Undisclosed was the fact that one of the five authors runs an abortion clinic at San Francisco's public hospital while another author worked temporarily more than five years ago for an abortion rights advocacy group." [You can read the entire article at www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/health/chi-0508260225aug26,1,776080.story?coll=chi-health-hed] So, what are the obligations of researchers to disclose their relevant backgrounds and how does that factor into an assessment of a study's validity? Let me highlight one quote from Judith Graham's and Ronald Kotulak's story to make a major, if obvious, point about double standards. "Dr. Marcia Angell, a senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School [and no friend of pro-lifers], is also a former editor of the New England Journal. 'Suppose it were the other way,' she said. 'Suppose there were an article that said that (fetuses) do feel pain and it was written by people who were involved in the right-to-life movement. Would I want to know that? I think I would.'" Well, duh, of course. And we should know that Ms. Lee didn't work for some garden-variety, mildly "pro-choice" organization. She worked for NARAL. And Dr. Drey isn't the head of some private practice that performs one or two abortions a year. Dr. Drey is medical director of the Women's Options Center at San Francisco General Hospital, the city's largest abortion clinic. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, her clinic "performs 2,000 abortions a year, about half of them during the second trimester and about 600 of those during the 20th to 23rd week of pregnancy..." Moreover, as noted in Part Two, "Drey is a prominent critic of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, and a self-described activist." A researcher with links to the nation's primary pro-abortion political advocacy group and another who heads a clinic that performs almost one thousand abortions during the second trimester, more half of them in the 20th week or later--these are the kind of people who will give an unbiased, objective assessment of at what age a baby being torn apart can feel pain? Makes you wonder. Be sure to read Part Two. Please send all comments to Dave Andrusko at dandrusko@nrlc.org. |
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