Judge Rips Alabama for Hiring a Discredited Abortion Foe

It’s the second time this year a federal judge slammed a state for hiring Vincent Rue to defend its anti-abortion law.

Anti-abortion protesters at a clinic in Birmingham, AlabamaJay Reeves/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Vincent Rue, a marriage therapist best known for his discredited theories about how abortion causes mental illness, has made hundreds of thousands of dollars assembling legal teams to defend extreme anti-abortion bills. But lately, the states that hire him have been getting a raw deal.

On Monday, US District Judge Myron H. Thompson skewered Alabama for involving Rue in the defense of a law that requires abortion providers to obtain admitting privileges with a local hospital. Thompson struck down the law, which had threatened to close three of Alabama’s five abortion clinics. Notably, Thompson disregarded two arguments made by John M. Thorp, an OB-GYN at the University of North Carolina Hospital and one of Rue’s go-to expert witnesses: that complications arise from abortion more often than is reported in official statistics, and that admitting privileges are necessary to good patient care. Both claims have been key for states defending these sorts of abortion restrictions.

This is the second time this year that a federal judge has dismissed evidence brought by Rue’s favored expert witnesses. In September, a Texas judge ruling on an anti-abortion bill that would close all but six of the state’s clinics raked the state’s attorneys across the coals for bringing on Rue—and hiding his involvement.

Rue was thoroughly discredited as an abortion expert long before Alabama hired him. When he testified in two landmark abortion cases in the 1990s, judges disregarded his testimony for being personally biased and lacking expertise. Mainstream medical organizations have rejected Rue’s research on a supposed mental illness caused by abortion, “post-abortive syndrome.”

In Alabama, Rue recruited expert witnesses for the state and in one case wrote the entirety of the report the state’s witnesses submitted to the court. Rue didn’t testify. But the state paid him $82,890 for his work. It paid the two witnesses that Thompson called out in his opinion, Thorp and James C. Anderson, a Virginia emergency room physician, $40,174.75 and $76,279.20, respectively. Thorp, Rue, and Anderson did not reply to requests for comment.

Thorp based his testimony on a study he wrote for a pay-to-publish journal. (Traditional academic journals do not charge authors for printing their work.) He misplaced decimal points in his report to the court compiling abortion complication rates. When challenged about his methodology on cross-examination, Thorp told the court to “knock a point off” his estimate of complication rates.

At trial, Anderson admitted that Rue had written a report to the court that Anderson signed. Anderson also said that Rue provided most of the research for a second report Anderson wrote. Anderson further testified that he didn’t know courts had disregarded Rue’s testimony. Thompson was incredulous.

“You say you don’t know his employment or any organizations that he belongs to,” the judge asked Anderson. “Why do you trust him?”

In his Monday ruling, Thompson tried to guess at the answer: “Either [Anderson] has extremely impaired judgment; he lied to the court as to his familiarity with Rue; or he is so biased against abortion that he would endorse any opinion that supports increased regulation on abortion providers. Any of these explanations severely undermines Anderson’s credibility as an expert witness.”

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate