Who is Vincent Rue? | MSNBC

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"You say you don't know his employment or any organizations that he belongs to," the judge asked Anderson. "Why do you trust him?"
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“Well, we go back to 2002, and I’ve found him to be reliable,” Anderson said.

An attorney for the clinics persisted. “Are you aware of where Vincent Rue got his degree?”

“No,” Anderson replied.

“So you are not aware of whether he in fact has a degree from a school of home economics?” asked the attorney.

Anderson responded that he didn’t. But, he said, “I’ve been working with Vince and his wordsmithing the document and finding articles. And he’s been good in that arena.”

Before he was “wordsmithing” for these trials, Rue made his name testifying before Congress in 1981 about post-abortion syndrome.

Rue claims no public health research training. An online biography notes that he “received his Ph.D. in Family Relations from the University of North Carolina in 1975,” but not that it was from the School of Home Economics. It also describes him as the co-director, with his wife, of the Institute for Pregnancy Loss in Jacksonville, Florida.

In 1987, President Ronald Reagan dispatched his surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, to issue a report on the health risks to women who had abortions. (The idea came from then-Reagan advisor Dinesh D’Souza.) Rue’s official biography describes him as a “special consultant” to that effort.

Koop was staunchly against abortion, but Rue nonetheless failed to persuade him. In January 1989, Koop outraged his ideological allies when he wrote to Reagan saying there would be no report because “the scientific studies do not provide conclusive data about the health effects of abortion on women.” Koop later clarified in testimony before Congress that he was referring to mental health effects. (The data on abortion’s relative physical safety to the woman is well-documented, Koop noted).

Since then, every single rigorous analysis of data has concluded that “post-abortion syndrome” doesn’t exist. The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges announced in December 2011 that its review found that “rates of mental health problems for women with an unwanted pregnancy were the same whether they had an abortion or gave birth.” The American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Mental Health and Abortion found the same in 2008.

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Julia Steinberg, an assistant professor at the Department of Psychiatry at University of California-San Diego said at the time, “This is not a scholarly difference of opinion; their facts were flatly wrong. This was an abuse of the scientific process to reach conclusions that are not supported by the data.”

Such faulty studies have major policy implications: They have become the basis for laws requiring that doctors give inaccurate information to women who have abortions, and they influence the decision-making of judges considering restrictions on abortion. In South Dakota, for example, where Rue testified before a state task force, a woman who seeks an abortion is told it carries an “increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide,” despite that claim having been debunked by reputable researchers.

Some judges have raised alarm bells about Rue’s testimony over the years, which may explain why he largely works behind the scenes now.

Who is Vincent Rue? | MSNBC