Denying Texas women access to abortion is proving to be pricey. Texas has paid Vincent Rue, a Florida marriage therapist best known for his discredited theories about how abortion causes mental illness, more than $42,000 in less than six months to aid its legal defense of a new law that would close all but a handful of the state's abortion clinics.
The controversial legislation, which was the target of state Sen. Wendy Davis's 11-hour filibuster, places strict new regulations on abortion clinics with the aim of shutting them down. Its most onerous provision—which the Center for Reproductive Rights, a legal advocacy group, is challenging in court—gives abortion clinics until September 1 to meet the standards of ambulatory surgical centers. A typical abortion does not require the features of an ambulatory surgical center, such as general anesthesia. Only six Texas clinics currently qualify as ambulatory surgical centers. The state's other 15 clinics would need upgrades to operating rooms and construction to widen hallways in order to meet the standard—a costly prospect that will ultimately force these clinics to close.
Judges in other states have thrown out less draconian laws. So to defend its abortion restrictions, Texas brought in Rue, who helped draft, edit, and find citations for the reports its experts witnesses submit to the court. But Rue, who holds a doctorate in family relations from the University of North Carolina School of Home Economics, is an odd choice for the job—"a long-discredited quack," in the view of one state representative from Wisconsin, where Rue performed similar defense work. Although Rue testified about the harms of abortion in two landmark abortion cases in the early 1990s, the judges in those cases dismissed his testimony as personally biased and lacking expertise. Rue has pushed the medical mainstream to recognize "post-abortive syndrome"—a mental illness that supposedly results from abortion—only to have organizations such as the National Center for Health Statistics pan his research. In 1981, he claimed in a report to the US Senate that "abortion re-escalates the battle between the sexes" and "abortion increases bitterness toward men."
Texas Pays "Thoroughly Discredited" Expert $42,000 to Defend Anti-Abortion Law | Mother Jones
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