‘Scientifically Laughable’: The Catholic Roots of Mifepristone Disinformation

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When addressing a gathering of Catholic physicians in 1910, Boston Archbishop William Henry O’Connell issued a warning against the spread of pseudoscience that “runs perpetually to extremes.”^[1] O’Connell believed Catholic doctors, then organizing local physicians’ guilds, provided the morality missing from secular medicine’s “unscientific materialism” – without rejecting science outright.^[2] More than a century later, the growing traction of a self-published paper from the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) challenging the safety of mifepristone reveals how Catholic institutions are not only legitimizing the ideologically motivated pseudoscience O’Connell once warned against, but also generating disinformation in the process.

Touted as the most extensive study on “chemical abortion,” the EPPC paper, published in April, reported that serious adverse events following a mifepristone-induced abortion are twenty-two times higher than rates seen in hundreds of peer-reviewed clinical studies and the FDA’s consistent post-market surveillance.^[3] Medical experts have criticized the EPPC paper for its “shoddy science,” flawed dataset, and lack of peer review. In response, EPPC researchers claimed they’re disrupting a “terribly biased” peer-review process that doesn’t allow for anti-abortion viewpoints, including “substantive critiques of the abortion pill or abortion.”

Although EPPC doesn’t have a religious affiliation, the conservative think tank has ties to Catholic ethicists who consult politicians and other government officials on Catholic social doctrine.^[4] With its new paper, EPPC builds upon the most recent campaign against mifepristone, using pseudoscientific methods to influence public health policy. For example, in November 2022 the anti-abortion medical coalition Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine filed a federal lawsuit against the FDA seeking to block access to mifepristone and reverse its FDA approval. The Catholic Medical Association (CMA) – the modern iteration of the National Federation of Catholic Physicians’ Guilds (NFCPG) – is a founding member of Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine and a key player behind this federal lawsuit, which the Supreme Court dismissed in 2024 for lack of standing.^[5]

Despite criticism from the mainstream medical community, members of the Trump administration have rushed to validate the EPPC’s findings, with U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. advising the FDA to open a review of mifepristone. Now, the CMA is citing the paper in its own policy recommendation paper against telemedicine abortion. The paper’s authors claim the EPPC research is solid evidence that removing “common-sense” FDA regulations around mifepristone “places convenience and abortion-promoting ideology above patient health and well-being.”

This rhetoric from the CMA and EPPC reveals how longstanding tensions between Catholic and secular medicine influenced Catholic physicians to medicalize their opposition through the language of public health and safety. When the National Federation of Catholic Physicians Guilds’ formed in 1932, it foregrounded Catholic moral theology in its approach to medical ethics. However, Catholic physicians didn’t necessarily seek to separate themselves from the mainstream medical establishment. If anything, the NFCPG may have wanted to insert itself within the mainstream medical establishment.

Physicians were largely opposed to performing abortions throughout the first half of the 20th century, but the tide turned around 1970 when, after several years of debate, the American Medical Association (AMA) approved a resolution to repeal state-level abortion bans.^[6] Members of the National Federation of Catholic Physicians Guilds led the opposition at an AMA Board of Trustees committee meeting. Catholic doctors positioned themselves not as outsiders to the medical community, but as defenders of the medical profession and women. Abortion, these doctors testified, was a quick fix for the nation’s “social ills,” a “manic simplistic solution of the New Left,” and even a “blood bath” for American women.^[7]

Abortion and emergency contraceptives became moving targets for Catholic medicine in the 1970s. What’s often overlooked in this complicated religious medical history is how some NFCPG members weren’t entirely unified on reproductive health measures; members even sounded the alarm against promoting flawed science before it turned into disinformation.

In many ways, the now-discontinued diethylstilbestrol (DES) – a synthetic estrogen used as an off-label emergency contraceptive in the 1970s – serves as a precursor to the mifepristone debates.^[8] An ongoing dialogue in CMA/NFCPG’s flagship journal, The Linacre Quarterly, over the controversial drug tested the boundaries of a physician’s moral responsibility and a patient’s spiritual autonomy. The Rev. Donald McCarthy, Ph.D., a Catholic priest, was a proponent of using DES as an emergency contraceptive, even though Catholic medical ethics generally considers it causing a direct abortion. McCarthy challenged his fellow doctors:

Can a pro-life physician use DES, knowing there is a very slight risk of destroying a fertilized ovum, if his or her intention is to prevent fertilization and protect the rape victim from grave injustice?^[9]

For McCarthy, the answer was yes. And in spite of harsh criticism from his fellow Catholic doctors, McCarthy consulted with mainstream medical organizations to counter NFCPG on publishing a response to his article that promoted misleading science.^[10] McCarthy may have anticipated how both distorting scientific claims and ignoring moral grey areas would lead to disinformation.

Ideological battles over mifepristone sparked a rise in disinformation during the 1990s, when mifepristone was on the verge of breaking through to the U.S. market. Yet biomedical researcher Lawrence F. Roberge warned in The Linacre Quarterly that abortion disinformation “does no justice to pro-life advocates in the marketplace of ideas.”^[11]

A myth circulated in anti-abortion circles that mifepristone was “like” DES, even though the two drugs are neither similar in molecular structure, biological function, nor primary uses. According to Roberge, this myth stemmed from the 1991 article “RU-486 – A Chemical Time Bomb?” disseminated by the National Right to Life Committee. The article featured science so flawed that Chemical & Engineering News deemed it “scientifically laughable.”^[12]

No scientific evidence supported this comparison between DES and mifepristone. Still, by the late 1990s, an exasperated Roberge spent his time consulting a large anti-abortion organization preparing to file a legal petition against mifepristone on “extinguishing” this myth.^[13] “The more certain pro-life advocates spread this myth around,” Roberge wrote, “the more others (especially those without a scientific background) will believe it!” Worried that anti-abortion advocates would become “Neo-Luddite in mentality,” he encouraged the anti-abortion movement to “access scientific professionals to clearly understand these scientific and technological developments.”^[14]

Developments like mifepristone, even more so than DES, also threatened anti-abortion activism, which was losing favor with the general American public as violence against abortion providers surged during the late 1980s and 1990s. After anti-abortion activists murdered abortion provider Dr. David Gunn and attempted to assassinate Dr. George Tiller in 1993,^[15] Catholic bioethicist G. Kevin Donovan asked in The Linacre Quarterly: Could the anti-abortion movement truly use “strength of arms” to “seize the moral high ground?”^[16]

Donovan was certainly concerned about the anti-abortion movement losing focus of its pro-life ethics by embracing lethal violence. But he also signaled that mifepristone placed abortion politics “on shifting ground” because of the possibility that abortion would one day be fully placed in the hands of patients.^[17] Like Archbishop O’Connell, Donovan believed a strong moral framework would not just win the public abortion debate but strengthen the position of Catholic medicine. For Donovan, it was a strategy that also encouraged passive resistance in the face of injustice.

Except these tactics used by the CMA and EPPC are not passive resistance. They are active strategies that have elevated “scientifically laughable” abortion disinformation from fringe claims to policy recommendations, shaping authority far beyond the exam room.

Notes

1. “Warns Catholics of Christian Science.” New York Times. May 15, 1920, sec. A. ↑
2. The first of these guilds formed in New York City, where Archbishop O’Connell delivered this address in 1910. Inspired by leaders of the New York physicians’ guild, O’Connell brought the idea to Boston, forming the Boston Guild of Saint Luke. A third guild emerged in Philadelphia in 1911. See Jessica Martucci. “Religion, Medicine, and Politics: Catholic Physicians’ Guilds in America, 1909–32.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 92, no. 2 (Summer 2018), 289. ↑
3. “Chemical abortion” is an outdated term primarily used in anti-abortion materials. ↑
4. EPPC also facilitates the Catholic Women’s Forum, which helps “shape conversations in the Church and in the culture” around gender, sexuality, and religious liberty. ↑
5. Catholic Medical Association, email message to author, May 2023. In 1997, the National Federation of Catholic Physicians Guilds’ restructured itself from a guild-centered organization to an organization of individual membership and changed the name from to Catholic Medical Association. ↑
6. American Medical Association Clinical Convention minutes, p. 241, resolution No. 18: Therapeutic Abortion, 1969 and AMA House of Delegates Proceedings minutes, p. 337 – 339, Report D of the Board of Trustees – Abortion, 1970. ↑
7. Richard D. Lyons. “Catholics Oppose Move for Repeal of All Legal Curbs,” New York Times, June 23, 1970, 16. ↑
8. Since the 1940s, DES has had many uses, including miscarriage prevention and postpartum lactation suppression. By 1971, the FDA advised against using DES during pregnancy due to cancer risk of people exposed to DES in utero. As an emergency contraceptive, DES remained under consideration of the FDA but never formally approved for widespread use. ↑
9. Catholic Physicians’ Guild. “Letters to the Editor.” The Linacre Quarterly 45, no. 1 (1978): Article 4. ↑
10. Ibid. ↑
11. Ibid. ↑
12. Lawrence F. Roberge. “Scientific Disinformation, Abuse, and Neglect Within Pro-Life.” The Linacre Quarterly 66, no. 1 (February 1999): 56 – 57. ↑
13. Ibid, 57. ↑
14. Ibid, 62. ↑
15. Tiller would later be assassinated in 2009. ↑
16. G. Kevin Donovan. “Does Shooting Abortionists Reveal a Lack of Faith?” The Linacre Quarterly Vol. 61, no. 1 (1994): 20. ↑
17. Ibid. ↑

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