On Wednesday Bobby Junior, last seen swimming in a creek loaded with fecal matter,

testified at a Senate hearing that he had called for a FDA review of mifepristone regulations:

The review, he said, was necessary due to “new data” – data that emerged from a flawed analysis that top US anti-abortion groups are now using to pressure the Trump administration to reimpose restrictions on the abortion pill, if not pull it from the market entirely.

“It’s alarming,” Kennedy told the Missouri senator Josh Hawley, a Republican, during a congressional hearing. “Clearly, it indicates that, at very least, the label should be changed.”

I knew about this “study” because my MAGAt House rep, Riley Moore, has been posting about it, assuring all of us that it is super scientific and that mifepristone should be made unavailable, and so I immediately knew it was bullshit.

The study was published by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a rightwing think tank founded to apply Judeo-Christian moral traditions to public policy. OK. Well, this is going to come as a surprise because the study was also done by the EPPC. Of course neither author is a medical doctor, or a medical researcher, or a nurse, or in any way competent or qualified to write this study, although one of them did write this book:  When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment. Mmhmm.

Of course the study is rife with errors:

Okay, let’s get into what conservatives are calling the “largest-ever” study on abortion medication—research they claim shows that over 10% of women “experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or another serious or life-threatening adverse event.”

Sounds terrifying, right? Until you actually look at what the so-called researchers at the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) are calling a “serious adverse event.”

Here’s what they did: The group bought access to a health insurance claims database and flagged certain diagnosis and procedure codes—then simply labeled whatever they wanted as abortion complications. For example, out of the 94,605 patients they say were seriously harmed by abortion pills, 40,960 simply visited an emergency room. Not treated at the emergency room, but visited.

Tellingly, while the EPPC claims they “followed the official FDA definition of a ‘serious adverse event,’” the FDA does not define an ER visit alone as one. So right off the bat, they’re full of shit.

It doesn’t get better:

Doctor Daniel Grossman, obstetrics and gynecology professor and director of ANSIRH at the University of California at San Francisco, tells me that there are even more methodological flaws: The study isn’t peer-reviewed; it only includes patients with insurance-covered abortions—which isn’t the norm; it includes people who may have taken mifepristone without misoprostol, which means it wouldn’t reflect the standard FDA-approved regimen; and the study included patients who received mifepristone for miscarriage management.

Dr. Grossman also points out that the study counts needing a procedural abortion as a serious adverse event. “This is not an SAE,” he says. “This is a known potential outcome of the treatment, and patients are told that medication abortion is about 95%-97% effective before they choose this abortion method.”

They have to make shit up because the world they live in bears no resemblance to reality.

I’ll leave you with this, something I randomly remembered today and which is good listening.