Vincent Rue wasn’t officially a witness at either of two recent abortion-related trials in Alabama and Wisconsin. But his fingerprints were everywhere.
Rue, who is not a physician but holds a Ph.D., originated the concept of “post-abortion syndrome,” which claims that the procedure triggers symptoms similar to post-traumatic stress disorder. His research has repeatedly been discredited by major medical research institutions and his testimony was thrown out in two landmark abortion cases as being “not credible.”
Rue did not return a call from msnbc seeking comment for this story.
Despite his well-established history, both Alabama and Wisconsin invited Rue to consult and recruit expert witnesses to defend their laws requiring abortion providers to have hospital admitting privileges. Clinics in each state have sued, saying the laws are an unconstitutional burden on a woman’s right to an abortion. Both laws are on hold pending litigation. Alabama’s law could shut down three of its five abortion clinics if it goes into effect; in Wisconsin, at least one clinic may close.
While states are not allowed to ban abortion outright under current Supreme Court precedent, they can impose regulations on abortion clinics if they show such laws further a legitimate interest, such as protecting women’s health. While that isn’t the only criterion — the burden the law put on women is also taken into account — much rests on whether the state can justify the medical basis of the law. That’s where expert witnesses come in.
Rue was involved in recruiting many of the witnesses for the trials in Wisconsin and Alabama, according to the witnesses’ testimony. Many of the same experts had been called upon to justify admitting privileges laws in other states, including in Texas, where the law has shut down over one third of the state’s abortion clinics.
One such witness was Dr. James Anderson. On the stand in Alabama, Anderson admitted that he had not actually read one of the reports cited in his own supplemental report to the court, just the one sentence he quoted. Anderson also said he had worked with Rue on several other abortion cases and that Rue had, in fact, written that supplemental report.
“I started doing that just because of time issues,” Anderson explained, referring to his collaboration with Rue. “The typing is very laborious.”
Alabama District Court Judge Myron Thompson pressed Anderson more on his connection to Rue: “You say you don’t know his employment or any organizations that he belongs to… Why do you trust him?”
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.
In 2012, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco and the Guttmacher Institute debunked a study on which Rue was a co-author. It purported to show that abortion caused mental health problems.
“Most egregiously, the study… did not distinguish between mental health outcomes that occurred before abortions and those that occurred afterward, but still claimed to show a causal link between abortion and mental disorders,” the researchers said. In other words, Rue and his co-authors blamed abortion for problems that happened before the procedure.
The editor of the Journal of Psychiatric Research, where the study originally appeared, acknowledged that it had a “flawed methodology” and that the “analysis does not support [the authors’] assertions.”
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.”









