WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – The Trump administration has canceled funding for a follow-up to a notorious research project behind many of the abortion lobby’s false narratives, sparking outrage among activists.
A long list of U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) grants terminated so far in 2025 includes $538,719 to the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF), of which $126,042.69 had been spent, to examine the “health and economic consequences of changing federal and state policies on reproductive health.”
The 19th reported that the grant was for researcher Diana Greene Foster, whose new project was intended as a follow-up to her work on the Turnaway Study, an infamous project by UCSF’s Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH), which for years abortion activists and their allies have cited as proof that the vast majority of women do not regret their abortions, whereas being denied the ability to dispose of their children causes a litany of health and financial woes.
“It is very likely that certain types of people are less likely to be able to get a wanted abortion. And I think that includes people who experience pregnancy complications and are too sick to travel across state lines,” Foster said. “Some cases make the newspapers, but only systematic study can tell us how often it happens, quantify the added health risks of the law and help us understand how to mitigate the harms.”
“Our study would rigorously examine how state abortion bans — with and without health exceptions — affect treatment of medical emergencies, like preterm, pre-labor rupture of membranes, preeclampsia and ectopic pregnancy, through surveys and interviews with physicians in emergency departments across the U.S.,” she added.
The 19th said Foster received a letter from HHS’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) explaining that “(r)esearch programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans,” and that Foster had anticipated receiving a total of $2.5 million over a five-year period. She is now “madly” trying to replace the funding through private donations.
While left-wing outlets frame the story as a tragic blow to legitimate and important science, the Turnaway Study long faced accusations of serious methodological problems and biases.
In 2022, the journal Frontiers in Psychology published a study by Professor Priscilla Coleman of Bowling Green State University’s College of Education & Human Development panning Turnaway as a “case of self-correction in science upended by political motivation and unvetted findings.” Frontiers later retracted the study under pressure from left-wing critics, but while its retraction notice claims Coleman had unspecified, “undisclosed competing interests,” it does not identify errors in her methodology or findings.
Coleman noted that UCSF’s “reproductive health” work was funded in large part by pro-abortion billionaire Warren Buffett for the express purpose of creating an air of “high level of medical certainty” about abortion’s safety and outcomes for women in direct response to legal precedent that “medical and scientific uncertainty” justifies state legislatures’ “wide discretion” in abortion policies.
“The final sample of 516 participants amounts to a miniscule 0.32% of the total abortions performed at the 29 facilities over three years if the high end 162,000 figure for the population is used,” Coleman noted. “At 50% (81,000), the percentage only jumps to .64%, and at 10% (16,200), the percentage is 3.18%. The Turnaway Study researchers attempted to make generalized claims about women seeking abortion when the study itself likely did not even consider over 95% of women receiving abortions at the facilities included in the study.”
Coleman explained that “there are many potentially systematic reasons women may not have been screened in or approached that have relevance to the outcome measures. There are also numerous reasons women may themselves have chosen not to participate or dropped out after agreeing to participate. They could have been upset or worried about privacy, because a longitudinal design requires repeated contact with participants. Women whose voices were not represented are logically among those with the most significant mental health complications, because revisiting the experience may have been perceived as too stressful or traumatic (Adler, 1976; Söderberg et al., 1998a). In one of the Turnaway studies led by Rocca et al. (2015), the investigators noted that participants most likely to be retained had among the highest rates of relief at baseline; whereas those with the lowest levels of relief at baseline were most likely to drop out before the 3rd year decision satisfaction measure was administered.”
The Trump administration has taken aim at many left-wing uses of taxpayer dollars, including pro-abortion and pro-censorship activity through The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda” through the National Science Foundation, and billions to left-wing “green energy” nonprofits through the Environmental Protection Agency.