title:  SCOTUS Ruling On Texas’ Abortion Law Was Based In Actual Science That Texas GOP Wanted Buried
text: The GOP s anti-science stance is helping them do nothing but spiral ever farther out into the stratosphere, while people who actually understand and trust science are still firmly grounded. The Supreme Court struck down Texas  restrictive abortion law, but they didn t make that ruling without taking a lot of facts into account. Many of those facts were science   something the GOP absolutely abhors.The ruling attacked Texas lawmakers for their sorry lack of those facts. The dissent from Justices Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Samuel Alito seemed to focus more on defining the word  right,  and the definition of  undue burden  than it did on whether the law actually had a negative effect on Texas women.Thomas even went so far as to say: Moreover, by second-guessing medical evidence and making its own assessments of  quality of care  issues, the majority reappoints this Court as  the country s ex officio medical board with powers to disapprove medical and operative practices and standards throughout the United States.' That isn t what happened. There s this thing called  expert witnesses,  and they testified on this case. Expert witnesses exist because judges can t be expected to know everything about everything. Breyer s opinion cited data, along with expert testimony, as the reason for why the court voted to strike the law down.As for where some of those experts came from? A team of researchers from the University of Texas has been looking hard at the effects of that law since it went into effect in 2013. They studied everything from abortion access in rural areas to Twitter traffic, and they found that the law did, indeed, restrict access to abortion. That just makes women decide to try and end their pregnancies themselves, and all this research points to that actually happening in Texas.The Texas GOP didn t like that at all. One of the reasons the GOP is so anti-science is because science often contradicts their policies, making them look like the dogmatic morons they are. Texas even went so far as to pressure their head of health research to resign because of this: Texas Republicans often said the researchers  math didn t check out. When one unflattering study in February suggested that funding cuts to Planned Parenthood restricted access to women s health care, the state s head of health research resigned under pressure from GOP lawmakers, who questioned his contributions to a  deeply flawed and highly political report.' To fire a state official for cooperating with scientific research that leads away from what you think, you re working to bury the research. That s what this was.When conservatives say,  I m not a scientist, and neither are you,  they re really just dodging the issue entirely. Sometimes, they re even shirking responsibility for the effects of, oh, say, a bad law like this one.  I m not a scientist, and neither are you,  is nothing more than cowardice.The sheer volume of research that came out of Texas doesn t exist in other states, and pro-choice groups have been jumping on this for obvious reasons. But conservatives are increasingly anti-science and anti-education. They wouldn t have tried to bury this if that weren t true.Featured image by Pete Marovich/Getty Images