[LINK] "Missouri state senator aims to block student's dissertation on abortion"
Al Jazeera America's Massoud Hayoun reports on an astonishingly brazen attempt to control education, by trying to prevent a graduate student from researching the effects of abortion bans.
A University of Missouri doctoral student plans to continue research for her dissertation on the effects of the state’s recently imposed 72-hour waiting period for abortions, despite a state legislator’s push to block the research, the student told Al Jazeera in an exclusive interview.
“I stand by my research project,” Lindsay Ruhr said Wednesday. “I feel that my research is objective, and that the whole point of my research is to understand how this policy affects women. Whether this policy is having a harmful or beneficial effect, we don’t know.”
State Sen. Kurt Schaefer, a Republican from Columbia, Missouri, who chairs the Missouri state senate’s interim Committee on the Sanctity of Life, sent a letter in late October to the University of Missouri calling Ruhr’s dissertation “a marketing aid for Planned Parenthood - one that is funded, in part or in whole, by taxpayer dollars,” according to a copy of the letter posted to HuffingtonPost.com. Schaefer called for the university to hand over documents regarding the project's approval and said that, because the University of Missouri is a public university, it should not fund research that he said would promote elective abortions. Missouri law prohibits the use of public funds to promote non-life-saving abortions.
"We are still in the process of responding to Sen. Schaefer's request for documents," Mary Jenkins, public relations manager for University of Missouri Health, said Wednesday in an email. Schaefer did not respond to Al Jazeera's multiple interview requests.
Missouri in September 2014 enacted a 72-hour wait for abortions, becoming one of several states that have restricted access to the procedure - moves that reproductive rights advocates have called legal attempts to chip away at the rights established by the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. Other legal restrictions, passed in Missouri and some other states, have required that women seeking an abortion undergo an ultrasound scan and receive informational material that abortion rights advocates say aims to dissuade women from undergoing the procedure.
A University of Missouri doctoral student plans to continue research for her dissertation on the effects of the state’s recently imposed 72-hour waiting period for abortions, despite a state legislator’s push to block the research, the student told Al Jazeera in an exclusive interview.
“I stand by my research project,” Lindsay Ruhr said Wednesday. “I feel that my research is objective, and that the whole point of my research is to understand how this policy affects women. Whether this policy is having a harmful or beneficial effect, we don’t know.”
State Sen. Kurt Schaefer, a Republican from Columbia, Missouri, who chairs the Missouri state senate’s interim Committee on the Sanctity of Life, sent a letter in late October to the University of Missouri calling Ruhr’s dissertation “a marketing aid for Planned Parenthood - one that is funded, in part or in whole, by taxpayer dollars,” according to a copy of the letter posted to HuffingtonPost.com. Schaefer called for the university to hand over documents regarding the project's approval and said that, because the University of Missouri is a public university, it should not fund research that he said would promote elective abortions. Missouri law prohibits the use of public funds to promote non-life-saving abortions.
"We are still in the process of responding to Sen. Schaefer's request for documents," Mary Jenkins, public relations manager for University of Missouri Health, said Wednesday in an email. Schaefer did not respond to Al Jazeera's multiple interview requests.
Missouri in September 2014 enacted a 72-hour wait for abortions, becoming one of several states that have restricted access to the procedure - moves that reproductive rights advocates have called legal attempts to chip away at the rights established by the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. Other legal restrictions, passed in Missouri and some other states, have required that women seeking an abortion undergo an ultrasound scan and receive informational material that abortion rights advocates say aims to dissuade women from undergoing the procedure.