State-Sanctioned Propaganda

And Kansas's Kris Kobach's Hypocrisy

Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach is a hypocrite, but we knew that already (or at least suspected it given his status as a middle-aged, white, Republican election official).

Kobach filed a lawsuit against Pfizer last week that argues the pharmaceutical giant deliberately misrepresented the safety and efficacy of its COVID-19 vaccine. At the same time, Kobach is the defendant in a lawsuit that argues the state of Kansas deliberately misrepresented the safety and efficacy of abortion.

I do not have the time or expertise (legal or medical) to truly assess the validity of Kobach’s 179-page complaint against Pfizer. I will say that much of it seems to ignore the reality of the COVID-19 pandemic. People were dying and we were all locked in our houses. The research behind this vaccine was not going to be done as slowly and methodically as it would have under different circumstances.

I will also say that parts of the complaint read like a classic GOP conspiracy theory. Like when Kobach writes, “…Pfizer kept its COVID-19 vaccine’s true effects hidden by destroying the control group participating in its vaccine trial.” No, big pharma didn’t have people killed or burn documents. At least not this time. Once it became clear that the vaccine was safe and effective, Pfizer offered it to the 21,000 people who had enrolled in the study and were randomly assigned to get the placebo. This might not have been ideal for long-term research, but it very well might have been lifesaving for the people who volunteered to be lab rats for the sake of the rest of us. This is not the first study in which researchers have decided the ethical thing to do was to stop the study and offer whatever intervention was being reviewed to the control group. 

Granted, there are parts of the complaint that make Pfizer and its execs seem a little suspect. If Kobach’s facts are in order, the company is still sitting on at least one data set it promised to share years ago, and the CEO made at least one questionable stock sale.

I am grateful to all the scientists—including those employed by Pfizer—who made the vaccine possible. A 2022 analysis by the Commonwealth Fund found that vaccines prevented 18 million hospitalizations and 3 million deaths in the U.S. alone. They also allowed us to get on with our lives so that my kids could have a childhood and I could hug my parents. But maybe Pfizer deserves to be sued anyhow. I don’t know.

Honestly, most of Kobach’s complaint just makes Pfizer sound like a greedy pharmaceutical company that is being run by rich guys who would prefer no government oversight and sometimes put profit over people. We knew that, but isn’t that exactly the kind of unregulated capitalism that Republicans love?

I’m not here to defend big pharma. I’m just here to call Kris Kobach a hypocrite, because Kansas does indeed have a law that forces doctors to give out exactly the kind of misinformation he’s accusing Pfizer of peddling.

The Woman’s Right to Know Act, a name that can be described as ironic at best, was passed in 1997 and added on to whenever legislators got a new idea about how to make abortions harder to get. The WRKA created state-sponsored propaganda in the form of a pamphlet, a video, and posters which providers are required to hand out, turn on, and prominently display. Like all good propaganda, these materials push other options, tug at the heartstrings, distort reality, and outright lie.

Patients are told that pregnancy starts at fertilization and that “abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being.” While this is an opinion some religions espouse, medicine says pregnancy starts at implantation and focuses on when a fetus can viably live outside the womb rather than the amorphous question of when life begins.

The law spells out numerous “facts” about early fetal development that must be shared with patients. Women are to be told that “eight weeks after fertilization, except for the small size, the developing human’s overall appearance and many internal structures closely resemble the newborn” and that “many common daily activities seen in children and adults begin in the womb.” The materials must also note that developing humans feel pain and remind potential parents about the miracle of the fetal heartbeat that can be heard on the ultrasound. 

It like a warped version of the “Stars—They’re Just Like Us” section of Us Weekly. A picture of Taylor Swift at a supermarket does not mean she does her own shopping or cooks her own dinner every night any more than a faux heartbeat means a clump of cells the size of a grain of rice is a fully formed person.

Anyone who has ever seen an ultrasound knows that well past eight weeks, a fetus looks more like an alien than a human baby, and they’re not hanging out in the womb smoking cigars or playing canasta. By now, we should all also know that fetuses don’t have heartbeats because they don’t yet have a heart. Ultrasounds pick up electrical activity in tissue that will become part of the heart, and the machine amplifies the sound into something that resembles a heartbeat.

The discussion of embryonic and fetal development required by the WRKA was evaluated by a panel of specialists in human anatomy. They found that 43.4% of the statements on this topic were medically inaccurate.

The law also forces doctors to lie to patients about abortion itself. Patients are told that abortion is linked to future fertility issues and breast cancer despite years of evidence to the contrary. In addition, one of the newest amendments to the law would require providers who offer medication abortion to display a false statement suggesting that the procedure might not work and can be reversed in the middle if a person changes their mind.

There is no abortion reversal procedure, and women don’t change their minds halfway through. Contrary to what the GOP might think, we are capable of making decisions despite having a uterus.

In addition to propaganda, the WRKA makes patients who want abortions—and the providers who want to offer them—jump through more hoops than a trained seal. (“You get a fish.”) The law requires a 24-hour waiting period between seeing a provider and getting an abortion. Again, because we uterus-havers can’t possible have made up our minds. In addition to being patronizing as f**k, the waiting period is a logistical nightmare for people who live far away from a clinic, especially if they don’t have the resources to get a hotel room.

The Kansas legislature managed to make the waiting period even more onerous in recent years by forcing patients to wait an extra half hour after seeing a doctor before they can give consent for the abortion. There is no value in this added requirement, it is just meant to make it harder for clinics and their patients. 

But wait, it gets worse. A new amendment to the WRKA would require that patients read the propaganda material at least 24 hours before their appointment. The law goes as far as to specify what font and color the material needs to be written in. In case you were wondering, it’s Times New Roman, 12 pt, black on white paper. (To quote a friend, “It should have been Comic Sans because that’s the font of clowns.”) To prove that they’ve read this, patients must bring a printout of the document with them to their appointment. Clinics have had to turn patients away for not having this piece of paper even if they’ve traveled long distances to get to their appointment. This is absurd given that our society is increasingly becoming paperless and many people no longer have printers.

Abortion politics in Kansas are complicated. The Republican-dominated legislature would like to restrict abortion as much as possible. The Democratic governor—who beat Kobach himself in 2018—is decidedly pro-choice. The Kansas Supreme Court struck down an abortion ban in 2019 not because Roe was still standing but because the justices believe the state’s constitution includes a right to bodily autonomy that extends to abortion. And in 2022, the voters themselves struck down an attempt to remove abortion rights from their constitution.  

While abortion remains largely legal in Kansas through 22 weeks of pregnancy, the legislature continues to create laws like the WRKA designed to make abortions harder to get. It passed a bunch of these laws recently and had enough of a Republican majority to override the governor’s veto. 

Last year, the Center for Reproductive Rights and Planned Parenthood sued Kris Kobach in his official capacity as attorney general on behalf of providers in the state. In October, Johnson County District Judge Krishnan Christopher Jayaram granted a temporary injunction against several of the provisions in the WRKA, including the poster advertising medication abortion reversal, the need to print information 24-hours before a procedure, and the sanctioning of misinformation about abortion causing breast cancer and infertility. Judge Jayaram wrote:

The Act appears to be a thinly veiled effort to stigmatize the procedure and instill fear in patients that are contemplating an abortion, such that they make an alternative choice, based upon disproven and unsupportable claims.  

The lawsuit is ongoing, and the plaintiffs recently added a challenge to a newly passed amendment that would require providers to ask patients why they wanted an abortion and report that information to the state.

Kobach is not the first attorney general to sue Pfizer for lying. He’s not the first attorney general to sanction state-sponsored lies about abortion. He might be the first attorney general to do both at the same time. Then again, he might not. Any way you look at it, though, Kris Kobach is a hypocrite.