Missouri state senator Kurt Schaefer, a Republican, wants the University of Missouri to stop Lindsay Ruhr, a graduate student in social work, from studying the impact of Missouri’s waiting period law on women’s decision about whether to have an abortion.
Missouri law makes it illegal for public employees and facilities to use state resources to “encourage or counsel” women to have abortions, and Schaefer thinks Ruhr’s research is a “marketing aid for Planned Parenthood.”
The university said Ruhr didn’t receive state scholarship or grant money for her Ph.D. dissertation project, and Ruhr says her project is an objective study and she doesn’t know what the data will show.
Maybe Schaefer, who chairs the Missouri Senate’s Sanctity of Life Committee (yes, that’s a real legislative committee!) and his fellow Republicans are afraid Ruhr’s study will prove their pet law is a waste of taxpayer resources?
Read story here. Photos: Ruhr (above left), Schaefer (below right)
Update: Schaefer is a piece of work. According to his Wikipedia biography, “In the legislature, Schaefer sponsored a measure dubbed Amendment Five that … severely restricts the state’s ability to limit gun ownership to citizens. A Missouri judge has ruled that the amendment permits felons to own guns. In the Senate, he chairs a thinly-veiled political hatchet committee inspired by misleading tapes about Planned Parenthood … called ‘The Sanctity of Life Committee’ that intimates it can use its power to threaten funding at the University of Missouri, threats that have compelled Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin to eliminate eight of nine University programs affiliated with Planned Parenthood, to terminate the University Hospital attending privileges of the Planned Parenthood physician, and those threatened actions in all likelihood precipitated the resignation of the Dean of Medicine at the University.
“… Schaefer has been accused of using his position on the Appropriations Committee of the State Legislature to strong-arm political opponents. A Sunshine Law request was made to the University of Missouri by a conservative group to determine if Schaefer threatened to lower the University’s funding if they encouraged Josh Hawley, a law professor at the University of Missouri, to run against him” for Missouri Attorney General in 2016. Apparently even conservatives don’t trust him; in 2002, he sought a Democratic endorsement for a judicial position.