Police Break Up Public Citizen Press Conference Criticizing HHS for Unethical Study
By Sam Jewler,
CitizenVox
| 08. 28. 2013
I’ve been in tense police-protester situations before, but generally in more of a civil disobedience context. It was the last thing I expected at a press conference with renowned doctors in suits and a family with a six-year-old daughter who has cerebral palsy.
But that’s what happened today when we held a press conference outside of the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), where a public forum was convened to
discuss revelations
we publicized last spring of an HHS-funded study that put premature infants at great risk without fully informing their parents of the dangers.
As we set up our minimal props for the press conference, we were informed that we were on government property and would have to move elsewhere. We briefly debated with the security guards the difference between “government property” and “public property,” but that didn’t go very far. (Side note: Can I pay less in federal taxes now that I know I can’t put up a sign and speak to reporters in front of federal buildings?) The guards went inside, so...
Related Articles
By Emma McDonald Kennedy
| 10.29.2026
At the beginning of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s blockbuster documentary You Can See Everything, Billy Evans (partner of Theranos founder and convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes), says that they decided to do the film for one purpose: “radical transparency.” As they work on “Theranos 2.0,” Evans and Holmes want to show the public that she has been misunderstood –– painted as a liar and a fraud in the public imagination (and the courts) despite, as she claims in the...
By Jennifer Denbow, Guest Contributor
| 10.29.2026
Almost every day I am reminded that we are in the midst of a fertility panic. Whether it’s the Vice President exhorting Americans to have more babies or The New York Times running yet another story about the fertility cliff, fear about falling fertility rates is everywhere. While centrally concerned with declining rates of childbearing, Anna Louie Sussman’s new book, Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty, is a welcome antidote to the panic.
Sussman has written...
By Jan Grue, The Guardian | 10.27.2026
For a very long time, I dreamed of being cured. I was born in 1981. I learned to walk early enough, but I stumbled and fell more easily than other children. My parents began to worry that something was wrong...
By staff, We Are Egg Donors | 10.21.2026
Michelle Lambrechts is a police officer and one-time egg donor in Belgium. She is also the founder of Ik Zit Met Een Ei, a Belgian nonprofit that advocates for egg donors. (The name is a Dutch play on words...