WHAT PART OF "NO" DOES PRESIDENT BUSH NOT UNDERSTAND?
On November 7, voters telegraphed their dissatisfaction with faith-based reproductive health policy and reached beyond ideology to embrace common sense. South Dakotans, aided in their fight by NARAL Pro-Choice Missouri’s volunteers on the ground, rejected the total ban on abortion that their legislature and governor had given them. Anti-choice ballot initiatives were defeated in California and Oregon, too. Kansans retired right-wing crusading attorney general Phill Kline, who was subpoenaing the private medical records of women who had abortions until a court stopped him. Pro-choice candidates defeated anti-choice hardliners in the five states where the anti-choicers were running hard on the issue, including here in Missouri, where incumbent Jim Talent emphasized his vote to confirm Justice Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court despite Alito’s opinion that a married woman should get her husband’s permission to have an abortion.
The president pledged a bipartisan approach to governing in the wake of his electoral rebuke, then promptly re-nominated six Far Right judicial nominees, trying to sneak them in before the new, improved Congress takes office in January. And then he made the un-humble pie a la mode by nominating Dr. Eric Keroack to head the federal family-planning program, known as Title X.
Dr. Keroack is no longer Board-certified as an OB/GYN, but he serves on the advisory board for the Abstinence Clearinghouse and also helped to develop guidelines for federally funded sex-ed grants that mandate the teaching of abstinence-only curricula and prohibit any education about contraception. Dr. Keroack also served as the director of an organization that operates so-called “crisis pregnancy centers”—in reality, quasi-clinics who try to convince women that birth control is “demeaning to women, degrading of human sexuality, and adverse to human health and happiness.”
Dr. Keroack also adheres to the scientifically untenable theory that a woman’s ability to produce [the hormone] oxytocin decreases if she has multiple sexual partners during her life, rather than one male partner—thereby interfering with her ability to “bond” with one mate through the chemical properties of oxytocin. This decidedly odd theory, if correct, would mean that women who had sex with more than one partner would never be able to bond with children to whom they gave birth, since oxytoxin is known to play a role in initial mother-child bonding after childbirth.
Even Richard Nixon supported family planning. It was he who signed Title X into law, providing millions of women who have no other access to family planning with this vital federal resource.
Clearly, President Bush wasn’t listening to what Americans said on November 7. Americans do not want faith-based reproductive health policy. Please, let the President know you’re still talking, and while you’re at it, let Department of Health and Human Services Secretary [Mike?] Leavitt know that Dr. Keroack is a wrongheaded and divisive choice to head the Title X program. Call the President at 202-456-1414, and drop Mr. Leavitt a line here.
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