A Bad Choice, a Quick
Exit
EDITORIAL, NYTimes on
the Web, April 12, 2007
The story of Eric Keroack’s brief
stint as director of family planning programs at the Department of Health and
Human Services brings together three familiar Bush administration themes:
a disdain for women’s reproductive health and rights, the sacrifice of science
to ideology and incompetence.
Appointed in November, Dr. Keroack was always a disturbing choice to lead the
federal office that finances birth control, pregnancy tests and other health
care services for five million poor Americans. He previously was the
medical director of a private network of pregnancy counseling clinics in
Massachusetts that views the distribution of contraception as “demeaning to
women, degrading of human sexuality and adverse to human health and happiness,”
according to the group’s Web site.
Its program for dissuading women from having an abortion has included spreading
the medically inaccurate claim that having an abortion greatly increases the
risk of breast cancer. In speeches and writing, Dr. Keroack has promoted
the scientifically bereft notion that sex with multiple partners alters women’s
brain chemistry in a way that makes it hard for them to form relationships.
It turns out these were not the only reasons Dr. Keroack was unsuitable.
Last month he resigned after the Medicaid office in Massachusetts took action in
connection with his private medical practice. The details of a continuing
investigation (which someone in the White House should have discovered) are
still murky, and Dr. Keroack says he plans an appeal. In the meantime, the
administration’s ideological blinkers and shoddy process for vetting appointees
has produced yet another embarrassment.
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