Limiting
Family Planning For The Poor
By Gene Gerard
22 November, 2006
Countercurrents.org
Last week President Bush appointed
Dr. Eric Keroack to serve as the Assistant Secretary of Health and Human
Services for Population Affairs. This position is primarily responsible
for overseeing the Office of Family Planning, which is charged with
providing access to contraceptive information and supplies to low-income
individuals. But Dr. Keroack has a long-standing opposition to contraception
and abortion. Through this appointment, President Bush will severely
limit contraceptive information and choices to many of America’s
poorest women.
Dr. Keroack was previously the medical director of “A Woman’s
Concern,” a non-profit organization operating crisis-pregnancy
centers in Massachusetts. According to its literature, A Woman’s
Concern works to encourage “abortion-vulnerable women” to
go through with their pregnancies. The organization characterizes contraceptives
as “demeaning to women.” Consequently, A Woman’s Concern
doesn’t provide information regarding birth control at its clinics,
and advocates sexual abstinence until marriage.
It appears as if Dr. Keroack’s chief qualification, in the eyes
of President Bush, for his new position is his strong support for abstinence-only
sex education. In a presentation at the 2003 International Abstinence
Leadership Conference he indicated, “Pre-Marital Sex is really
modern germ warfare.” And in 2004, while criticizing the American
Medical Association’s support for comprehensive sex education,
Dr. Keroack proclaimed, “For the first time, we have found a high
quality sexual education that has actually begun to reverse these deadly
trends – abstinence education. Why would we want to stop it?”
Since taking office the Bush administration has channeled more than
$600 million into abstinence-until-marriage sex education programs.
Yet no scientific study to date has demonstrated that curriculums that
only promote abstinence actually curtail teenage sex. In 2001 the National
Institute of Child Health and Human Development released a monumental
study of approximately 100,000 teenagers who had taken an abstinence
pledge. The study found that after 18 months most broke the pledge by
engaging in sexual intercourse. And since they didn’t plan on
doing so, the majority failed to use contraception.
Still, Dr. Keroack has maintained, “Abstinence education is the
first mechanism that has actually made a positive impact on the devastation
caused by the errant sexual education programs of the 1970s and 1980s.”
But there’s simply no evidence to support this. Last year, the
Texas Department of Health conducted a review of abstinence-only sex
education programs in that state. The review concluded that the programs
had “little impact” on teenagers’ behavior. In fact,
the review found that girls in the ninth grade were actually five percent
more likely to engage in sex after being exposed to an abstinence-only
curriculum. And boys in the tenth grade were 15 percent more likely
to engage in sex after participating in abstinence-only classes.
The Office of Family Planning is mandated to provide a broad range of
acceptable and effective family planning methods and services. Given
this responsibility it’s troubling that A Woman’s Concern,
the pregnancy centers Dr. Keroack previously supervised, has repeatedly
been accused of deceptive practices. The attorney general for Massachusetts
has received numerous complaints in the past two years from women who
maintained that they were misled by the pregnancy centers. The complaints
indicate that women were told by A Woman’s Concern that they perform
abortions, but once the women arrived for their appointments they were
accosted and told that they were “killing [their] babies.”
Dr. Keroack used the clinics to pioneer his technique of showing ultrasound
images of fetuses to women to encourage them not to have abortions.
He previously compared this technique to car repairs. In a letter written
to the Massachusetts legislature in 2001 Dr. Keroack maintained, “Even
Midas lets you look at your old muffler before they advise you to change
it.” It’s difficult to believe that someone so biased can
impartially oversee the federal government’s provision of contraceptive
services.
Equally controversial, Dr. Keroack has compared teenage sexual activity
to drug use. In 2001 he theorized that engaging in sex prevents teenagers
from developing emotional relationships, owing to an overproduction
of the hormone oxytocin. According to a paper co-written by Dr. Keroack,
“Just as in heroine addiction, the person involved will experience
sex withdrawal and will need to move on to a new sex playmate.”
But the scientific community rejected his theory, largely because it
was not based on research conducted on teenagers, but rather on small
rodents found on the Great Plains.
The Office of Family Planning oversees a yearly budget of $288 million
and operates a national network of approximately 4,600 clinics, providing
reproductive health services to five million persons annually. For more
than 30 years these family planning clinics have played an important
role in ensuring access to contraceptive services for low-income and
uninsured women at no cost or at a reduced cost. Under the direction
of Dr. Keroack, the services and information provided by the clinics
will substantially decrease. President Bush has demonstrated a calloused
disregard for the nation’s poor with this appointment.
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