Letters to the Editor

by the Readers

Choices

The Bush administration now appears to be in full-dress battle mode against sexual and reproductive health. On the homefront, the latest attack is the possible nomination of W. David Hager, MD, to the FDA's Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee, the group that makes recommendations on the safety and effectiveness of reproductive health drugs.

Dr. Hager practices a weird mix of religion and science. He has been known to recommend specific Bible readings and prayers for PMS. (Imagine how far he'd get telling a man with erectile dysfunction to "Pray on it.") He also opposes the use of emergency contraception that prevents fertilization -- which is just what contraception is supposed to do -- because he holds the topsy-turvy view that somehow life begins before a sperm fertilizes an egg.

This is not reproductive science. It's reproductive voodoo.

Dr. Hager has no place advising and treating anyone regarding reproductive health, much less sitting on a committee making reproductive health recommendations.

This development, however, pales by comparison when one contemplates the President's global acts to undermine reproductive health. His first official act was to cripple family planning agencies throughout the world by denying them funds if they provide any information about abortion. Then, this summer, he withheld our country's congressionally authorized $34 million contribution to the United Nations Population Fund. It has been estimated that as a result of these two actions as many as 2 million unwanted pregnancies will occur, 800,000 women will induce their own abortions, and 4,700 mothers and 77,000 infants and children will die.

Now, on top of that, the administration has recently announced it is withdrawing support for the reproductive health action program adopted by the United States and 178 other countries in Cairo eight years ago. The Cairo Plan promotes the global fight against AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases; it facilitates women's ability to control their own fertility; and it encourages prevention of unwanted pregnancies.

And we now officially have walked away from all that.

Why? Because of the administration's concerns that the program's use of terms like "reproductive health services" and "reproductive health care" imply the right to abortion. While the action program does affirm that where abortions are legal, they should be safe, it does nothing like guarantee a universal right to abortion.

The administration's reneging on its commitment to the plan also sends a very powerful message that America -- official America, anyway -- is more interested in making grand, albeit destructive, gestures to support an ultra-conservative anti-abortion ideology than in real people's health and real people's lives.

I always thought the Right supported the Right to Life. But this eyes-wide-shut devotion to dogma (and the hell with the real-life consequences), this countermanding of congressional actions, this attempt to put the scientifically impaired in charge -- they all do just the opposite. They are producing a reproductive health nightmare that reeks of abject misery and certain death.

Dick Goldberg
Chestnut Hill