Keroack resigns

Dr. Eric Keroack resigned abruptly only four months after President George Bush appointed the anti-birth control zealot to head the country’s $283 million family planning program.

Keroack is a non-board-certified obstetrician/gynecologist who operates six Christian anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy” centers in Massachusetts and who opposes contraception and comprehensive sex education.

Though reproductive rights organizations mounted a strong exposé of Keroack as outrageously unqualified for the job—a proverbial fox in a chicken coop—Keroack resigned on March 29 only after the office of Medicaid in Massachusetts leveled charges against him.

In fact, this past January, Keroack received “two formal warnings from the Massachusetts board of medicine ordering him to refrain from prescribing drugs to people who are not his patients and from providing mental health counseling without proper training.” (Boston Globe)

Bush’s appointment of Keroack was a blatantly misogynist, racist, anti-poor attack on the reproductive rights of more than 17 million women, disproportionately women of color, who rely on the federal Title X program for family planning and birth control services.

Leaders of several groups supporting reproductive rights immediately called for Bush to appoint, in the words of Planned Parenthood head Cecile Richards, “a legitimate mainstream public health expert who supports family planning and access to birth control.” She noted, “The nation’s family planning program should be run by a champion for women’s health and safety.” (PP press release, March 29)

Because Title X funds have been cut back severely during Bush’s administration, legislators who support reproductive rights are pushing the Prevention First Act, which seeks to dramatically expand access to family planning services by increasing funding to $385 million.

Coverage would include emergency contraception and comprehensive, medically accurate sex education. The stipulation of “medically accurate” sex education is critical. The federal government began funding $50 million for an abstinence-only program after the Clinton administration destroyed the welfare safety net for poor women.

But now under Bush, that has mushroomed into a $176 million program, and Bush wants to push it to $191 million in the 2008 budget. Abstinence-only is the only type of sex education currently funded by the federal government. However, an April 15 New York Times article reported that results of a study mandated by Congress showed that “students who participated in sexual abstinence programs were just as likely to have sex as those who did not.”

That corroborated a 2006 General Accountability Office study that concluded such programs had not proven effective and often contained inaccurate information about such things as condoms and HIV/AIDS.

Already this year six states have opted out of the federal program. Ohio, Connecticut, Montana, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Wisconsin recently joined California in turning down thousands of dollars because they don’t choose to comply with federal rules restricting discussion of contraceptives. (Los Angeles Times, April 8)

It’s interesting to note that from 1995 to 2002, teen pregnancy rates dropped 24 percent, according to a study by Columbia University and the Guttmacher Institute. The report, published in the American Journal of Public Health in January, attributed 14 percent of the decline to teens waiting longer to have sex and the rest to contraception use.