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his wife, and then claimed he did it by mistake, is made an issue in this lawsuit. Dr. David Hager was the leader of the movement to deny the initial application for OTC approval of Plan B. He also was the source of the novel argument that the drug would be misused by teens. Hager is a typical Bush follower. Dr. David Hager: Lunatic, Extremist, Rapist, Bush’s Favorite Gynecologist, and the Man Who Killed “Plan B”
. . .Hager is a prominent gynecologist who is infamous for injecting his evangelical religious views - extremist to the point of being delusional - into his medical practice. He has written two books, and edited another, that promote the mingling of Christian dogma with medical practice; the most widely-remarked is a book he co-authored with his (now ex-)wife, Stress and the Woman’s Body, which prescribes reading specific religious verses as treatment for various medical ailments (PMS can apparently be cured by reading Romans 5:1-11: “Tribulation worketh patience”). He espouses a conservative Christian view of women’s roles, including that they must be submissive to men and that men are to exercise paternalistic guidance over women; he describes his own role as a gynecologist in these terms. . . .
. . . Hager’s tenure on the Committee has been as controversial as his nomination. He has continued to create roadblocks for mifepristone, and took a strong stance against over-the-counter certification for “Plan B” - the emergency contraception (or “morning after pill”) drug that has been available without prescription for years throughout most of Europe. Hager - alone - raised “safety” objections on grounds that the drug would be misused by teenagers (despite years of data from actual use in Europe which shows no such thing); in a public speech, however, he credited God with using his supposedly scientifc argument to block the drug on moral grounds. The FDA notoriously, and almost unprecedentedly, rejected the 23-4 vote of its own advisory committees in favor of approval of the drug for OTC sale, and has refused to issue an official ruling on the matter. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists referred to this action as a “dark stain on the reputation of an evidence-based agency like the FDA.” Another member of the Committee stated that “I’ve been on this committee…for almost four years, and I would take this to be the safest product that we have seen brought before us.” Hager, naturally, was one of the 4 dissenting votes on the issue.
. . . Hager’s brand of relgious-delusional intrusiveness into women’s sex lives is exactly what the Bush administration likes to see. This week, though, The Nation magazine released a devastating expose of Hager by Ayelish McGarvey, detailing both his disgustingly violent, in fact criminal, abuse of his ex-wife, the truly repulsive extent to which his contempt for women pervades his personal life, and the unknown role he played in the FDA’s failure to certify Plan B after the advisory committee approved it. Hager was long-known to be misogynistic, paternalistic, anti-sex, a roadblock to appropriate birth-control policy and availaibility, and just plain weird. We now know that he is a rapist, psychologically abusive, deeply disturbed about sex, and that he wields behind-the-scenes influence at the FDA that allowed him to single-handedly, secretly, block the Plan B approval.
The entire article is revelatory; go read it. Excerpts:
Rape
(Linda Carruth) Davis (formerly Linda Hager, David Hager’s wife and co-author) alleges that between 1995 and their divorce in 2002, Hager repeatedly sodomized her without her consent. Several sources on and off the record confirmed that she had told them it was the sexual and emotional abuse within their marriage that eventually forced her out. “I probably wouldn’t have objected so much, or felt it was so abusive if he had just wanted normal (vaginal) sex all the time,” she explained to me. “But it was the painful, invasive, totally nonconsensual nature of the (anal) sex that was so horrible.” . . .
Linda Hager, as she was still known at the time, was sinking into a deep depression, she says. Though her marriage had been dead for nearly a decade, she could not see her way clear to divorce; she had no money of her own and few marketable skills. But life with David Hager had grown unbearable. As his public profile increased, so did the tension in their home, which she says periodically triggered episodes of abuse. “I would be asleep,” she recalls, “and since (the sodomy) was painful and threatening, I woke up. Sometimes I acquiesced once he had started, just to make it go faster, and sometimes I tried to push him off…. I would (confront) David later, and he would say, ‘You asked me to do that,’ and I would say, ‘No, I never asked for it.’” . . .
Sex was always a source of conflict in the marriage. Though it wasn’t emotionally satisfying for her, Davis says she soon learned that sex could “buy” peace with Hager after a long day of arguing, or insure his forgiveness after she spent too much money. “Sex was coinage; it was a commodity,” she said. Sometimes Hager would blithely shift from vaginal to anal sex. Davis protested. “He would say, ‘Oh, I didn’t mean to have anal sex with you; I can’t feel the difference,’” Davis recalls incredulously. “And I would say, ‘Well then, you’re in the wrong business.’” . . .
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20050530&s=mcgarvey http://www.leanleft.com/archives/2005/05/12/4205 / As I said above, Hager is a typical Bush follower. |
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