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The veil over the Bush administration's war on women's reproductive health was pulled back recently by the president's own former surgeon general. When Richard H. Carmora told Congress he was muzzled by the administration when he wanted to speak out on issues of sex and science, he highlighted one of the news media's major failures over the past seven years.
The ideological matrix into which the administration has tried to cram science policy should have been one of the biggest stories in the nation. But the press failed its women readers in particular (and their children).
While one issue, stem cell research, did become a big story, the news media overall often failed to focus on a larger pattern, the almost unprecedented, across-the-board rejection of mainstream science by a U.S. president.
The issues over reproductive health, most of which were central mainly to women, flew well below the surface of the mainstream media. Checking through Lexis-Nexis, it is surprising to discover how big stories on the issue were more often featured in the British and Canadian media than in the United States.
One of the early salvos in this war was little noticed by the press. On Christmas Eve, 2002, in a stealth move, Bush named 11 members to a standing advisory committee of the FDA on reproductive health -- four were antiabortion advocates with a record of opposing reproductive drugs approved by the FDA. One appointee in particular worried mainstream scientists.
Dr. David Hager, a gynecologist, objected to oral contraceptives because he says that they provide a "convenient way for young people to be sexually active outside marriage" and wrote a book with his wife that recommends Bible readings and prayers for such ailments as premenstrual syndrome.
Not surprisingly, Hager was one of four FDA panel members who voted against making emergency contraceptive pills (known as plan B) available over the counter. In 2004, The Bush administration reversed a 23-4 vote in favor of the measure taken by its own FDA panel of scientists, who found the "morning-after" pill a safe and effective way to avoid unwanted pregnancies and to prevent hundreds of thousands of abortions.
One of the issues the former surgeon general told Congress he was instructed to avoid was plan B. Emergency contraception only became legal because of the muscle of two women senators, Hillary Clinton and Patty Murray. They held up Bush's nominee to be FDA commissioner until the administration caved and approved its own panel's recommendation.
Even information about birth control was targeted by the Bush administration. The National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control websites were told to remove information about the effectiveness of condoms from their websites, replacing it with pro-abstinence propaganda.
See more stories tagged with: contraception, bush administration, reproductive rights
Boston University journalism professor Caryl Rivers is the author of Selling Anxiety: How the News Media Scare Women (University Press of New England).
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