Sex Science Skeptic

[JeffBooth]

One of Bush's first actions after the last election was to make one of the most irresponsible and unimaginably inappropriate appointments of his presidency. Dr. Eric Keroack was put in charge of family planning at the Department of Health and Human Services, overseeing $283 million a year in family-planning grants that help women plan their pregnancies through contraceptives and information. There is a small problem, though. Eric Keroack does not believe in birth control. Nor does he believe in abortion, or even comprehensive sex education. His previous job was medical director of an organization called A Woman’s Concern , whose official stance on birth control is that it is “demeaning to women, degrading of human sexuality, and adverse to human health and happiness.” They also believe, somewhat ironically and illogically, that it contributes to out-of-wedlock pregnancy and abortion.

The organization, which provides Christian crises pregnancy counseling, spews the typical abstinence only misinformation. While Keroack does have a medical degree, he is a quack of the first order. One of his many "theories" is that premarital sex alters brain chemistry in a way that prevents happy marriages (see our oxytocin listing in the non-scientist attacks section), despite any scientific evidence for such an incredible idea. So, a guy who is the medical expert for a lunatic fringe organization and himself a medical quack was put in charge of family planning for the United States government. Fortunately, he would not hold the job for long.

Only months later, Dr. Keroack resigned from his post. It was not his lack of qualifications or the fact that he has worked actively for an organization that strongly opposed birth control even though his new position put him in charge of birth control programs for poor women. Nor was it the fact that he refused to clarify his position on birth control, which from his record is something he strongly opposed, along with sex education. Apparently, he left to help the Bush administration avoid another scandal. The state of Massachusetts’ Office of Medicaid has taken official action against Keroack’s private practice there.