The appointment of Eric Keroack of Marblehead, MA as the new chief of family-planning programs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has driven liberals wild.
Pro-Aborts Outraged at HHS Appointment
The editors of the pro-abortion Chicago Sun-Times, for example, put it this way:
You would have to search far and wide to find someone more ardently opposed to birth control and other women’s rights than Dr. Eric Keroack, for whom any sex education beyond abstinence counseling is a no-no.
As medical director for A Woman’s Concern, an extremist group of pregnancy health centers in Boston, he supports their decree that the manufacture and distribution of birth control is ‘demeaning to women, degrading of human sexuality and adverse to human health and happiness.’
Difficult as it is to believe, President Bush has made Keroack head of the nation’s family planning program. As deputy assistant secretary for population affairs, a position that does not require confirmation, Keroack is in charge of distributing Title X of the Public Health Service Act, which for decades has offered contraceptive services to women who need them.
One can only imagine how this proselytizer of abstinence will spend the $283 million in Title X programs [translation: contraception].
The Sun-Times says 98 percent of women use contraceptives, that just about everybody in America favors only candidates who support women’s reproductive health rights, and that George Bush has slapped us all in the face with an appointment that could not be more divisive.
The Sun-Times ends its editorial with the tired old lie that “The irony, of course, is that the more contraception is available, the fewer abortions there will be.”
Two months ago the Pro-Life Action League presented eight experts on contraception who put the lie to the notion that contraception prevents abortion because contraception prevents pregnancy. The Sun-Times could have sent a reporter to the conference to learn that contraceptive use only increases abortion. The Chicago Tribune had the good sense to send a reporter to this once-in-a-lifetime conference. The Sun-Times didn’t.
Contraception Increases Abortion
But for the record, here are a few quotes even from the abortion crowd:
- “The highest frequency of induced abortions is in the group which most frequently uses contraception”—Abortionist Alfred Kinsey.
- “As people turn to contraception, there will be a rise in the abortion rate”—Abortionist Malcolm Potts
- “There is overwhelming evidence that the provision of contraception leads to an increase in the abortion rate”—Abortionist Judith Bury.
The national media have reported only recently that studies show more than half the women having abortions were on some form of contraception when they got pregnant. How did the Sun-Times editors happen to miss that story?
But it will be interesting to see just how the new Bush appointment will handle his job. He could do the world a world of good by cutting off Planned Parenthood without a cent.
Ebineezer Daley
Back here in Chicago the Daley Administration shot itself in the foot again by denying New Line Cinema a venue for showing clips of its new movie “The Nativity Story,” a rendering of the trip of Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem.
First the city fathers complained that non-Christians might feel bad if they saw a movie about Mary and Joseph and the Christ Child at a festival called Christkindlmarket, which means the Christ Child Market. That didn’t make any sense so they changed their alibi to “it was too commercial”—out there where shops from all over the world were selling goods at marked up prices.
It didn’t seem to bother the powers in City Hall that twenty-eight other cities had allowed The Nativity Story to be shown with no problems, and that Chicago was the only chicken out of the twenty-nine who were approached to show the film.
Bill O’Reilly called it silly, and most commentaries we’ve read simply say something like, “What did you expect from the Daley Administration? No guts.”