Free Republic

In a June 12 letter to the House Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources, Monty Patterson, the father of 18-year-old Holly Patterson, who died in 2003 after taking the abortion pill RU-486, has accused a former official of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of deliberately leaving out her associations with pro-abortion advocacy groups in her testimony on RU-486. “I question if there are ethical issues and a potential conflict of interest surrounding Susan F. Wood, Ph.D., testifying at the Subcommittee Hearing on May 17, 2006,” Patterson wrote. Formerly Assistant Commissioner for Women’s Health at the...

Late last October Dr. W. David Hager, a prominent obstetrician-gynecologist and Bush Administration appointee to the Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs in the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), took to the pulpit as the featured speaker at a morning service. He stood in the campus chapel at Asbury College, a small evangelical Christian school nestled among picturesque horse farms in the small town of Wilmore in Kentucky's bluegrass region. Hager is an Asburian nabob; his elderly father is a past president of the college, and Hager himself currently sits on his alma mater's board of trustees. Even the school's...

President Bush has announced his plan to select Dr. W. David Hager to head up the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee. The committee has not met for more than two years, during which time its charter lapsed. As a result, the Bush Administration is tasked with filling all eleven positions with new members. This position does not require Congressional approval. The FDA's Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee makes crucial decisions on matters relating to drugs used in the practice of obstetrics, gynecology and related specialties, including hormone therapy, contraception, treatment for infertility, and medical alternatives...

The celibacy struggle Many teens don't keep abstinence pledges; others redefine what 'sex' is By Mary Meehan HERALD-LEADER ARTS WRITER Abstinence pledges -- signed commitments that teenagers will not have sex before marriage -- might be less than effective, a recent study says. And more than half the teens in a recent study said a person should still be considered abstinent after engaging in oral sex. Those are the results of a Northern Kentucky University survey of nearly 600 teens. According to the survey, 61 percent of those who had taken abstinence pledges had broken them within a year. Of...

Can a doctor have religious convictions? Does having religious convictions disqualify him for public service?These are not theoretical questions from a college ethics class. They are questions some doctors are asking themselves after reading the press attacks on a potential candidate for an FDA advisory committee last week. Dr. W. David Hager, a doctor and professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Kentucky, was the subject of a piece in Time magazine by Karen Tumulty titled "Jesus and the FDA." Dr. Hager, it would seem, is a "Jesus freak" (my words, not Tumulty's) who wants to reverse...