Hager’s true colors

W. David Hager has been outed today not only as the writer of a “minority report” that influenced the FDA’s decision not to give emergency contraception over-the-counter-status, but also as an abusive rapist. Yeah, I’m serious.
Hager, the controversial doctor who Bush appointed to the FDA’s Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs last year, was always known to be a religious misogynist. As a doctor he was known to give demeaning ‘ethical lectures’ before prescribing birth control to unmarried women and wrote a book recommending Scripture readings to treat PMS. (So you can imagine how pleased us pro-choicers were with his appointment to the advisory committee.)
The Nation’s recent article on Hager, Dr. Hager’s Family Values, reveals offenses much worse than diatribes on the bible and menstruation.
Linda Carruth Davis [Hager’s former wife of thirty-two years]…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.”
Read the whole article; it details emotional, financial and sexual abuse that Hager subjected his wife to for years. It’s completely appalling.
In less horrifying (but still disturbing) news on Hager, both The Nation and The Washington Post report on the doctor/rapist’s role in keeping emergency contraception from going over-the-counter:
In his sermon at Asbury College last fall, Hager proudly recounted his role in the Plan B decision. “After two days of hearings,” he said, “the committees voted to approve this over-the-counter sale by 23 to 4. I was asked to write a minority opinion that was sent to the commissioner of the FDA…. Now the opinion I wrote was not from an evangelical Christian perspective…. But I argued it from a scientific perspective, and God took that information, and He used it through this minority report to influence the decision.”
I’m speechless.
Pandagon and Echidne also have the story.