Dr. David Hager: Lunatic, Extremist, Rapist, Bush’s Favorite Gynecologist, and the Man Who Killed “Plan B” by KTK

Healthcare policy-watchers have long been aghast at Bush’s appointment of Dr. David Hager to the FDA’s Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee. Hager is a prominent gynecologist who is infamous for injecting his evangelical religious views – extremist to the point of being delusional – into his medical practice. He has written two books, and edited another, that promote the mingling of Christian dogma with medical practice; the most widely-remarked is a book he co-authored with his (now ex-)wife, Stress and the Woman’s Body, which prescribes reading specific religious verses as treatment for various medical ailments (PMS can apparently be cured by reading Romans 5:1-11: “Tribulation worketh patience”). He espouses a conservative Christian view of women’s roles, including that they must be submissive to men and that men are to exercise paternalistic guidance over women; he describes his own role as a gynecologist in these terms. He refuses to prescribe or make available some forms of birth control, and either refuses to prescribe or attempts to discourage his unmarried female patients from using birth control at all. He led a right-wing Christian protest effort against FDA approval of mifepristone (RU-486, the medical-abortion drug); for this effort he was nominated by Bush as Chair of the FDA Reproductive Drugs Committee in 2002.

His nomination provoked a firestorm of criticism. Bush then secretly appointed him to the Committee as a regular member, not the Chair, which evaded the need for Congressional approval; the appointment was announced on Christmas Eve, ensuring that it would not be covered in the press. Hager’s tenure on the Committee has been as controversial as his nomination. He has continued to create roadblocks for mifepristone, and took a strong stance against over-the-counter certification for “Plan B” – the emergency contraception (or “morning after pill”) drug that has been available without prescription for years throughout most of Europe. Hager – alone – raised “safety” objections on grounds that the drug would be misused by teenagers (despite years of data from actual use in Europe which shows no such thing); in a public speech, however, he credited God with using his supposedly scientifc argument to block the drug on moral grounds. The FDA notoriously, and almost unprecedentedly, rejected the 23-4 vote of its own advisory committees in favor of approval of the drug for OTC sale, and has refused to issue an official ruling on the matter. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists referred to this action as a “dark stain on the reputation of an evidence-based agency like the FDA.” Another member of the Committee stated that “I’ve been on this committee…for almost four years, and I would take this to be the safest product that we have seen brought before us.” Hager, naturally, was one of the 4 dissenting votes on the issue.

Hager is up for re-appointment to the Committee next month. The pro-choice, reality-based community is even more opposed to him than before, but expected him to retain his seat, given that it does not require Congressional approval and that Hager’s brand of relgious-delusional intrusiveness into women’s sex lives is exactly what the Bush administration likes to see. This week, though, The Nation magazine released a devastating expose of Hager by Ayelish McGarvey, detailing both his disgustingly violent, in fact criminal, abuse of his ex-wife, the truly repulsive extent to which his contempt for women pervades his personal life, and the unknown role he played in the FDA’s failure to certify Plan B after the advisory committee approved it. Hager was long-known to be misogynistic, paternalistic, anti-sex, a roadblock to appropriate birth-control policy and availaibility, and just plain weird. We now know that he is a rapist, psychologically abusive, deeply disturbed about sex, and that he wields behind-the-scenes influence at the FDA that allowed him to single-handedly, secretly, block the Plan B approval.

The entire article is revelatory; go read it. Excerpts:

Rape

[Linda Carruth] Davis [formerly Linda Hager, David Hager's wife and co-author] 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.” . . .

Linda Hager, as she was still known at the time, was sinking into a deep depression, she says. Though her marriage had been dead for nearly a decade, she could not see her way clear to divorce; she had no money of her own and few marketable skills. But life with David Hager had grown unbearable. As his public profile increased, so did the tension in their home, which she says periodically triggered episodes of abuse. “I would be asleep,” she recalls, “and since [the sodomy] was painful and threatening, I woke up. Sometimes I acquiesced once he had started, just to make it go faster, and sometimes I tried to push him off…. I would [confront] David later, and he would say, ‘You asked me to do that,’ and I would say, ‘No, I never asked for it.’” . . .

Sex was always a source of conflict in the marriage. Though it wasn’t emotionally satisfying for her, Davis says she soon learned that sex could “buy” peace with Hager after a long day of arguing, or insure his forgiveness after she spent too much money. “Sex was coinage; it was a commodity,” she said. Sometimes Hager would blithely shift from vaginal to anal sex. Davis protested. “He would say, ‘Oh, I didn’t mean to have anal sex with you; I can’t feel the difference,’” Davis recalls incredulously. “And I would say, ‘Well then, you’re in the wrong business.’” . . .

By 1995, according to Davis’s account, Hager’s treatment of his wife had moved beyond morally reprehensible to potentially felonious. It was a uniquely stressful year for Davis. Her mother, dying of cancer, had moved in with the family and was in need of constant care. At the same time, Davis was suffering from a seemingly inexplicable exhaustion during the day. She began exhibiting a series of strange behaviors, like falling asleep in such curious places as the mall and her closet. Occasionally she would–as she describes it–”zone out” in midsentence in a conversation, and her legs would buckle. Eventually, Davis was diagnosed as having narcolepsy, a neurological disorder that affects the brain’s ability to regulate normal sleep-wake cycles.

For Davis, the diagnosis spelled relief, and a physician placed her on several medications to attain “sleep hygiene,” or a consistent sleep pattern. But Davis says it was after the diagnosis that the period of the most severe abuse began. For the next seven years Hager sodomized Davis without her consent while she slept roughly once a month until their divorce in 2002, she claims. “My sense is that he saw [my narcolepsy] as an opportunity,” Davis surmises. Sometimes she fought Hager off and he would quit for a while, only to circle back later that same night; at other times, “the most expedient thing was to try and somehow get it [over with]. In order to keep any peace, I had to maintain the illusion of being available to him.” At still other moments, she says, she attempted to avoid Hager’s predatory advances in various ways–for example, by sleeping in other rooms in the house, or by struggling to stay awake until Hager was in a deep sleep himself. But, she says, nothing worked. One of Davis’s lifelong confidantes remembers when Davis first told her about the abuse. “[Linda] was very angry and shaken,” she recalled.

Psychological Abuse

By the 1980s, according to Davis, Hager was pressuring her to let him videotape and photograph them having sex. She consented, and eventually she even let Hager pay her for sex that she wouldn’t have otherwise engaged in–for example, $2,000 for oral sex, “though that didn’t happen very often because I hated doing it so much. So though it was more painful, I would let him sodomize me, and he would leave a check on the dresser,” Davis admitted to me with some embarrassment. This exchange took place almost weekly for several years.

Money was an explosive issue in their household. Hager kept an iron grip on the family purse strings. Initially the couple’s single checking account was in Hager’s name only, which meant that Davis had to appeal to her husband for cash, she says. Eventually he relented and opened a dual account. Davis recalls that Hager would return home every evening and make a beeline for his office to balance the checkbook, often angrily summoning her to account for the money she’d spent that day. Brenda Bartella Peterson, Davis’s friend of twenty-five years and her neighbor at the time, witnessed Hager berate his wife in their kitchen after one such episode. For her part, Davis set out to subvert Hager’s financial dominance with profligate spending on credit cards opened in her own name. “I was not willing to face reality about money,” she admits. “I thought, ‘Well, money can’t buy happiness, but it buys the kind of misery you can learn to live with.’” . . .

Abuse of Position

[After the advisory committee voted 23-4 in favor] the FDA rejected the advice of its own experts and refused to approve the sale of Plan B over the counter. In his letter to Barr Laboratories, Steven Galson, acting director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, claimed that Barr had not provided adequate data showing just how young adolescent women would actually use the drug.

That issue was never voted on by the committee. It was, however, broached by Hager at the meeting; he mentioned his concern for these “younger adolescents” several times.

In his private practice back in Kentucky, Hager doesn’t prescribe emergency contraception, because he believes it is an abortifacient, and, not surprisingly, his was one of the four votes against widening its availability. But rather than voice his ethical opposition to the product, Hager emphasized his concern about adolescents, which other committee members have since called a “political fig leaf.” According to Dr. James Trussell, who voted in favor of Plan B, the FDA had at hand six studies examining whether teens as young as 15 would increase their “risky” behavior if they knew they had a backup emergency contraceptive–and none of the studies showed any evidence for that contention.

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.” [Emphasis added.]

None of the four panel members I spoke with for this article were aware of Hager’s “minority opinion.” An FDA spokeswoman told me that “the FDA did not ask for a minority opinion from this advisory committee,” though she was unable to say whether any individual within the agency had requested such a document from Hager. This past January the FDA missed a deadline to respond to a new application from Barr Laboratories, and any forward motion on making Plan B more widely available has completely stalled.

Note that, until now, no one had known of Hager’s unilateral, behind-the-scenes activity to block Plan B, or that his one-person “minority report” had been so influential in the outcome (or, in fact, that it even existed). The report has apparently still not been publicly released.

Finally, as to the issue of believability:

Linda Davis chose not to bring allegations of marital rape into her divorce proceedings; her foremost desires at the time were a fair settlement and minimal disruption for her sons. Nonetheless, she informed her lawyer of the abuse. Natalie Wilson, a divorce attorney in Lexington, asked Linda to draw up a working chronology of her marriage to Hager. “[It] included references to what I would call the sexual abuse,” Wilson explained. “I had no reason not to believe her…. It was an explanation for some of the things that went on in the marriage, and it explained her reluctance to share that information with her sons–which had resulted in her sons’ being very angry about the fact that she was insisting on the divorce.”

As it turned out, when the dust settled after their divorce, nearly everyone in the Hagers’ Christian and medical circles in Lexington had sided with Hager, who told people that his wife was mentally unstable and had moved in with another man (she moved in with friends).

Davis had only told a handful of people about the abuse throughout her marriage, but several of her longtime confidantes confirmed for this article that she had told them of the abuse at the time it was occurring. Wilson, the attorney, spoke to me on the record, as did Brenda Bartella Peterson, Davis’s close friend of twenty-five years. Several others close to Davis spoke to me off the record. Two refused to speak to me and denounced Davis for going public, but they did not contest her claims. Many attempts to interview nearly a dozen of Hager’s friends and supporters in Lexington and around the country were unsuccessful.

As for David Hager, after repeated attempts to interview him for this story, we finally spoke for nearly half an hour in early April. That conversation was off the record. “My official comment is that I decline to comment,” he said.

The full portrait of David Hager – as a person, and in terms of his public role at the FDA – is more disturbing even than what had been known about him in the past. He is – there is no other description for it – a repeat rapist with a decades-long history of sexually assaulting his own wife under cover of intimidation, physical force, and drugs. (McGarvey notes that marital rape is illegal in Kentucky, though most of Hager’s crimes cannot be prosecuted because of a statutory limitation that applied only to the rape of a spouse. That limitation was voided in 2000, however – meaning that Hager could still be prosecuted for multiple rapes committed between 2000 and 2002.) He also has a lifelong history of extremely creepy behavior toward women: not just the invasive and paternalistic treatment of his patients, or his prescribing religious exercises for medical conditions, but his overbearing treatment (he announced to his future wife, on their first date, that he intended to marry her; bizarrely, she put up with it), his later psychological abuse of his wife, his public humiliations of her, refusing to allow her access to money, then using money as a tool to control and humiliate her, and his publicly slandering her when she sought a divorce, flesh out a picture of someone who not only doesn’t see women as independent and worthy of respect, but of someone who demands control over women and actively demeans and abuses them when he obtains it. Add to that his oppressive and abusive sexual behavior (leaving aside the question of actual rape, he forced his wife for decades to perform painful, unconsensual sex acts that she did not enjoy, then treated her as a prostitute for doing so), and his apparent psychological linkage between sexuality and the degradation and abuse of women, and you have someone who is positively horrifying as a gynecologist and as Bush’s personal policy-maker for women’s reproductive health issues. Then, to top it all off, he is apparently the only voice that matters in the FDA’s sexual health division. With 85% of two combined committees voting in favor of approval, one secret, unsolicited opinion from the most controversial member of the panel, on a side issue that had not even been addressed in the hearings, was sufficient to stall approval of the medication – a sequence of events that, over a year later, had not been revealed to the public.

This is the person Bush tried to appoint as Chair of the Committee that held these hearings – the person he then stealth-appointed over heated objections, and intends to reappoint in a matter of weeks. The Plan B issue has still not been resolved. Further restrictions on mifepristone are constantly being proposed, and birth control technology development in general is perenially slowed by right-wing opposition. David Hager is the linchpin of religious-extremist obstructionism on these issues – he was appointed for that purpose, and has been granted secret and unprecedented influence on them far beyond his authority as a member of an advisory panel. And the results are significant: Plan B is less easily available than it could be for every woman in America, and in practice unavailable for many of them at the time they need it, because of this violent, misogynistic, perverted lunatic.

Predictably, Hager is claiming “Christian persecution”.

David Limbaugh, the lesser light in the Limbaugh family and author of Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging Political War Against Christianity, said the left had subjected Hager to an “anti-Christian litmus test.” Hager’s valor in the face of this “religious profiling” earned him the praise and lasting support of evangelical Christians, including such luminaries as Charles Colson, Dr. James Dobson and Franklin Graham, son of the Rev. Billy Graham.

Back at Asbury, Hager cast himself as a victim of religious persecution in his sermon. “You see…there is a war going on in this country,” he said gravely. “And I’m not speaking about the war in Iraq. It’s a war being waged against Christians, particularly evangelical Christians. It wasn’t my scientific record that came under scrutiny [at the FDA]. It was my faith…. By making myself available, God has used me to stand in the breach”

But it isn’t the fact that he’s a Christian that objectors oppose – it’s the fact that he uses his positions of authority and influence to impose his Christian practices on everyone else. Objecting to that – like objecting to all other forms of Christian intrusiveness – is hardly “persecution,” it’s a simple demand for personal freedom on the part of those subject to Hager’s abuses. McGarvey notes that her personal revelations about Hager are also likely to provoke complaints about “the politics of personal destruction”: but she also notes, correctly, that “it ought to be remembered that President Clinton’s sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky was never alleged to be criminal and did not affect his ability to fulfill his obligations to the nation.” Hager’s crimes, perversions, delusions, and abuses, personal and political, are not merely “evidence of character” – they are harms he has inflicted on real people, including his own wife, his patients, and the general public.

This is a person who should never have been allowed to attain any position of authority. His behavior – in a women’s-health physician, n0 less – raises frightening questions about his suitability for any professional role. But in particular, his attitudes – both explicitly stated and apparent – toward women unfit him for any position of influence over women’s-health policy, and together with his abuse of his FDA position – apparently with the connivance of higher-ups in the Bush administration – disqualify him for reappointment. Arguably, he deserves to be prosecuted for rape, sexual abuse, and assault and battery. Certainly he deserves to be held up to scorn for personally denying protection against unwanted pregnancy to millions of American women – as does the man who appointed him, secretly, for that specific purpose.

Dr. David Hager is, himself, a “dark stain on the reputation of an evidence-based agency like the FDA.” He is also a rapist, sexually sadistic and immature, misogynistic, emotionally abusive to women, and abusive of his power and position. He fits perfectly into the Bush administration’s approach to women and women’s reproductive health. He must never be allowed to play such a role again.

UPDATE:

A follow-up story by the Washington Post on the events surrounding Hager’s “minority report” to the FDA clarifies just how manipulative and underhanded the entire sequence was.

Although Hager claimed publicly that “I was asked to write a minority opinion that was sent to the commissioner of the FDA,” the FDA denies that any such request was made:

An FDA spokeswoman said yesterday that the agency did not ask Hager to write a report and that Hager sent what she called a “private citizen letter” to Commissioner Mark McClellan. “We don’t ask for minority reports and opinions,” she said. “I’ve been advised that nobody from the FDA asked him to write the letter.”

Hager now says that he was asked to write the report by someone “outside the agency.” Nonetheless, after receiving this unsolicted “private citizen letter,” the FDA refused to act on its committee’s overwhelming consensus – for what Hager himself claims is only the second time in 50 years.

Furthermore, it now appears that Hager had been shopped around by the Bush administration to find the most powerful position possible from which he could devastate women’s reproductive health and autonomy. He was originally considered for Surgeon General (!), then given some lower-profile appointments elsewhere, then finally specifically requested to go to the FDA Reproductive Health committee specifically because of his known background on those issues. In other words, he was the administration’s single favorite religious-whacko doctor from the beginning, and was put on the contraception committee – a doctor who refuses to actually provide contraception to his patients! – for the specific purpose of blocking action on issues the Bushies opposed.

In his October sermon, Hager said that White House officials called him in June 2001 and asked him to serve in some capacity — initially as a candidate for surgeon general and later as a member of two advisory boards. After one month, Hager said, he was called by the White House and asked to resign from those committees and join the FDA’s reproductive drugs panel instead because “there are some issues coming up we feel are very critical, and we want you to be on that advisory board.”

David Hager is not just a religious nut, misogynist, rapist, and sneak; he is and has been, from the very beginning, the Bush administration’s chosen hatchet man on women’s sexual health. He is the perfect embodiment of everything they believe in, and has acted as such every step of the way. Neither he, nor Bush, should ever be allowed to live it down.