This long article from the US magazine The Nation, shows an in-depth and disturbing account of how one man, charged with safeguarding the health and welfare of millions of women, can throw evangelical influence behind his opposition to health progress on religious grounds. Even more alarming, this indictment of a obstetrician -gynecologist who has been alleged to carry out marital rape over a course of years. The kind of man you’d want to take care of your body?

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.

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By the 1980s, according to [his ex-wife] 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.

As disturbing as they are on their own, Linda Davis’s allegations take on even more gravity in light of Hager’s public role as a custodian of women’s health. Some may argue that this is just a personal matter between a man and his former wife–a simple case of “he said, she said” with no public implications. That might be so–if there were no allegations of criminal conduct, if the alleged conduct did not bear any relevance to the public responsibilities of the person in question, and if the allegations themselves were not credible and independently corroborated. But given that this case fails all of those tests, the public has a right to call on Dr. David Hager to answer Linda Davis’s charges before he is entrusted with another term. After all, few women would knowingly choose a sexual abuser as their gynecologist, and fewer still would likely be comfortable with the idea of letting one serve as a federal adviser on women’s health issues.

From an article by Ayelish McGarvey in The Nation

The Nation: Dr. Hager’s Family Values

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