Glamour Magazine has a piece up called, The New Lies About Women's Health. It's about the lies passing as science that are brought to you by the U.S. Government.
Or, I should say, it's about the lies passing as science that are brought to you by the U.S. Government and "Christian fundamentalist groups like the Southern Baptist Convention and powerful religious conservative organizations like the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America."
From the rightwing crusade against emergency contraception, to the fanatical war on condoms and accurate health information, this piece is straight out of Orwell's 1984. Let's face it, if the women of America don't get busy doing some serious breeding, the U.S. Government may have to outsource future wars.
Leave it to the Bush Administration to turn government websites into sources of fiction and Glamour Magazine into a scientifically accurate and politically terrifying resource.
Here's an excerpt, but the entire feature is worthy reading.
The New Lies About Women's Health
For the past 15 years, Ruth Shaber, M.D., has been an ob-gyn in San Francisco for Kaiser Permanente, one of the nation's largest health maintenance organizations. . . .
"As a physician, I can no longer trust government sources," says Dr. Shaber. She is not a political activist or a conspiracy theorist; in addition to her own practice, she's Kaiser Permanente's director of women's health services for northern California and head of the HMO's Women's Health Research Institute. Yet this decidedly mainstream doctor and administrator says, "I no longer trust FDA decisions or materials generated [by the government]. Ten years ago, I would not have had to scrutinize government information. Now I don't feel comfortable giving it to my patients." [...]
SCIENTISTS FIGHT BACK
It's extremely rare for a scientific conference to turn into something more like a political rally. "Scientists do not normally engage in what is going on in Washington, D.C., or politics," says [Susan F. Wood, Ph.D., former head of the FDA's Office of Women's Health]. But at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science last February, a special conference was added to the agenda to discuss how politics have invaded the realm of science.
It quickly became a standing-room-only event, and scientists applauded as speakers like Wood and Nobel winner David Baltimore, Ph.D., president of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, condemned the government's interference in research.
Wood was struck by the overwhelming number of people who attended. "Scientists from across the country, from all kinds of fields, were there," she says, "because they care a great deal about how science is done and how data are analyzed and how the information is used." Why were they finally voicing their fears? "I think as people become more aware [of the interference in science], they are willing to step up and say, 'This is not what we want,'" Wood says.
For a group of researchers, the rhetoric was fiery. Baltimore accused the Bush administration of suppressing science. And when Wood said that morale at the FDA had sunk to a new low because of overwhelming pressure from social conservatives, she got a standing ovation.
Outside of the halls of science, who are the real victims of this political maneuvering? "The American public, particularly American women," says Trussell. "Who's hurt when you can't get EC over the counter? When there is a suggestion that abortion causes breast cancer—something that is entirely made up? When it's suggested that condoms are not effective against STDs, when in reality they are effective against HIV and even HPV? Women."
But many women can't imagine how these lies could possibly have an impact on them, Trussell says. "The first time one of them walks into a pharmacy and can't get her birth control pill prescription filled, that will have a wake-up effect. Most won't feel the effects until these rights are gone—they can't believe there would be a time when these things would be outlawed. I hope their belief is true, but I'm very worried."
Reproductive Rights Religious Fanatics Bush Condoms Contraception Science Birth Control EC War on Women Abortion
