Here is an excerpt from Goodman’s recent column:
It’s not an accident that one of the first bills in the Senate with a new Democratic majority was the Prevention First Act, a wide-ranging family-planning initiative. Rep. Louise Slaughter will follow next week with a similar bill described in one mouthful as a “bipartisan, bicameral, pro-choice, pro-life innovative approach to reducing unintended pregnancies.” Then, Reps. Rosa DeLauro and Tim Ryan, a pro-choice/pro-life duo, will reintroduce an omnibus family-planning and family-support bill with the lumbering title, “The Reducing the Need for Abortions and Supporting Parents Act.”
But there is a roadblock to this common ground. The man overseeing it is Eric Keroack, the brand new head of the Office of Population Affairs. Keroack has, to put it mildly, marched to a different drummer. One heard more often in the March for Life.
As Cecile Richards, head of Planned Parenthood, says, “You have to search far and wide to find a doctor who opposes family planning to run the nation’s family-planning program.” This White House found one. The president picked Keroack just weeks after the election delivered anti-choice defeats. “He didn’t get the memo,” says Nancy Keenan, head of NARAL Pro-Choice America.
Keroack is an OB-GYN who was the medical director for A Woman’s Concern, a network of faith-based “crisis pregnancy centers” in Massachusetts. This group not only promotes abstinence until marriage, it regards birth control as “demeaning to women, degrading of human sexuality and adverse to human health and happiness.”
Read the whole thing here. Also, the text of the Prevention First Act is available here.
