Alas, a Blog

UPDATE: Dr. Hager has told reporters that he will be leaving the FDA’s Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee at the end of June. So that’s good news. So long, and please be under the next bus out of town. But it still leaves Plan B unavailable over the counter, unfortunately.

Dr. W. David Hager, a gynecologist and leading conservative activist on “women’s issues,” is in the news today for seeming to admit having been asked to send a “minority report” regarding “Plan B” contraception to the FDA. The overwhelming majority of the expert panelists had recommended making “Plan B” an over-the-counter drug. From the Washington Post:

Speaking at the Asbury College chapel in Wilmore, Ky., Hager said, “I was asked to write a minority opinion that was sent to the commissioner of the FDA. For only the second time in five decades, the FDA did not abide by its advisory committee opinion, and the measure was rejected.”

Hager told the group that he had not written his report from an “evangelical Christian perspective,” but from a scientific one — arguing that the panel had too little information on how easier availability of Plan B would affect girls younger than 16. The FDA later cited that lack of information as the reason it rejected the application.

“I argued from a scientific perspective, and God took that information, and he used it through this minority report to influence the decision,” Hager said. “Once again, what Satan meant for evil, God turned into good.” […]

While the FDA sometimes rejects the recommendations of its expert panels, the Plan B case was highly unusual in that the vote was so lopsided in favor of over-the-counter sales and its own science staff had also strongly favored approval.

As far as I can understand, whether or not there’s a scandal here depends on that horribly unspecific “I was asked…” Who did the asking? If it was someone at the FDA, or the Bush Administration, that could be an example of improperly trying to make politics – or personal religious convictions – influence what should be a decision made on scientific grounds.

Unfortunately, even if President Bush himself called Hager and asked him to make up some basis for rejecting the application, as long as Hagar is smart enough to not say so in public, I doubt anything here will stick. The truth is, virtually everyone knows that the primary grounds for opposing Plan B is not scientific. The Republican contempt for science is not exactly news.

Maybe I’m wrong; maybe something here will stick, or someone will be able to use this information to pressure the FDA into letting scientific concerns rule the day. I hope so.

But there’s another, ultra-disturbing aspect to this story. Dr. Hagar – the author of As Jesus Cared for Women, and one of the go-to conservative activists for moral and medical guidance on sexual issues – has been credibly accused of rape by his ex-wife, co-author of some of his published writing and a Republican, conservative Christian.

From a Nation article released today (these are just bits and pieces, read the whole thing):

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.[…]

By 1995, according to Davis’s account, Hager’s treatment of his wife had moved beyond morally reprehensible to potentially felonious. […] 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.[…]

As Hager began fielding calls from the White House personnel office in 2001, the stress in the household–and, with it, the abuse–hit an all-time high, according to Davis. […]

For a while, fears of poverty, isolation and damnation were enough to keep Davis from seeking a divorce. She says that she had never cheated on Hager, but after reuniting with a high school sweetheart (not her current husband) in the chaotic aftermath of September 11, she had a brief affair. En route to their first, and only, rendezvous, she prayed aloud. “I said to the Lord, ‘All right. I do not want to die without having sex with someone I love,'” she remembers. “‘I want to know what that’s like, Lord. I know that it’s a sin, and I know this is adultery. But I have to know what it’s like.'”

Davis was sure that God would strike her dead on her way home that weekend. But when nothing happened, she took it as a good sign. Back in Lexington, she walked through her front door and made a decision right there on the spot. “I said, ‘David, I want a divorce.'”

Marital rape is a foreign concept to many women with stories like this one. Indeed, Linda Davis had never heard the term until midway through her 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.[…]

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. […] 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.

I feel bad about how much I cut out there. Read the whole article, it’s quite compelling. And infuriating.

My first reaction is to feel very sad for all that Linda Davis has suffered.

I’m leery of politicizing Davis’ personal tragedy too much. But I’m struck by the fact that Linda Davis – who had never even heard of “marital rape” until recently, and who seems unlikely to know much about feminism – has described an abusive marriage that matches, in every detail, what feminists say about how abusers operate.

The abuser is controlling; the abuser can be charming; the abuser believes in the male right (and “duty”) of taking a leadership position within the household; the abuser has weird issues with prostitution and pornography; and the abuser knows how to get the community on his side. Fear of poverty, fear of disbelief, commitment to her family obligations and her marriage, and not having anyplace to go keeps the victim by her abuser’s side. Davis is probably no feminist, but the story she tells is exactly what feminists have been saying about abuse for decades.

(Although Davis probably doesn’t see it this way, I find it unsurprising that it was only when she built a new relationship – that is, only when she had someplace else to go – that she was able to demand a divorce. I don’t criticize Davis even slightly for that; I only wish that she could have found a way to leave much earlier, and that all abuse victims could have someplace else to go).

This is what’s wrong with the idea of a male duty to head the household, in my view; no doubt some kind men take on that “duty” with kindness, but not all men are kind. An abuser and rapist like David Hager (and I know he hasn’t been and probably never will be convicted in a courtroom, but in my personal opinion Davis’ account is entirely believable) takes that message as a license to abuse and rape. And a community that beleives in male headship will take his side and defend his “rights” until given genuinely extraordinary evidence of abuse.

And, as the Nation article says, it’s beyond disturbing that this rapist and abuser has become one of the nation’s leading “guardians” and “advocates” for women’s health.

It’s sometimes not that easy to write laws that can be applied equally to all people. A law that’s equal on its face may not be equal when applied.

Let’s look at a commonplace example of an “equal” law: the law against murder. But it’s not enough to just outlaw murder: we have to define murder, and define what are the legal defenses to being charged with murder. What kind of model we imagine our laws applying to will affect whether or not they’re actually equal when applied to real people.

So our laws say that killing in self-defense can be legal, and define “self-defense” as legitimate when a “reasonable person,” looking at the situation, would have felt that “imminent threat or a confrontational circumstance involving an overt act by an aggressor” was taking place. (The language I’m quoting comes from the Kansas Supreme Court, by the way, but the law is pretty similar to this nationwide).

In other words, once Brad pulls a knife and begins advancing on Bill, it’s legal self-defense for Bill to pull a gun and shoot Brad. But before Brad pulled that knife – committing an “overt act” that made him an “imminent” threat – it would have been murder for Bill to suddenly shoot Brad.

Is that self-defense law equal? Well, it’s certainly equal in the sense of being possible to hold women and men to the same standard. It’s very unequal, however, in terms of what threats to life women and men are most likely to face.

The most likely murderer of a man is a male stranger or acquaintance, and if a man defends himself, it’s likely to be an instance of “mutual combat” – Bob pulls a knife on Bill, Bill shoots Bob. The laws on self-defense are written for a model of what kind of situations are likely to happen to men.

In contrast, the most likely murderer of a woman is an abusive husband or boyfriend. Does the “mutual combat” model make much sense in this case?

It’s interesting to note what this requires of a battered woman who, though years of intimate knowledge of her boyfriend or husband, has excellent reason to believe her life is in danger: in order to defend her life, she must wait until her abuser is awake, alert and attacking before it is permissible to defend herself.

In effect, the defendant must act in a way that puts her life at profound risk to defend herself without being convicted of murder. That this is all judged against a “reasonable person” standard is extremely ironic, since no reasonable person would choose to put their life at such extreme risk if a less risky alternative is available. To meet a reasonable person standard, defendants must act irrationally, and fail to protect their own lives effectively. Isn’t that bizarre?

Would a reasonable hostage, if he knows he is no physical match for a terrorist captor, choose to wait for the man-to-man confrontation? No, of course not; a reasonable hostage would attack while his captor was asleep or had his back turned, if at all possible. But a reasonable battered woman cannot legally act to protect herself until her life is about to end – when it’s least likely that she’ll be able to defend herself.

This is what happens when laws are designed to be enforced equally according to a male model. The truth is, “equal enforcement” isn’t the same as “equality.” If the laws aren’t written to account for the real circumstances of people’s lives (not just men’s lives), then they will be unequal in application – no matter how equally enforced they are.

Now, to solve for this, we don’t have to have one set of self-defense rules for women, and another for men. We do have to have rules for self-defense that are molded around the kinds of situations in which women are most likely to have to defend themselves, as well as the kinds of situations in which men are most likely to have to defend themselves. The “reasonable person” standard has to become just that; what reasonable people, of both genders, do, instead of just what reasonable men do.