We Can't Look Away

By Christine Cupaiuolo — January 25, 2007

The appointment of Dr. Eric Keroack is like a bad road accident that demands your attention — try as we might, we can’t stop gawking at his crazy ideas.

Besides, we feel a responsibility to keep pointing out what is obvious to 98.4 percent of the country: this is possibly the most absurd appointment — out of many — that the Bush administration has ordered.

Who can pass up reading the “Top 10 Reasons Why You Should Be Terrified that Dr. Eric Keroack is in Charge of the U.S. Federal Family Planning Program” — especially when there’s an accompanying slideshow!

Go see now why Andrea Lynch writes, “Not since the appointment of Dr. W. David Hager to the FDA’s reproductive health drugs advisory committee have Americans been so abuzz about an anti-family planning zealot appointed by the Bush administration to a federal body responsible for providing family planning information and services.”

Just over two months into his tenure as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Population Affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services (where he administers $283 million annual budget of federal family planning grants), we are still uncovering evidence of “Doctor” Eric Keroack’s staggering lack of credentials. The latest exhibit is “OXYTOCIN: Is this NANO-PEPTIDE a chemical type of HUMAN ‘SUPER-GLUE’?” (emphasis most definitely NOT mine), the PowerPoint presentation that sealed his infamy in the eyes of self-respecting scientists, physicians, and non-crazy people everywhere.

In short, the presentation compiles “evidence” that engaging in pre-marital sex compromises people’s (or more specifically, women’s) ability to form healthy and lasting relationships. Why? Because, as Keroack argues (or rather, extrapolates from a bunch of studies on mice, voles, and the occasional human female), the more we engage in pre-marital sex, the more failed relationships we have, and the more failed relationships we have, the more we interfere with our body’s ability to release and process the “love” hormone oxytocin, and the more we interfere with that process, the more we lose our ability to form healthy, lasting, loving relationships, and as a result, the more miserable and unfulfilled we are. The antidote? Abstinence before marriage, of course.

At least, that’s what Lynch thinks Keroack is getting out. It’s kind of tricky to tell, what with all the “flying leaps of logic” and “Thomas-Friedman-on-crack mixed metaphors.” Oh yes, there’s more

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