According to a piece in Time magazine by Karen Tumulty entitled, “Jesus and the FDA,” the appointment of Dr. Hager to the FDA board has women’s reproductive health rights activists up in arms.

Journalist Kathryn Jean Lopez, in her article “Your kind not welcome,” isn’t impressed by the ‘hysteria’ being raised over the abortion issue; what really matters in this controversy is not that Dr. Hager “would rather have his patients pray and wait for Divine intervention than medically act to treat disease” and “recommends specific Scripture readings and prayers for such ailments as headaches and premenstrual syndrome;” nor that he published a book with his wife, As Jesus Cared for Women: Restoring Women Then and Now; not even that, as appointed chairman for the FDA Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee, he would “lead its study of hormone-replacement therapy for menopausal women” when we’ve already seen him do his best to reverse the FDA’s approval of RU-486 based on his belief that “it has endangered the lives and health of women.”

Lopez feels the problem is not whether a doctor with strong religious views ought to be appointed to the FDA, but that the FDA “does not want to be scrutinized.”

“In recent years, the FDA has been criticized on a host of issues outside of abortion, and not just by pro-lifers. Dr. Stevens warns that this leak is ‘about an FDA that does not want to be scrutinized.’ The committee, for instance, that Hager’s name has been floated for has not met in two years and currently has no members. That’s no way for a government agency to operate, most especially one whose decisions so directly affect issues of life and death.”

Lopez goes even further out on her limb to suggest that Hager’s appointment would be beneficial for the Left, if only because his moral backbone provokes him to question the FDA “when necessary.”

“If Hager never makes it to Washington, it will be more than just another unfair loss to the Left in the name of hysterical abortion politics: a qualified doctor willing to question the FDA when necessary. But, worse still, if secular media and Left folk manage to create what Dr. Stevens calls a ‘false dichotomy’ between medicine and values, or values and policymaking, scuttled potential nominations will not be the worst result.”

So when is it necessary, if not where women’s reproductive health rights are concerned?

The Naral Pro-Choice America website offers an opportunity for women’s reproductive health rights activists to voice their opinions.