The Nation
May 30, 2005
Dr. Hager's Family Values
by AYELISH MCGARVEY
Late last October Dr. W. David Hager, a prominent
obstetrician-gynecologist and Bush Administration appointee to the
Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health {*filter*} in the cooking.net">food and Drug
Administration (FDA), took to the pulpit as the featured speaker at a
morning service. He stood in the campus chapel at Asbury College, a
small evangelical Christian school nestled among picturesque horse
farms in the small town of Wilmore in Kentucky's bluegrass region.
Hager is an Asburian nabob; his elderly father is a past president of
the college, and Hager himself currently sits on his alma mater's board
of trustees. Even the school's administrative building, Hager Hall,
bears the family name.
That day, a mostly friendly audience of 1,500 students and faculty
packed into the seats in front of him. With the autumn sunlight
streaming through the stained-glass windows, Hager opened his Bible to
the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel and looked out into the audience. "I
want to share with you some information about how...God has called me
to stand in the gap," he declared. "Not only for others, but regarding
ethical and m{*filter*}issues in our country."
For Hager, those m{*filter*}and ethical issues all appear to revolve around
sex: In both his medical practice and his advisory role at the FDA, his
ardent evangelical piety anchors his staunch opposition to emergency
contraception, {*filter*} and premarital sex. Through his six
books--which include such titles as Stress and the Woman's Body and As
Jesus Cared for Women, self-help tomes that interweave syrupy Christian
spirituality with paternalistic advice on women's health and
relationships--he has established himself as a leading conservative
Christian voice on women's health and {*filter*}ity.
And because of his warm relationship with the Bush Administration,
Hager has had the opportunity to see his ideas influence federal
policy. In December 2003 the FDA advisory committee of which he is a
member was asked to consider whether emergency contraception, known as
Plan B, should be made available over the counter. Over Hager's
dissent, the committee voted overwhelmingly to approve the change. But
the FDA rejected its recommendation, a highly unusual and controversial
decision in which Hager, The Nation has learned, played a key role.
Hager's reappointment to the committee, which does not require
Congressional approval, is expected this June, but Bush's nomination of
Dr. Lester Crawford as FDA director has been bogged down in controversy
over the issue of emergency contraception. Crawford was acting director
throughout the Plan B debacle, and Senate Democrats, led by Hillary
Clinton and Patty Murray, are holding up his nomination until the
agency revisits its decision about going over the counter with the
pill.
When Hager's nomination to the FDA was announced in the fall of 2002,
his conservative Christian beliefs drew sharp criticism from Democrats
and prochoice groups. David Limbaugh, the lesser light in the Limbaugh
family and author of Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging Political War
Against Christianity, said the left had subjected Hager to an
"anti-Christian litmus test." Hager's valor in the face of this
"religious profiling" earned him the praise and lasting support of
evangelical Christians, including such luminaries as Charles Colson,
Dr. James Dobson and Franklin Graham, son of the Rev. Billy Graham.
Back at Asbury, Hager cast himself as a victim of religious persecution
in his sermon. "You see...there is a war going on in this country," he
said gravely. "And I'm not speaking about the war in Iraq. It's a war
being waged against Christians, particularly evangelical Christians. It
wasn't my scientific record that came under scrutiny [at the FDA]. It
was my faith.... By making myself available, God has used me to stand
in the breach.... Just as he has used me, he can use you."
Up on the dais, several men seated behind Hager nodded solemnly in
agreement. But out in the audience, Linda Carruth Davis--co-author with
Hager of Stress and the Woman's Body, and, more saliently, his former
wife of thirty-two years--was enraged. "It was the most disgusting
thing I've ever heard," she recalled months later, through clenched
teeth.
According to Davis, Hager's public moralizing on {*filter*} matters clashed
with his deplorable treatment of her during their marriage. Davis
alleges that between 1995 and their divorce in 2002, Hager repeatedly
sodomized her without her consent. Several sources on and off the
record confirmed that she had told them it was the {*filter*} and emotional
abuse within their marriage that eventually forced her out. "I probably
wouldn't have objected so much, or felt it was so abusive if he had
just wanted normal [{*filter*}l] sex all the time," she explained to me.
"But it was the painful, invasive, totally nonconsensual nature of the
[anal] sex that was so horrible."
Not once during the uproar over Hager's FDA appointment did any
reporter solicit the opinion of the woman now known as Linda Davis--she
remarried in November 2002 to James Davis, a Methodist minister, and
relocated to southern Georgia--on her husband's record, even though she
contributed to much of his self-help work in the Christian arena (she
remains a religious and political conservative). She intermittently
thought of telling her story but refrained, she says, out of respect
for her {*filter*} children. It was Hager's sermon at Asbury last October
that finally changed her mind. Davis was there to hear her middle son
give a vocal performance; she was prepared to hear her ex-husband
inveigh against secular liberals, but she was shocked to hear him speak
about their divorce when he took to the pulpit.
"In early 2002," Hager told the churchgoers that day, "my world fell
apart.... After thirty-two years of marriage, I was suddenly alone in a
new home that we had built as our dream home. Time spent 'doing God's
will' had kept me from spending the time I needed to nourish my
marriage." Hager noted with pride that in his darkest hour, Focus on
the Family estimated that 50 million people worldwide were praying for
him.
Linda Davis quietly fumed in her chair. "He had the gall to stand under
the banner of holiness of the Lord and lie, by the sin of omission,"
she told me. "It's what he didn't say--it's the impression he left."
David Hager is not the fringe character and fundamentalist faith healer
that some of his critics have made him out to be. In fact, he is a
well-credentialed doctor. In Kentucky Hager has long been recognized as
a leading Ob-Gyn at Lexington's Central Baptist Hospital and a faculty
member at the University of Kentucky's medical school. And in the 1990s
several magazines, including Modern Healthcare and Good Housekeeping,
counted him among the best doctors for women in the nation.
Yet while Hager doesn't advocate the substitution of conservative
Christianity for medicine, his religious ideology underlies an
all-encompassing paternalism in his approach to his women patients.
"Even though I was trained as a medical specialist," Hager explained in
the preface to As Jesus Cared for Women, "it wasn't until I began to
see how Jesus treated women that I understood how I, as a doctor,
should treat them." To underscore this revelation, Hager recounted case
after case in which he acted as confidant, spiritual adviser and even
father figure to his grateful patients. As laid out in his writings,
Hager's worldview is not informed by a sense of inherent equality
between men and women. Instead, men are expected to act as benevolent
authority figures for the women in their lives. (In one of his books,
he refers to a man who{*filter*}d his wife as "selfish" and "sinful.") But
to model gender relations on the one Jesus had with his followers is to
leave women dangerously exposed in the event that the men in their
lives don't meet the high standard set by God Himself--trapped in a
permanent state of dependence hoping to be treated well.
In tandem with his medical career, Hager has been an aggressive
advocate for the political agenda of the Christian right. A member of
Focus on the Family's Physician Resource Council and the Christian
Medical and Dental Society, Hager assisted the Concerned Women for
America in submitting a "Citizen's Petition" to the FDA in August 2002
to halt distribution and marketing of the {*filter*} pill, RU-486. It was
this record of conservative activism that ignited a firestorm when the
Bush Administration first floated his name for chairman of the FDA's
advisory committee in the fall of 2002. In the end, the FDA found a way
to dodge the controversy: It issued a stealth announcement of Hager's
appointment to the panel (to be one of eleven members, not chairman) on
Christmas Eve. Liberals were furious that they weren't able to block
his appointment. For many months afterward, an outraged chain letter
alerting women to the appointment of a man with religious views "far
outside the mainstream" s{*filter*} its way around the Internet, lending the
whole episode the air of urban legend.
Back in Lexington, where the couple continued to live, Linda Hager, as
she was still known at the time, was sinking into a deep depression,
she says. Though her marriage had been dead for nearly a decade, she
could not see her way clear to divorce; she had no money of her own and
few marketable skills. But life with David Hager had grown unbearable.
As his public profile increased, so did the tension in their home,
which she says periodically triggered episodes of abuse. "I would be
asleep," she recalls, "and since [the {*filter*}] was painful and
threatening, I woke up. Sometimes I acquiesced once he had started,
just to make it go faster, and sometimes I tried to push him off.... I
would [confront] David later, and he would say, 'You asked me to do
that,' and I would say, 'No, I never asked for it.'"
I first heard of Davis's experience in 2004 through a
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Prominent GOP doctor practices "family values"