Bush's War on Women Is a War on Science (worth passing around as it

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Bush's War on Women Is a War on Science
By Caryl Rivers, AlterNet
Posted on July 20, 2007, Printed on July 20, 2007

http://www.alternet.org/story/57381/

The veil over the Bush administration's war on women's reproductive health was pulled back recently by the president's own former surgeon general. When Richard H. Carmora told Congress he was muzzled by the administration when he wanted to speak out on issues of sex and science, he highlighted one of the news media's major failures over the past seven years.

The ideological matrix into which the administration has tried to cram science policy should have been one of the biggest stories in the nation. But the press failed its women readers in particular (and their children).

While one issue, stem cell research, did become a big story, the news media overall often failed to focus on a larger pattern, the almost unprecedented, across-the-board rejection of mainstream science by a U.S. president.

The issues over reproductive health, most of which were central mainly to women, flew well below the surface of the mainstream media. Checking through Lexis-Nexis, it is surprising to discover how big stories on the issue were more often featured in the British and Canadian media than in the United States.