WH puts politics above women's health care - Making Us Sick!

[UpInArms]

http://www.suntimes.com/output/pickett/cst-nws-pickett08.html

excerpt:

Compassion making us sick

The Bush administration's twin obsessions with gay sex and abortion have had profound consequences for women's health in this country. Their supposedly compassionate conservatism is, quite literally, making us sick.

Even as AIDS rates among African-American women have skyrocketed, the administration has moved away from the very strategies proven to reduce transmission. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson appointed Thomas Coburn, a family doctor and former Oklahoma congressman who first made a name for himself by opposing the use of condoms, sex education and anonymous HIV testing to prevent AIDS, to co-chair the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS.

The reputation of the once non-partisan commission has been tarnished by Coburn's lack of respect for mainstream science. Ram Yogev, director of the Pediatric, Adolescent and Maternal HIV Infection program at Chicago's Children's Memorial Hospital, was recently appointed to the council and, he said, when his colleagues heard the news, they "congratulated me and then right away gave me a hell of a time. Right away, they assumed I'm a Republican."

Coburn, who is now running for Oklahoma's open U.S. Senate seat, recently resigned from the commission, leaving the co-chair position open. Whoever gets appointed next could hold the job for up to four years -- regardless of who wins the presidential election.

Meanwhile, Thompson's increasingly politicized department began, in 2002, to penalize long-established, community-based AIDS prevention programs, saying they violate rules governing use of U.S. Centers for Disease Control dollars by "promoting" sex in workshops that discuss condom use.

...much more worth reading...

[AmyDeLune]

1. Thank You!

This is just the sort of article I was looking for!

Time to go Whack a Freeper. :D

---Amy