Susan "Contraception is Not Health Care" Orr Appointed Chief of Family Planning Programs

Once again the Bush Administration is waging an attack on women's right to decide when and with whom they have children. This week, the "Bush administration again has appointed a chief of family planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services who has been critical of contraception." Wonderful, a head of family planning programs who opposes our most effective family planning tools. As The Washington Post tells us:

Susan Orr, most recently an associate commissioner in the Administration for Children and Families, was appointed Monday to be acting deputy assistant secretary for population affairs. She will oversee $283 million in annual grants to provide low-income families and others with contraceptive services, counseling and preventive screenings.

In a 2001 article in The Washington Post, Orr applauded a Bush proposal to stop requiring all health insurance plans for federal employees to cover a broad range of birth control. "We're quite pleased, because fertility is not a disease," said Orr, then an official with the Family Research Council.

Hummm... if you wanted to reduce abortions, you would think you'd promote contraceptive methods. However, if your goal was just to punish women for having sex, well then keeping them off the pill makes more sense.

As Thus Spake Zuska explains:

The motives of the FRC are pretty clear: disempower women, suggest they're bad parents if they don't stay home at the beck and call of the children God sends them, keep them pregnant for 30 years, out of the workplace, and subservient to men. Think I'm kidding? Why the vehement opposition to birth control? It prevents conception - you'd think they'd approve; fewer abortions that way! Why should they oppose contraception if not to tie women down by the uterus? Or to deny them from possessing sexual power equivalent to men?

Yup, that is exactly what this is about. It isn't even that we have a nation that loves babies so much that we want every woman to have 8-10, since, as you know, making abortion illegal does not reduce the number of abortions. So, what are we really after? Sexually subservient women and punishment for women who dare seek the same freedoms as men.

UPDATE: Cara from Curvature tells us how to join the Planned Parenthood campaign to protest Orr's appointment and encourage the President to instate someone more in keeping with the ideas of the family planning programs that they would oversee. Yet, since Bush has shown himself to be oblivious to both reason and criticism alike on many other important issues, the chances of this campaign succeeding are, well, nil. But, it is good to remind politicians that sane women (who would like to see their rights maintained) vote too, not just the fundie nut jobs.