Asbury College

Latest Asbury College News

Consider the appalling fact that only The Nation has given real coverage to serious allegations against Dr. David Hager, President Bush’s controversial appointee to the Food and Drug Administration’s Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs. According to the reporter Ayelish McGarvey, in October 2004 Hager took the pulpit at Kentucky’s Asbury College chapel and told churchgoers that he had been persecuted for standing up on “moral and ethical issues in this country,” persecution that was part of “a war being waged against Christians, particularly evangelical Christians.” Here’s what he meant: many people had opposed his appointment as the panel’s chairman because he had worked with Concerned Women for America to block distribution of RU-486, the “morning after” birth control pill. While Hager did not become chairman, he was appointed to the committee, where, he boasted from the same pulpit, he had been influential in blocking over-the-counter distribution of RU-486. In May 2005, The Nation published McGarvey’s article, in which Hager’s ex-wife, Linda Carruth Davis, alleged that, during the years that he had been crusading to restrict women’s medical choices, he had been raping her repeatedly, anally and painfully, often while she was drugged into sleep by prescriptions for a neurological - more available