President Bush has long claimed the country has a serious shortage of Ob-Gyns, and now he's finally proven it.
How else to read his appointment of Dr. Eric Keroack as the new HHS deputy assistant secretary overseeing family planning and advising on reproductive health issues? Couldn't he find an Ob-Gyn in all of America who had better credentials or bothered to maintain his certification in his medical specialty?
Power Liberal flagged this shortcoming earlier. The New York Times weighs in today and Kaiser Daily Women's Health Policy Report summarizes several other editorials panning the pick.
My resident advisor on Ob-Gyn matters — who, unlike Keroack, is board-certified by the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG)— considers the lapsed certification a signal Keroack is a fringe character in the profession. She says her colleagues consider Board certification an expression of basic competence in their field.
To be fair, his new post doesn't have to be filled by a physician, but seeing a trained specialist who's let his credentials and practice lapse is a red flag in any field. Think of an attorney doing marketing, an architect selling building materials or an accountant in the coin business. Not unheard of, but not exactly in the talent pool where you'd expect a president to look for appointees.
An article in the Washington Post contained several statements from an HHS spokesperson defending Keroack.
Eric Keroack, a nationally known advocate of abstinence until marriage, served for more than a decade as medical director for A Woman's Concern, a Massachusetts nonprofit group that discourages abortion and does not distribute information promoting birth control. But HHS spokeswoman Christina Pearson said yesterday that most of Keroack's professional time had been devoted to his private practice of 20 years, not the group.
Pearson was trying to refute objections to Keroack's anti-contraception role with A Woman's Concern, claiming he had prescribed birth control in private practice. But the timeline above doesn't square with what I found in my own review of available records about Keroack.
The Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine lists Keroack has having graduated from medical school in 1986. He completed his residency in 1993, taking a year longer than normal after having changed residency programs after his first year. Thus, his "private practice of 20 years" can only have been 14 years at the very most. If it's true that he "served for more than a decade as medical director for A Woman's Concern," let's be generous and say he dedicated himself to private practice for three years — hardly the picture of a 20-year veteran physician that Pearson implies.
Certainly, Keroack could have maintained a small semblance of private practice, even while he was a full-time medical director. But from the recent evidence available, it was not very robust. Keroack's profile with the local medical center, North Shore Medical Center, lists the same address as a location for A Woman's Concern. (It also gives a different date for his residency completion (1991) than the state licensing board's.) A Salem, MA, directory lists him as sharing an office with one other physician who keeps part-time hours and no longer practices obstetrics. The state board lists his office at what is apparently a residential address in Marblehead.
ACOG, the leading academic society, has no listing at all for Keroack, although he presented himself as an ACOG Fellow at least a recently as 2003.
There must be people in the witness protection program who'd envy the faint trail Keroack 's left. It's almost as if Bush reached down to find a federal court nominee who was subleasing an office from a friendly Anoka State Farm agent.
Keroack's ideas about abstinence, the impact of premarital sex on maternal bonding, and the efficacy of ultrasound as a method of discouraging abortions are all worth highlighting, but I found one concise note from the doctor himself that seems to sum up his curious qualifications for the Bush appointment. This was posted [typos and all] in the guestbook of a site promoting abstinence before marriage:
Entry of Apr
2, 2001 at 13:36 [EST]
Age: 41
How I found your page: A search engine other than Yahoo!
Comments: I am a Gynecologist lining North of Boston, Massachusetts.
I am the Medical Director of the Largets Crisis Preg. Cntr. in our State. I
took this pledge myself, prior to marriage (my second one), because I had lived
through the effects of THE GREAT SOCIAL EXPERIMENT---"The Sexual Revolution"
and I knew it's failure directly. I now counsel Teens on Abstinence...IT IS
BETTER!!
