Critics protest health post pick

President resolute; Mass. physician's theories criticized

By Alan Wirzbicki and Bryan Bender, The Boston Globe, November 18, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Democrats yesterday called on President Bush to reconsider the appointment of Massachusetts physician Eric Keroack to a top position supervising federal family-planning programs, and researchers cited by Keroack to argue for teaching teenagers sexual abstinence said he mischaracterized their work.

"This appointment flies in the face of bipartisanship and once again lets ideology trump science," said Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts in a statement urging Bush to withdraw the Marblehead gynecologist's appointment. Kennedy is slated to take charge of the Senate committee overseeing health programs in January.

House Democrats Henry A. Waxman of California and Carolyn B. Maloney of New York also called on Bush to withdraw the appointment.

But the Bush administration reiterated its support , calling the doctor a national expert on preventing teen pregnancy.

Meanwhile yesterday, scientists criticized Keroack's theories about human sexuality. In a 2001 paper prepared for a group called the Abstinence Clearinghouse, Keroack and a colleague said that having sex with multiple partners alters brain chemistry in a way that makes it harder to form relationships later in life.

But the lead author of a 1999 paper in the journal Psychiatry that Keroack cited said he had gone beyond any scientific evidence in making his claims.

"This is complete -- and I say this without any hesitation -- is complete pseudoscience," said Rebecca Turner , a professor at the California School of Professional Psychology at Alliant International University in San Francisco. "He claims that my study shows women will lose their ability to bond. It's just nowhere in my paper that says that."

Another researcher cited by Keroack, Margaret Altemus of Cornell University, said Keroack "apparently didn't understand the paper and has misstated the findings."

"It's disturbing that he has misinterpreted the scientific paper and that the misinterpretation is consistent with his political beliefs," she said.

In his paper, Keroack also referred to research that has been conducted on prairie voles, small, gray rodents native to the Great Plains, to bolster his argument that sex with multiple partners inhibits the brain's ability to respond to a chemical called oxytocin, which promotes bonding. Prairie voles form monogamous pairs, a relatively rare act among animals.

But Karen Bales , a researcher at the University of California at Davis who has studied voles, said Keroack's paper was full of mistaken assumptions -- most important the drastic long-term effects he said would happen as a result of too much sex.

"There is absolutely no evidence I am aware of that shows we can damage our capacity to produce or respond to oxytocin through sexual activity," Bales said in an e-mail.

The coauthor of Keroack's paper, Dr. John Diggs, said: "Without a doubt the conclusions we came to were inferences that scientists would never come to. This was a paper for lay people to look into some scientific literature that could support an overt observation about human behavior."

Supporters of Keroack defended the doctor's work against abortions yesterday.

Keroack is affiliated with A Woman's Concern, a Dorchester-based chain of pregnancy centers that seek to dissuade women from having abortions. Keroack was medical director for a nonprofit that runs six crisis-pregnancy centers, but was not in charge of Problem Pregnancy in Worcester, as the Globe erroneously reported yesterday (see correction on this page).

The abortion-rights group Planned Parenthood acknowledged that it mistakenly linked Keroack to the Worcester facility, which Planned Parenthood had singled out for misleading women into thinking it was an abortion clinic.

Problem Pregnancy's director, Rod Murphy , said that the center once consulted with Keroack on the use of ultrasound technology, but that Keroack never had a formal affiliation.

Teresa Donovan , who until 2002 was the director of the Brookline center operated by A Woman's Concern and supervised by Keroack, took issue with what she said has been a caricature of the doctor as a rigid ideologue on abortion and sex-education issues.

"This notion that he has been some lifelong ideologue in the prolife or antiabortion movement is flatly wrong," said Donovan, who is now a researcher at the University of Kentucky. "He has strong medical beliefs, and he has also served a variety of women throughout his career as a physician. Those encounters have shaped his views as well."

Donovan said he "once held views that were quite sympathetic" to the abortion-rights groups that are now vilifying him.

"He grew up during the sexual revolution and is far more understanding and aware than people might realize," Donovan said

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