50 ABSTAINING FROM THE TRUTHtion to the FDA in August 2002 to halt distribution and marketing of the abortion pill RU-486. Appointing such a religious extremist to a scienti advisory board on women reproductive issues was a highly controversial move, even for the Bush administration. To help limit opposition, the administration actually announced Hager appointment to the panel on Christmas Eve in 2002, ensuring that it would receive little immediate notice in the press. Hager says he personally refuses to prescribe Plan B to his patients on moral grounds. our faith is an integral part of your life and everything that you do,�he told a reporter, contending that �3 percent of patients in this country say that they prefer that their physicians pray with them.�4 It also bears noting, given Hager moralizing about issues of women sexuality, that he has drawn controversy for his own alleged sexual proclivities. In a recent account, his now-divorced wife, also a devout Christian, asserts that Hager not only cheated on her during their marriage but forcibly sodomized her against her will on a regular basis for at least seven years until she divorced himn the same year he was appointed to the FDA panel.15 Since becoming a government adviser, Hager has taken ample advantage of his position. As a member of FDA advisory panel, it was Hager who st raised the spurious issue of whether the sample size of young girls in Barr Pharmaceuticals�clinical trials was too small. He brought up the issue at the FDA advisory panel meeting. Then, he says, when a request came rom outside the agency�for a minority report, he followed up with a letter about the issue to Galson.16 In 2005, speaking to a religious congregation, Hager explained his role in the FDA decision: apparently he was doing the Lord bidding as well as George W. Bush. od has used me to stand in the breach,�Hager told the congregation. He said that when he urged Galson to overturn the panel recommendations, argued from a scienti perspective, and God took that information, and he used it through this minority report to inence the decision.�7 Hager may have bragged that he argued from a cienti perspective,�but there is little doubt about what really motivates him and the Bush administration to try to block Plan B from being sold over the counter. The objections have little to do with science and everything to do with the politics of right-wing Christian fundamentalists.