Bush has appointed yet another birth-control foe to head contraceptive programming at the Department of Health and Human Services. As the deputy assistant secretary for population affairs, Susan Orr will advise the Secretary and the Assistant Secretary for Health on "a wide range of reproductive health topics, including adolescent pregnancy, family planning, and sterilization, as well as other population issues." She will also oversee $283 million in annual grants that are intended to provide contraceptive services to low-income families, the office's abstinence program aimed at teens, and the all of the funding for birth control, pregnancy tests, counseling, and screenings for sexually transmitted disease and HIV administered by the Office of Population Affairs. In 2001, Orr lauded Bush's proposal to stop requiring federal employees' health insurance plans to cover birth control, telling the Washington Post, "We’re quite pleased because fertility is not a disease. It’s not a medical necessity that you have it."
She's also the former senior director for marriage and family at the Family Research Council, and prior to this appointment, was directing child welfare programs (things like the foster care system, where children end up when their parents can't take care of them for whatever reason … often the same reasons one might choose to plan not to have a child in the first place) in another branch of Health and Human Services. In that post, she worked to undermine efforts to set federal minimums on the amount of money foster parents receive to provide adequate care to children and suggested that the privatizing the child welfare system was the best way to fix systemic problems.
And the appointment doesn't require a Senate confirmation, so we have a little over a year of this to look forward to.
--Kate Sheppard
