The Nation
May 30, 2005

Dr. Hager's Family Values
by AYELISH MCGARVEY

Late last October Dr. W. David Hager, a prominent
obstetrician-gynecologist and Bush Administration appointee to the
Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs in the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA), took to the pulpit as the featured speaker at a
morning service. He stood in the campus chapel at Asbury College, a
small evangelical Christian school nestled among picturesque horse
farms in the small town of Wilmore in Kentucky's bluegrass region.
Hager is an Asburian nabob; his elderly father is a past president of
the college, and Hager himself currently sits on his alma mater's board
of trustees. Even the school's administrative building, Hager Hall,
bears the family name.

That day, a mostly friendly audience of 1,500 students and faculty
packed into the seats in front of him. With the autumn sunlight
streaming through the stained-glass windows, Hager opened his Bible to
the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel and looked out into the audience. "I
want to share with you some information about how...God has called me
to stand in the gap," he declared. "Not only for others, but regarding
ethical and moral issues in our country."

For Hager, those moral and ethical issues all appear to revolve around
sex: In both his medical practice and his advisory role at the FDA, his
ardent evangelical piety anchors his staunch opposition to emergency
contraception, abortion and premarital sex. Through his six
books--which include such titles as Stress and the Woman's Body and As
Jesus Cared for Women, self-help tomes that interweave syrupy Christian
spirituality with paternalistic advice on women's health and
relationships--he has established himself as a leading conservative
Christian voice on women's health and sexuality.

And because of his warm relationship with the Bush Administration,
Hager has had the opportunity to see his ideas influence federal
policy. In December 2003 the FDA advisory committee of which he is a
member was asked to consider whether emergency contraception, known as
Plan B, should be made available over the counter. Over Hager's
dissent, the committee voted overwhelmingly to approve the change. But
the FDA rejected its recommendation, a highly unusual and controversial
decision in which Hager, The Nation has learned, played a key role.
Hager's reappointment to the committee, which does not require
Congressional approval, is expected this June, but Bush's nomination of
Dr. Lester Crawford as FDA director has been bogged down in controversy
over the issue of emergency contraception. Crawford was acting director
throughout the Plan B debacle, and Senate Democrats, led by Hillary
Clinton and Patty Murray, are holding up his nomination until the
agency revisits its decision about going over the counter with the
pill.

When Hager's nomination to the FDA was announced in the fall of 2002,
his conservative Christian beliefs drew sharp criticism from Democrats
and prochoice groups. David Limbaugh, the lesser light in the Limbaugh
family and author of Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging Political War
Against Christianity, said the left had subjected Hager to an
"anti-Christian litmus test." Hager's valor in the face of this
"religious profiling" earned him the praise and lasting support of
evangelical Christians, including such luminaries as Charles Colson,
Dr. James Dobson and Franklin Graham, son of the Rev. Billy Graham.

Back at Asbury, Hager cast himself as a victim of religious persecution
in his sermon. "You see...there is a war going on in this country," he
said gravely. "And I'm not speaking about the war in Iraq. It's a war
being waged against Christians, particularly evangelical Christians. It
wasn't my scientific record that came under scrutiny [at the FDA]. It
was my faith.... By making myself available, God has used me to stand
in the breach.... Just as he has used me, he can use you."

Up on the dais, several men seated behind Hager nodded solemnly in
agreement. But out in the audience, Linda Carruth Davis--co-author with
Hager of Stress and the Woman's Body, and, more saliently, his former
wife of thirty-two years--was enraged. "It was the most disgusting
thing I've ever heard," she recalled months later, through clenched
teeth.

According to Davis, Hager's public moralizing on sexual matters clashed
with his deplorable treatment of her during their marriage. Davis
alleges that between 1995 and their divorce in 2002, Hager repeatedly
sodomized her without her consent. Several sources on and off the
record confirmed that she had told them it was the sexual and emotional
abuse within their marriage that eventually forced her out. "I probably
wouldn't have objected so much, or felt it was so abusive if he had
just wanted normal [vaginal] sex all the time," she explained to me.
"But it was the painful, invasive, totally nonconsensual nature of the
[anal] sex that was so horrible."

Not once during the uproar over Hager's FDA appointment did any
reporter solicit the opinion of the woman now known as Linda Davis--she
remarried in November 2002 to James Davis, a Methodist minister, and
relocated to southern Georgia--on her husband's record, even though she
contributed to much of his self-help work in the Christian arena (she
remains a religious and political conservative). She intermittently
thought of telling her story but refrained, she says, out of respect
for her adult children. It was Hager's sermon at Asbury last October
that finally changed her mind. Davis was there to hear her middle son
give a vocal performance; she was prepared to hear her ex-husband
inveigh against secular liberals, but she was shocked to hear him speak
about their divorce when he took to the pulpit.

"In early 2002," Hager told the churchgoers that day, "my world fell
apart.... After thirty-two years of marriage, I was suddenly alone in a
new home that we had built as our dream home. Time spent 'doing God's
will' had kept me from spending the time I needed to nourish my
marriage." Hager noted with pride that in his darkest hour, Focus on
the Family estimated that 50 million people worldwide were praying for
him.

Linda Davis quietly fumed in her chair. "He had the gall to stand under
the banner of holiness of the Lord and lie, by the sin of omission,"
she told me. "It's what he didn't say--it's the impression he left."

David Hager is not the fringe character and fundamentalist faith healer
that some of his critics have made him out to be. In fact, he is a
well-credentialed doctor. In Kentucky Hager has long been recognized as
a leading Ob-Gyn at Lexington's Central Baptist Hospital and a faculty
member at the University of Kentucky's medical school. And in the 1990s
several magazines, including Modern Healthcare and Good Housekeeping,
counted him among the best doctors for women in the nation.

Yet while Hager doesn't advocate the substitution of conservative
Christianity for medicine, his religious ideology underlies an
all-encompassing paternalism in his approach to his women patients.
"Even though I was trained as a medical specialist," Hager explained in
the preface to As Jesus Cared for Women, "it wasn't until I began to
see how Jesus treated women that I understood how I, as a doctor,
should treat them." To underscore this revelation, Hager recounted case
after case in which he acted as confidant, spiritual adviser and even
father figure to his grateful patients. As laid out in his writings,
Hager's worldview is not informed by a sense of inherent equality
between men and women. Instead, men are expected to act as benevolent
authority figures for the women in their lives. (In one of his books,
he refers to a man who raped his wife as "selfish" and "sinful.") But
to model gender relations on the one Jesus had with his followers is to
leave women dangerously exposed in the event that the men in their
lives don't meet the high standard set by God Himself--trapped in a
permanent state of dependence hoping to be treated well.

In tandem with his medical career, Hager has been an aggressive
advocate for the political agenda of the Christian right. A member of
Focus on the Family's Physician Resource Council and the Christian
Medical and Dental Society, Hager assisted the Concerned Women for
America in submitting a "Citizen's Petition" to the FDA in August 2002
to halt distribution and marketing of the abortion pill, RU-486. It was
this record of conservative activism that ignited a firestorm when the
Bush Administration first floated his name for chairman of the FDA's
advisory committee in the fall of 2002. In the end, the FDA found a way
to dodge the controversy: It issued a stealth announcement of Hager's
appointment to the panel (to be one of eleven members, not chairman) on
Christmas Eve. Liberals were furious that they weren't able to block
his appointment. For many months afterward, an outraged chain letter
alerting women to the appointment of a man with religious views "far
outside the mainstream" snaked its way around the Internet, lending the
whole episode the air of urban legend.

Back in Lexington, where the couple continued to live, Linda Hager, as
she was still known at the time, was sinking into a deep depression,
she says. Though her marriage had been dead for nearly a decade, she
could not see her way clear to divorce; she had no money of her own and
few marketable skills. But life with David Hager had grown unbearable.
As his public profile increased, so did the tension in their home,
which she says periodically triggered episodes of abuse. "I would be
asleep," she recalls, "and since [the sodomy] was painful and
threatening, I woke up. Sometimes I acquiesced once he had started,
just to make it go faster, and sometimes I tried to push him off.... I
would [confront] David later, and he would say, 'You asked me to do
that,' and I would say, 'No, I never asked for it.'"

I first heard of Davis's experience in 2004 through a friend of hers.
After a few telephone conversations, she agreed to have me fly down to
see her in her modest parsonage in Georgia, to tell me her story on the
record. With her mod reading glasses, stylish bob and clever outfits,
Davis, 55, is a handsome woman with a sharp wit. She spoke with me over
two days in January.

Linda Davis (née Carruth) first met David Hager on the campus of
Asbury College in 1967. "On the very first date he sat me down and told
me he was going to marry me," Davis remembers. "I was so overwhelmed by
this aggressive approach of 'I see you and I want you' that I was
completely seduced by it."

Davis, a former beauty queen, was a disengaged student eager to get
married and start a family. A Hager-Carruth marriage promised prestige
and wealth for the couple; her father was a famous Methodist
evangelist, and his father was then president of Asbury. "On the
surface, it just looked so good," she remembers. The couple married in
1970, while Hager completed medical school at the University of
Kentucky.

"I don't think I was married even a full year before I realized that I
had made a horrible mistake," Davis says. By her account, Hager was
demanding and controlling, and the couple shared little emotional
intimacy. "But," she says, "the people around me said, 'Well, you've
made your bed, and now you have to lie in it.'" So Davis commenced with
family making and bore three sons: Philip, in 1973; Neal, in 1977; and
Jonathan, in 1979.

Sometime between the births of Neal and Jonathan, Hager embarked on an
affair with a Bible-study classmate who was a friend of Davis's. A
close friend of Davis's remembers her calling long distance when she
found out: "She was angry and distraught, like any woman with two
children would be. But she was committed to working it out."

Sex was always a source of conflict in the marriage. Though it wasn't
emotionally satisfying for her, Davis says she soon learned that sex
could "buy" peace with Hager after a long day of arguing, or insure his
forgiveness after she spent too much money. "Sex was coinage; it was a
commodity," she said. Sometimes Hager would blithely shift from vaginal
to anal sex. Davis protested. "He would say, 'Oh, I didn't mean to have
anal sex with you; I can't feel the difference,'" Davis recalls
incredulously. "And I would say, 'Well then, you're in the wrong
business.'"

By the 1980s, according to Davis, Hager was pressuring her to let him
videotape and photograph them having sex. She consented, and eventually
she even let Hager pay her for sex that she wouldn't have otherwise
engaged in--for example, $2,000 for oral sex, "though that didn't
happen very often because I hated doing it so much. So though it was
more painful, I would let him sodomize me, and he would leave a check
on the dresser," Davis admitted to me with some embarrassment. This
exchange took place almost weekly for several years.

Money was an explosive issue in their household. Hager kept an iron
grip on the family purse strings. Initially the couple's single
checking account was in Hager's name only, which meant that Davis had
to appeal to her husband for cash, she says. Eventually he relented and
opened a dual account. Davis recalls that Hager would return home every
evening and make a beeline for his office to balance the checkbook,
often angrily summoning her to account for the money she'd spent that
day. Brenda Bartella Peterson, Davis's friend of twenty-five years and
her neighbor at the time, witnessed Hager berate his wife in their
kitchen after one such episode. For her part, Davis set out to subvert
Hager's financial dominance with profligate spending on credit cards
opened in her own name. "I was not willing to face reality about
money," she admits. "I thought, 'Well, money can't buy happiness, but
it buys the kind of misery you can learn to live with.'"

These financial atmospherics undoubtedly figured into Linda's
willingness to accept payment for sex. But eventually her conscience
caught up with her. "Finally...I said, 'You know, David, this is like
being a prostitute. I just can't do this anymore; I don't think it's
healthy for our relationship,'" she recalls.

By 1995, according to Davis's account, Hager's treatment of his wife
had moved beyond morally reprehensible to potentially felonious. It was
a uniquely stressful year for Davis. Her mother, dying of cancer, had
moved in with the family and was in need of constant care. At the same
time, Davis was suffering from a seemingly inexplicable exhaustion
during the day. She began exhibiting a series of strange behaviors,
like falling asleep in such curious places as the mall and her closet.
Occasionally she would--as she describes it--"zone out" in midsentence
in a conversation, and her legs would buckle. Eventually, Davis was
diagnosed as having narcolepsy, a neurological disorder that affects
the brain's ability to regulate normal sleep-wake cycles.

For Davis, the diagnosis spelled relief, and a physician placed her on
several medications to attain "sleep hygiene," or a consistent sleep
pattern. But Davis says it was after the diagnosis that the period of
the most severe abuse began. For the next seven years Hager sodomized
Davis without her consent while she slept roughly once a month until
their divorce in 2002, she claims. "My sense is that he saw [my
narcolepsy] as an opportunity," Davis surmises. Sometimes she fought
Hager off and he would quit for a while, only to circle back later that
same night; at other times, "the most expedient thing was to try and
somehow get it [over with]. In order to keep any peace, I had to
maintain the illusion of being available to him." At still other
moments, she says, she attempted to avoid Hager's predatory advances in
various ways--for example, by sleeping in other rooms in the house, or
by struggling to stay awake until Hager was in a deep sleep himself.
But, she says, nothing worked. One of Davis's lifelong confidantes
remembers when Davis first told her about the abuse. "[Linda] was very
angry and shaken," she recalled.

As Hager began fielding calls from the White House personnel office in
2001, the stress in the household--and, with it, the abuse--hit an
all-time high, according to Davis. She says she confronted her husband
on numerous occasions: "[I said to him,] 'Every time you do this, I
hate your guts. And it blows a bridge out between us that takes weeks,
if not months, to heal.'" She says that Hager would, in rare instances,
admit what he had done and apologize, but typically would deny it
altogether.

For a while, fears of poverty, isolation and damnation were enough to
keep Davis from seeking a divorce. She says that she had never cheated
on Hager, but after reuniting with a high school sweetheart (not her
current husband) in the chaotic aftermath of September 11, she had a
brief affair. En route to their first, and only, rendezvous, she prayed
aloud. "I said to the Lord, 'All right. I do not want to die without
having sex with someone I love,'" she remembers. "'I want to know what
that's like, Lord. I know that it's a sin, and I know this is adultery.
But I have to know what it's like.'"

Davis was sure that God would strike her dead on her way home that
weekend. But when nothing happened, she took it as a good sign. Back in
Lexington, she walked through her front door and made a decision right
there on the spot. "I said, 'David, I want a divorce.'"

Marital rape is a foreign concept to many women with stories like this
one. Indeed, Linda Davis had never heard the term until midway through
her divorce. In Kentucky a person is guilty of rape in the first degree
when he engages in sexual intercourse with another person by "forcible
compulsion"; or when the victim is incapable of consent because she is
physically helpless. The same standards apply to the crime of sodomy in
the first degree (equivalent to rape, and distinct from consensual
sodomy). Both are felonies.

In sexual assault cases, the outcome hinges on the issue of consent. A
high-level domestic violence prosecutor in Kentucky confirmed that a
scenario such as this one, in which Davis was in a deep sleep from the
narcolepsy, could meet the "physically helpless" standard required for
a first-degree offense. A prosecutor could also argue that Hager
engaged in sodomy with Davis by means of forcible compulsion, even
though the alleged encounters did not involve violence. According to
the Kentucky Supreme Court's decision in 1992 in Yarnell v.
Commonwealth, a climate of abuse involving "constant emotional, verbal,
and physical duress" is tantamount to forcible compulsion. In that
case, the victims submitted to the sex acts to avoid a loss of
financial security, as well as to maintain peace in the household.

Historically, the legal system has long been indifferent to the crime
of marital sexual assault; as recently as twelve years ago in some
states, it was legal for a man to force his wife physically into sex,
or commence having sex without her consent--actions that could land a
stranger in jail. Until 2000 the Kentucky Penal Code still contained
archaic procedural obstacles for prosecuting marital rape, including a
requirement that it be reported within one year of the offense. (No
other felony--including "stranger rape"--contains a statute of
limitations.) Even today, marital sexual assault is a notoriously
difficult crime to prosecute. Women like Davis often have strong
financial incentives to stay with their spouses; those who speak out
frequently face an uphill battle to convince people that their
husbands, who may be well liked and respected, are capable of something
this ugly at home. Also, because marriages play out over many years,
some sex is consensual, while other sex is not--a fact that may
complicate matters for a jury in a criminal proceeding.

Linda Davis chose not to bring allegations of marital rape into her
divorce proceedings; her foremost desires at the time were a fair
settlement and minimal disruption for her sons. Nonetheless, she
informed her lawyer of the abuse. Natalie Wilson, a divorce attorney in
Lexington, asked Linda to draw up a working chronology of her marriage
to Hager. "[It] included references to what I would call the sexual
abuse," Wilson explained. "I had no reason not to believe her.... It
was an explanation for some of the things that went on in the marriage,
and it explained her reluctance to share that information with her
sons--which had resulted in her sons' being very angry about the fact
that she was insisting on the divorce."

As it turned out, when the dust settled after their divorce, nearly
everyone in the Hagers' Christian and medical circles in Lexington had
sided with Hager, who told people that his wife was mentally unstable
and had moved in with another man (she moved in with friends).

Davis had only told a handful of people about the abuse throughout her
marriage, but several of her longtime confidantes confirmed for this
article that she had told them of the abuse at the time it was
occurring. Wilson, the attorney, spoke to me on the record, as did
Brenda Bartella Peterson, Davis's close friend of twenty-five years.
Several others close to Davis spoke to me off the record. Two refused
to speak to me and denounced Davis for going public, but they did not
contest her claims. Many attempts to interview nearly a dozen of
Hager's friends and supporters in Lexington and around the country were
unsuccessful.

As for David Hager, after repeated attempts to interview him for this
story, we finally spoke for nearly half an hour in early April. That
conversation was off the record. "My official comment is that I decline
to comment," he said.

As disturbing as they are on their own, Linda Davis's allegations take
on even more gravity in light of Hager's public role as a custodian of
women's health. Some may argue that this is just a personal matter
between a man and his former wife--a simple case of "he said, she said"
with no public implications. That might be so--if there were no
allegations of criminal conduct, if the alleged conduct did not bear
any relevance to the public responsibilities of the person in question,
and if the allegations themselves were not credible and independently
corroborated. But given that this case fails all of those tests, the
public has a right to call on Dr. David Hager to answer Linda Davis's
charges before he is entrusted with another term. After all, few women
would knowingly choose a sexual abuser as their gynecologist, and fewer
still would likely be comfortable with the idea of letting one serve as
a federal adviser on women's health issues.

(Lest inappropriate analogies be drawn between the Hager accusations
and the politics of personal destruction that nearly brought down the
presidency of Bill Clinton, it ought to be remembered that President
Clinton's sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky was never alleged to
be criminal and did not affect his ability to fulfill his obligations
to the nation. This, of course, did not stop the religious right from
calling for his head. "The topic of private vs. public behavior has
emerged as perhaps the central moral issue raised by Bill Clinton's
'improper relationship,'" wrote evangelist and Hager ally Franklin
Graham at the time. "But the God of the Bible says that what one does
in private does matter. There needs to be no clash between personal
conduct and public appearance.")

Hager's FDA assignment is an object lesson in the potential influence
of a single appointment to a federal advisory committee that in turn
affects thousands, even millions, of lives. Witness the
behind-the-scenes machinations that set the stage for the FDA's ruling
against Plan B, a decision that the American College of Obstetricians
and Gynecologists called a "dark stain on the reputation of an
evidence-based agency like the FDA."

On December 16, 2003, twenty-seven of the FDA's advisers on women's
health and nonprescription drugs gathered in Gaithersburg, Maryland, to
evaluate the safety and efficacy of emergency contraception for
over-the-counter use. (The Plan B pill, which drastically reduces the
risk of pregnancy when used within seventy-two hours after intercourse,
has long been available by prescription only; its advocates say its
greater availability could significantly reduce the nation's abortion
rate.) After a long day of highly technical deliberation, the advisers
voted 23 to 4 to drop the prescription-only status of emergency
contraception. "I've been on this committee...for almost four years,
and I would take this to be the safest product that we have seen
brought before us," announced Dr. Julie Johnson, a professor at the
University of Florida's Colleges of Pharmacy and Medicine.

But on May 6, 2004, the FDA rejected the advice of its own experts and
refused to approve the sale of Plan B over the counter. In his letter
to Barr Laboratories, Steven Galson, acting director of the FDA's
Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, claimed that Barr had not
provided adequate data showing just how young adolescent women would
actually use the drug.

That issue was never voted on by the committee. It was, however,
broached by Hager at the meeting; he mentioned his concern for these
"younger adolescents" several times.

In his private practice back in Kentucky, Hager doesn't prescribe
emergency contraception, because he believes it is an abortifacient,
and, not surprisingly, his was one of the four votes against widening
its availability. But rather than voice his ethical opposition to the
product, Hager emphasized his concern about adolescents, which other
committee members have since called a "political fig leaf." According
to Dr. James Trussell, who voted in favor of Plan B, the FDA had at
hand six studies examining whether teens as young as 15 would increase
their "risky" behavior if they knew they had a backup emergency
contraceptive--and none of the studies showed any evidence for that
contention.

In his sermon at Asbury College last fall, Hager proudly recounted his
role in the Plan B decision. "After two days of hearings," he said,
"the committees voted to approve this over-the-counter sale by 23 to 4.
I was asked to write a minority opinion that was sent to the
commissioner of the FDA.... Now the opinion I wrote was not from an
evangelical Christian perspective.... But I argued it from a scientific
perspective, and God took that information, and He used it through this
minority report to influence the decision." [Emphasis added.]

None of the four panel members I spoke with for this article were aware
of Hager's "minority opinion." An FDA spokeswoman told me that "the FDA
did not ask for a minority opinion from this advisory committee,"
though she was unable to say whether any individual within the agency
had requested such a document from Hager. This past January the FDA
missed a deadline to respond to a new application from Barr
Laboratories, and any forward motion on making Plan B more widely
available has completely stalled.

Meanwhile, David Hager's stock has been rising among conservatives.
Though his term on the FDA panel is set to expire on June 30, observers
on both sides of the political divide anticipate his reappointment. In
March I spoke with Janice Shaw Crouse, executive director and senior
fellow at the Beverly LaHaye Institute, the research arm of Concerned
Women for America. She is one of Hager's staunchest advocates in
Washington (some credit her with engineering his FDA appointment);
Crouse sits alongside Hager on Asbury College's board of trustees. In
May, when informed of the allegations against him, she declined to
revise her earlier statement. "I would not be at all surprised to see
Dr. Hager elevated to a higher position or to another very influential
position when it comes to women's care," she told me. "Because he has
shown that he does care about women regardless of...the [religious]
issues that people want to try to raise.... When people try to
discredit him, he continues on. He hasn't caved in, and he hasn't
waffled. He has been a gentleman. He is a person of character and
integrity, and I think people admire that."