'Stealth' Bush Appointee Worries About Wayward Wives

He's a favorite guest speaker at meetings of the National Right to Life Committee. He's on the medical advisory council for the notorious Leslee Unruh's National Abstinence Clearinghouse, whence he expounds on such topics as the physical and emotional consequences of premarital sex.

He teaches that there is a physiological cause [pdf link] for relationship failure and sexual promiscuity -- a hormonal cause-and-effect that can only be short-circuited by sexual abstinence until marriage. (Editor's note: The following images, except when otherwise noted, are from the PowerPoint presentation described and linked to above.)

He's the full-time medical director for A Woman's Concern, a chain of Boston area crisis pregnancy centers, where he spreads all the usual lies about abortion and uses ultrasound scans as a tool to influence the decisions of women who might be considering abortion.

He was one of the "experts" who determined that federally funded abstinence education programs must mention contraceptives only in relation to their failure rates and promote abstinence until marriage.

Now, in what has been characterized as a "stealth" appointment by the Bush administration, we hear that Dr. Eric Keroack is set to assume a new post as the deputy assistant secretary for population affairs. The DASPA oversees a number of Health and Human Services programs, including the Office of Family Planning.

Keroack works his heart out for the Christian right. And it appears that, as of Monday morning, he'll be working for us, too.

Last June, Keroack was a featured speaker at the 10th Annual International Abstinence Leadership Conference in Kansas City, where he provided his somewhat unorthodox insights into the role of hormones in relationship failure.

Oxytocin is a hormone whose actions are associated with pregnancy, breastfeeding, and maternal-infant bonding -- and, according to Keroack, it's the tie that binds in marriage, as well. People don't fall in love, but into hormonal bondage. Therefore, the most important rationale for sexual abstinence isn't faith-based at all, but purely physiological. Unfaithful men and promiscuous women are created by misuse of the "emotional glue" of attraction, an abuse leading to a "perpetual cycle of misery."

In his presentation at the 10th Annual Abstinence Leadership Conference in Kansas City earlier this month, Dr. Eric Keroack ... explained that oxytocin is released during positive social interaction, massage, hugs, "trust" encounters, and sexual intercourse. "It promotes bonding by reducing fear and anxiety in social settings, increasing trust and trustworthiness, reducing stress and pain, and decreasing social aggression," he said.

Forty percent of couples who live together break up before they marry and of the 60 percent that do marry, 40 percent of them divorce after 10 years. ... So why do so many adults continue in a cycle of sex without a marriage commitment, cohabitation, and failed relationships? This perpetual cycle of misery is due largely to the role of oxytocin. The following is Dr. Keroack's explanation of the cycle:

Emotional pain causes our bodies to produce an elevated level of endorphins which in turn lowers the level of oxytocin. Therefore, relationship failure leads to pain which leads to elevated endorphins which leads to lower oxytocin, the result of which is a lower ability to bond. Many in this increased state of emotional pain and lower oxytocin seek sex as a substitute for love, which inevitably leads to another failed relationship, and so on, the cycle continues.

There is hope for the weary brokenhearted, Dr. Keroack said, but it requires abstinence and plenty of time for healing.

Keroack's fitting title for that novel presentation [PowerPoint link] was "If I Only Had a Brain." In an unpublished article that has become an established text of the abstinence movement, he wrote, "People who have misused their sexual faculty and become bonded to multiple persons will diminish the power of oxytocin to maintain a permanent bond with an individual." Keroack's teaching on the role of "God's 'super-glue'" is accepted as irrefutable in an article titled Fornication and Oxytocin.