Life and death in Arkansas: Dr. Joycelyn Elders does not hide her contempt for those who prefer life to 'quality of life.' - U.S. Surgeon General nominee and her politically correct medical policies

Dr. Joycelyn Elders does not hide her contempt for those who prefer life to |quality of life.'

If there's one thing you can say about Dr. Joycelyn Elders, President Clinton's nominee for Surgeon General, its that she doesn't discriminate. Since 1987, when she took over as director of the Arkansas Department of Health, she has addressed everything from the annual Arkansas AFL-CIO convention, to "One in Ten," a conference of lobbyists for a pro-gay school curriculum, to the hungry patrons of Don's Catfish Kitchen. She even takes her show out of state. For example, a 1991 article in the Arkansas Gazette noted that "from January 1 through April 30, the outspoken director attended 71 in-state and out-of-state functions. . . . |She's out an average of three days a week . . . plus weekends,' said Tom Butler, the department deputy director who runs the agency on a day-to-day basis."

From this track record, we might get the idea that Dr. Elders, if she is confirmed, will not spend much time on the everyday work of the Surgeon General's office. Then again, that might be the good news. Not because she is incompetent - the 59-year-old Dr. Elders has the reputation of being one of the leading pediatric endocrinologists around. But because of her focus on every politically correct cause in her field, from contraceptives in the schools to taxpayer-funded abortion.

Dr. Elders makes no bones about favoring birth control and abortion on demand for teens. "I tell every girl that when she goes out on a date put a condom in her purse," she told 60 Minutes. She has come out in favor of sex education as early as kindergarten and Medicaid payment for Norplant contraceptive implants, and she has endorsed the Freedom of Choice Act, which goes beyond Roe v. Wade. She has also described her opponents as having "slave-master mentalities." She told the American Medical News, "If Medicaid does not pay for abortions, does not pay for family planning, but pays for pre-natal care and delivery, that's saying |I'll pay for you to have another good, healthy slave, but I won't pay for you to use your brain and make choices for yourself . . . It's a way to keep people poor, ignorant, and enslaved. If you are poor and ignorant, you are a slave."

Her biggest project in Arkansas has been to push for school-based health clinics (SBCs). On the face of it, such clinics sound like a good idea: under-privileged children and teens might well need diagnostic services, nutritional advice, or drug counseling. But that is not the central goal of the SBC movement: birth control is.

Arkansas pro-family activists battled Dr. Elders for four years in the state legislature over whether the state would allow its SBCs to distribute contraceptives; at one point she referred to her critics as "very religious non-christians." Arkansas conservatives thought they had won the battle with a 1991 amendment to the health budget that prohibited spending public money on contraceptives - but the prohibition applied only to state money, Governor Clinton explained after the bill had passed: Arkansas schools can distribute condoms bought with local or federal funds. There are now more than fifty SBCs in Arkansas, one for every six school districts. Local activists say at least ten of the clinics are dispensing contraceptives.

Her goal in all this, she often says, is to "stop children from having children," a problem caused, she told a gay/lesbian newspaper, by "poverty and ignorance and the Bible-belt mentality." But in the early Eighties, before Dr. Elders took over, Arkansas's high teen-pregnancy rate dropped 10 per cent. Then, during her tenure, the rate rose by 17 per cent. Perhaps this should not come as a surprise: a number of studies published in Family Planning Perspectives, an academic journal which is generally pro-birth-control, show that teen-pregnancy rates actually rise in the presence of programs such as SBCs, presumably because their unintended effect is to encourage teens to become more sexually active, and at an earlier age. (Syphilis cases have also multiplied recently, again after a drop in the early Eighties.) Nonetheless, Mr. Clinton introduced Dr. Elders as one who would implement "aggressive efforts" to "reduce teenage pregnancy."

Orwellian Numbers

These numbers don't seem to have worked their way into Dr. Elders's consciousness, though she likes to throw statistics around. She has claimed, on MacNeil/Lehrer, that 60 per cent of American children are "unplanned and unwanted"; she could not defend the number when challenged - but still uses it.

Not all her statistics are bogus - but some of the uses she puts them to are worse than bogus. In her Senate testimony on behalf of the Freedom of Choice Act, she noted that "Abortion was the single most important factor in the significant decrease in neonatal mortality between 1964 and 1977; abortion was responsible for a reduction of 1.5 neo-natal deaths per 1,000 live births among whites and 2.5 per 1,000 live births among blacks." Hmm. Kill babies to stop them from dying.