President Obama to Nominate Pro-Abortion Margaret Hamburg as FDA Director
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
March 12, 2009
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — President Barack Obama plans to nominate former New York City Health Commissioner Margaret Hamburg as the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. Hamburg served as assistant HHS secretary during the Clinton administration and has been a key abstinence education opponent.
Hamburg takes a pro-abortion position and ran New York City’s abortion counseling and family-planning centers for former mayor Rudy Giuliani. The nation’s largest city is also the location of one of the highest abortion rates in the country.
A Giuliani aide once confirmed to the Village Voice newspaper that Hamburg supports abortion and said he "would never have considered anyone who wasn’t pro-choice."
Hamburg herself told the Village Voice in 2007 that "her pro-choice preferences were a given in the Giuliani administration."
She confirmed that she promoted abortion as the city’s health commissioner saying, "There were no restrictions on abortion counseling."
While serving as New York City health commissioner, Hamburg opposed a "morality oath" put forth by the Board of Education in 1992 when New York City was considering abstinence-only sex education.
She also said that science-based public health strategies and not "moral judgment" or "wishful thinking" should be the basis of sexual education.
Meanwhile, Obama has picked Baltimore health commissioner Joshua Sharfstein, who led Obama’s FDA transition team, as Hamburg’s chief deputy.
Sharfstein is also pro-abortion and, in a 1991 article in the Harvard Crimson newspaper, wrote that pro-life laws "will undoubtedly undermine women’s health. The reason is simple: It is more dangerous for a woman to go through childbirth than to have an abortion."
He said pro-life laws "force women to sacrifice their own health for the sake of their fetus–a responsibility not recognized anywhere else in American jurisprudence."
The FDA commissioner spot has been a controversial post.
In 2005, abortion advocates were delighted to see the resignation of FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford, who abruptly left his post just two months after the Senate confirmed him.
News reports indicate personal issues may have caused him to step down, but pro-abortion groups were unhappy with the FDA’s decision to delay approval of selling the morning after pill over the counter.
In addition to the controversy over the morning after pill, the FDA had been criticized for not being stringent enough on safety standards for the dangerous abortion drug RU 486.
Earlier this year, pro-life advocates were worried that Obama was considering Jane Henney to become the next head of the Food and Drug Administration.
Henney is a former FDA chief who oversaw the approval of the dangerous RU 486 abortion drug during the end of the Clinton administration.
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