Bush Cabinet Grows; Number of Women Appointees Shrinks

WASHINGTON, DC -- Recent appointments to the George W. Bush cabinet, as well as the likely-appointees list, suggest that the president-elect’s cabinet may include only two women – Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman and Christine Todd Whitman as EPA administrator.

Other possible appointments include Frank Keating for Attorney General and Tommy Thompson for Secretary of Health and Human Services. Both are vehemently anti-choice, and could place substantial barriers to women’s health. Keating, governor of Oklahoma, has called himself “one of the architects of the right-to-life movement.” Under Oklahoma’s Department of Health and Human Services, Keating sponsored a new program “to honor marriage and reduce divorce” – a poorly veiled anti-woman and anti-gay program that reads like a Promise Keepers’ pamphlet. Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson, best known for his welfare-to-work program, stated that abortions should be legal only when pregnancy is a result of rape, incest, or when the woman’s life is endangered, and signed legislation restricting access to abortion.

Aside from Whitman, all of the top contenders mentioned in the media for the remaining cabinet positions are men.

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