THE BELL CURVE:

Shortly before turning over his presidency to Barack Obama, George Bush directed a “midnight” nose-thumbing at his critics that landed mostly on American women. He handed down a regulation through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that made it possible for health-care workers at all levels — from pharmacists to physicians — to deny patients vital health-care information and services on the basis of personal religious convictions.

Thousands of protests poured in pleading with Obama to rescind this mean-spirited act. Obama has started that process, which is long and cumbersome. Meanwhile, the Bush ruling is the law of our land despite its rejection by a broad cross-section of Americans including such conservative bulwarks as the American Medical Assn.

Bush’s target of choice was an old enemy of the Christian right, which started as a pioneering birth control clinic, founded almost a century ago by a prophetic and determined nurse named Margaret Sanger. She joined hands with the women’s suffrage movement to eliminate once and for all the second-class citizen status of women in our society. It was no accident that the 19th Amendment to our constitution that wrote women’s suffrage into law in 1920 was followed soon after by the growth of Sanger’s birth control clinic into the beginnings of Planned Parenthood, dedicated then, as it is now, to its self-defined role as “the nation’s leading sexual and reproductive health-care advocate and provider.”

It has won international respect in that role through the performance of Planned Parenthood affiliates, which operate some 860 health centers in the U.S. That’s the big picture. The little picture is a handful of supervisors sitting in an Orange County board room making decisions affecting the health of many thousands of people on the basis of personal religious convictions and political expediency.

Such charges are now on the table because the supervisors have voted unanimously to suspend a contract with Planned Parenthood to provide health education for girls and young women — paid for with tobacco settlement money — that has apparently worked well for the past eight years. The supervisors’ action brings up two principal issues. Legal problems with the suspended contract will be argued and resolved by lawyers, not here. But the reasons for this action are another matter. They were summed up by Supervisor John Moorlach when he told a Pilot reporter: “I don’t think it’s the business of governments to be funding abortions.”

This is a gross oversimplification. A number of clinics and hospitals perform abortions without being singled out for attention. Only 3% of the total services of Planned Parenthood involve a safe and legal way for women to choose to end a pregnancy. The great preponderance of its services are devoted to teaching about anatomy, sexually transmitted diseases, substance abuse and birth control options. To dismiss 97% of its contributions to health on the basis of this tiny segment is a high order of hypocrisy — rather like banning flu shots because a small percentage of recipients get a bad reaction.

Planned Parenthood is as anxious as the Christian conservatives to cut down on unwanted pregnancies that lead to abortions. They pursue this end vigorously with intelligent sex education — against loud opposition from the unworkable abstinence-only disciples.

But the most important point in this affair is the clear intrusion of personal religious and political views on an issue in which health should be by far the major concern. And bringing that issue front-and-center is a local bipartisan organization called Women in Leadership, dedicated to identifying, selecting and supporting electable women of both political parties at the county, state and federal levels.

Women in Leadership members don’t see much to support in the actions of the supervisors who stuck it to Planned Parenthood last week. And because this is an activist organization, they backed up their feelings with a petition that reads, “The Orange County Supervisors have decided to overlook the county’s public health needs and instead act to further their personal ideologies by unanimously voting on March 10, 2009, to suspend Planned Parenthood’s $291,788 contract for County health educational programming.”

When I last checked, there were 200 signees who strongly disagreed with the supervisors’ action — and the list was growing daily.

Moorlach — apparently jocularly — told Pilot reporters that the “vast majority” of responses he has received to the board’s action came from people opposed to Planned Parenthood but, “We may need to ask for more security from the tone of some” of the harsher responses.

If that’s a joke, he may want to reconsider when the next election comes along. Women in Leadership might well be putting up a candidate who would like to keep “personal ideologies out of government.”

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.