CV NEWS FEED // An Alliance Defending Freedom lawyer is weighing in on the religious freedom at risk because of the Biden Administration’s recent move to force doctors to perform “gender transition” surgeries on children.
“The Biden administration has released a rule that attempts to redefine ‘sex’ to include ‘gender identity,’ defying the law, the Constitution, and common sense,” ADF Senior Counsel Julie Marie Blake told CatholicVote in an email interview.
The state of Florida, led by Republican Attorney General Ashley Moody, and the Catholic Medical Association responded to the new rule by filing a lawsuit against the Department of Health and Human Services on May 6. ADF lawyers are representing the Association in the lawsuit.
“This rule will transform the United States’ medical system for the worse as it will force doctors to perform harmful, life-altering procedures instead of prioritizing their patients’ best interests,” Blake explained. “It also requires insurance plans to pay for these dangerous procedures and forces doctors to refer to patients by self-selected pronouns contrary to one’s biology.”
Blake added that the new rule violates doctors’ religious freedom and freedom of speech.
“This mandate should never have come into existence in the first place because no doctor should be forced to harm their patients,” Blake stated.
The rule should, at minimum, allow all doctors with a religious or conscience objection to be wholly exempt from performing these surgeries, she added.
“Yet physicians who are found to be in violation of this mandate face huge financial penalties and loss of their ability to practice medicine in most settings, including for low-income patients who need them the most,” Blake stated. “This hurts both physicians and their patients.”
Though the rule does address certain limited exemptions, it falls short of providing the certainty and clarity that doctors or faith-based hospitals need, Blake explained.
“We are asking that every doctor with a religious or conscience objection be completely exempt up-front in the text of the rule. More importantly, we want to ensure that no doctor or hospital is ever required to harm patients, whether or not that hospital is religious. Patients deserve nothing less,” she said.
Under the new rule, states “will be penalized financially seeking to protect their citizens from these life-altering procedures,” Blake said.
The lawsuit, Blake explained, seeks to protect states, doctors, and children who are at risk from this rule.
“We are asking the court to find that the federal government has no authority to impose this mandate on anyone. Congress has never passed any law requiring doctors to harm their patients or to perform risky procedures on children,” Blake said.
The lawsuit also comes a month after the leading global organization on “transgender” healthcare was exposed for its lack of ethics and its support of experimental “treatments” for children suffering from gender dysphoria.
Leaked internal communications in the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) revealed the members’ disregard for the long-term harm inflicted upon children and vulnerable adults through irreversible “gender transition” surgeries and chemical hormone drugs.
The lawsuit against the HHS references several concerns about the WPATH “Standards of Care,” a standard that leading pediatric associations look to for guidance in treating children suffering from gender dysphoria.
Blake told CatholicVote that WPATH’s leaked internal communications “reveal what we already knew to be true: children cannot consent to life-altering procedures with full knowledge of the consequences involved.”
“Respected voices internationally recognize that injecting cross-sex hormones or disrupting puberty in a child’s body is strictly experimental, with no proven benefit. The government should not force doctors to perform experiments on our children that are likely to permanently sterilize them,” Blake continued:
A thorough review by England’s National Health Service of all available studies concluded that all claimed evidence of benefit from injecting puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones into children and teens is “very low quality”—meaning that it is completely unreliable.
Even voices that encourage using puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on children have recognized that these hormones disrupt natural development and may harm normal brain development.
Given the lack of evidence in support of puberty blockers and “gender transition” surgeries, children should be protected from them, Blake said.
“States are right to regulate the practice of medicine to prevent these experiments from taking place,” she concluded:
The Biden administration shouldn’t force doctors to harm their patients by performing dangerous, body-altering transition efforts with life-long consequences.
Alliance Defending Freedom is honored to defend doctors from facing steep financial penalties and loss of their ability to practice medicine.
