The Patriot Post® · Defending the Conscience of Doctors

If there’s strength in numbers, then the lawsuit filed by the American College of Pediatricians, the Catholic Medical Association, and an obstetrician-gynecologist specializing in care for adolescents will at least garner some attention. Hopefully, it’ll do much more.

The suit, which was filed on behalf of some 3,000 physicians and health professionals, opposes a Biden administration rule that the suit says encroaches on the rights of doctors opposed to gender-transitioning procedures. Specifically, the suit challenges a radical reinterpretation of “non-discrimination on the basis of sex” nested within ObamaCare. According to a press release from the Alliance Defending Freedom, that provision, if allowed to stand, will mandate that those doctors “perform gender transition procedures on any patient, including a child, [even] if the procedure violates a doctor’s medical judgment or religious beliefs.”

ADF is the world’s largest legal organization committed to protecting religious freedom, free speech, marriage and family, parental rights, and the sanctity of life. As ADF Senior Counsels Ryan Bangert and Julie Marie Blake put it:

The law and the medical profession have long recognized and respected the biological differences between boys and girls and the unique needs they each present in health care. Forcing doctors to prescribe transition hormones for 13-year-olds or perform life-altering surgeries on adolescents is unlawful, unethical, and dangerous. President Biden’s Health and Human Services department is grossly overreaching its authority and, in so doing, putting children’s psychological and physical health in danger. Our clients are rightfully objecting on medical, ethical, religious, and conscientious grounds to this unlawful government mandate to provide gender-transition procedures.

Doctors should never be forced to perform a controversial and often medically dangerous procedure that goes against their best judgment, their conscience, or their religion, especially when it involves vulnerable children experiencing mental and emotional confusion. To force doctors to engage in experimental medicine that poses a risk to patients — or face huge financial penalties, withdrawal of federal funding, or removal of their ability to practice medicine — is an extreme violation of doctors’ constitutional rights and certainly not in the best interest of the patients they serve.

That’s it, really. This is an extreme violation of doctors’ constitutional rights.

One of the hallmarks of a free society is the protection of conscience — which is to say, the protection against being forced to do something one finds morally or religiously objectionable. The two most prominent areas of conscience exception during the past 50 years have concerned abortion and, more recently, same-sex marriage. We can hope that experimental “transgender” medical treatment will one day soon join them among the Constitution’s essential protections — both for the sake of doctors, and for the sake of their young, vulnerable, and impressionable patients.