Medical Journal: Allow Adolescents to Consent When Parents Decline to Get Them Vaccinated
Study: Natural Immunity Effective at Preventing Severe Reinfection
At Last! Establishment Pushback Against Puberty Blocking
Medical Journal: Train Medical Students to Be Woke Social Activists
The Perils of Declaring Racism a ‘Public Health Emergency’
No NEJM: Blocking Puberty in Gender-Dysphoric Children Is Not Settled Science
Not Identifying Sex on Birth Certificates Pushed in New England Journal of Medicine
The New England Journal of Medicine continues its hard swing to the woke left. Now, it has published an advocacy article that would remove sex designation as an identifiable factor on birth certificates. From, “Failed Assignments: Rethinking Sex Designations on Birth Certificates”: Assigning sex at birth also doesn’t capture the diversity of people’s experiences. About 6 in 1000 people identify as transgender, meaning that their gender identity doesn’t match the sex they were assigned at birth. Others are nonbinary, meaning they don’t exclusively identify as a man or a woman, or gender nonconforming, meaning their behavior or appearance doesn’t align with social expectations for their assigned sex. The idea is to move sex designation “below the line,” which allows for general statistical compilation of vital statistics, but not an identifiable designation of the particular individual about whom the birth certificate was created. The point is to promote a particular view of social justice: Moving sex designations below the line would be in keeping with legal developments deemphasizing sex distinctions. Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has held, in Obergefell v. Hodges, that bans on same-sex marriage are unconstitutional, only a few legal contexts relying on sex designations remain. In these contexts, using information from birth certificates is not the best way to categorize people. The authors also want sex designations removed from important documents such as passports: Passports and state identification cards relying on sex assigned at birth for identification pose another challenge. These documents are usually issued or renewed when the holder is an adolescent or an adult, however, so moving sex designations below the line of demarcation on birth certificates would permit applicants to identify their gender without medical verification. Governments could also remove gender designations from identification cards altogether and focus more on identifiable physical features and updated photographs. This change would accommodate nonbinary people and reduce the burdens associated with amending documents. Articles like this certainly have their place in debating transgenderism. But when they appear in the most influential medical journal in the world, it calls into question the editors’ ability to dispassionately choose which medical papers to publish. I mean, if a reputable study reached conclusions that were scientifically sound but cut against the grain of transgender ideology, do you think it would ever make the pages of the NEJM? Not a chance! Publishing ideological advocacy in what is supposed to be a journal that primarily publishes objective scientific information contributes to the growing public distrust of the science sector. That doesn’t help people with gender dysphoria specifically, or contribute to the betterment of society overall.
Suicide by Starvation and Expanded Assisted Suicide Promoted in New England Journal of Medicine
Catholic Hospitals Under Attack
Catholic hospitals are under unremitting attack — from prestigious medical journals, media, and lawyers in courtrooms. The goal is to coerce these venerable institutions into replacing their faith-based methods of medical practice with secular moral standards that deny the sanctity of human life.
A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine — perhaps the world’s most influential medical publication — illustrates the threat to medical conscience rights. Ian D. Wolfe and Thaddeus M. Pope, two prominent bioethicists, fret that one in six U.S. hospitals is “affiliated with a Catholic health system.” This is a problem, in their view, because religiously-affiliated hospitals often “refuse to provide legally permitted health services on the basis of institutional belief structures.” The authors are referring to services like abortion, sterilization (absent a pathology), assisted suicide (where legal), and transgender sex reassignment surgeries that alter a body’s normal biological functions. Refusing such procedures, the authors claim, leads to “substantial risks for patient choice, patient safety, and the fundamental principle of autonomy.”
Patient choice? Yes, sometimes. If a woman requests an abortion and the hospital says no, she is not getting what she wants. But safety? The Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services allow Catholic hospitals to refuse interventions that violate Church belief, but nonetheless require that all patients receive proper care. That includes providing “all reasonable information about the essential nature of the proposed treatment and its benefits; its risks, side-effects, consequences, and cost; and any reasonable and morally legitimate alternative.” In practice, this may also include referring patients to non-Catholic institutions.
Worries over “safety” are more likely a deflection to mask anti-religious bigotry. Charles C. Camosy, associate professor of theological and social ethics at Fordham University, believes that in many circumstances, the motive for attacking Catholic medicine “is about raw power. Certain influential people don’t want certain [medical] choices denied, so they try to use their power make things the way they want them to be.”
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