Protection of Conscience Project News
Service, not Servitude
BBC News
A doctor who refused to use transgender pronouns as people’s chosen sex as it went against his Christian faith has lost his tribunal.
Disability assessor Dr David Mackereth, from Dudley, West Midlands, claimed the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) breached his right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.
But a panel ruled his biblical view of what it is to be male and female was “incompatible with human dignity.” . . . [Full text]
BioEdge
A trans man in the United Kingdom has lost his bid to be deemed a father on his child’s birth certificate – even though he conceived it, gestated it, and gave birth to it.
Astonishingly, it appears to be the first time that English common law has defined the word “mother”.
The would-be father, a natal female multimedia journalist at The Guardian named Freddie McConnell, was deeply disappointed by the decision and said that he plans to appeal. He complained:
“It has serious implications for non-traditional family structures. It upholds the view that only the most traditional forms of family are properly recognised or treated equally. It’s just not fair.”
Los Angeles Times
Stating that California’s interest in fighting discrimination against LGBTQ residents outweighs the right to impose religious standards on healthcare, an appeals court has reinstated a lawsuit against the Catholic Dignity Health hospital chain for barring a hysterectomy for a transgender patient.
The lawsuit was brought by Evan Minton, whose hysterectomy was abruptly canceled by Dignity’s Mercy San Juan Medical Center of Carmichael, Calif., in 2016 when hospital officials learned he was transgender. The hospital took the action to comply with the church’s Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, which prohibit sterilization procedures except in very narrow circumstances. . . [Full text]
CBN News
WASHINGTON – A trend in recent years is forcing medical professionals to participate in procedures they are opposed to for moral reasons. The most well-known of these procedures is abortion. Another one on the rise involves gender reassignment.
Conscience protections are supposed to prevent doctors and nurses from being forced to take part in such procedures.
“Right of conscience is the freedom to practice health care in accordance with your deeply-held religious, moral or ethical convictions,” explained Dr. David Stevens, CEO emeritus of the Christian Medical & Dental Associations (CMDA). . . [Full text]
A national inquiry into the safety and ethics of transgender medicine will be conducted by the Royal Australasian College of Physicians with the backing of Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt.
At the moment there are no nationally agreed standards, although guidelines issued by Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital gender clinic have been referred to as the “Australian standards”. However, this document, which has been described as the “most progressive” in the world by Victoria’s Minister for Health, has not been approved by the National Health and Medical Research Council.
The RCH model commits doctors to the controversial policy of reducing“mental illness in trans and gender diverse children by affirming and protecting their identity in a world where many judge and hurt them”.
According to an exclusive article in The Australian about the inquiry, “Critics say the 2018 standards encourage risky medical treatment without properly considering safer therapies such as counselling for problems such as depression, anxiety, autism spectrum disorder, bullying and family conflict. The RCH standards overplay evidence for medical treatment and downplay risks, say ‘dissident’ clinicians.”
The opposing sides of the debate over transgender Australian youth differ on fundamental issues.
Michelle Telfer, director of the Royal Children’s Hospital Gender Service in Melbourne, told The Australian that commencing medical intervention as young as 13 or 14 was “not at all controversial within those with expertise because we all know that we have been doing this for years”.
Critics question whether gender dysphoria is really understood.
“Far be it from anybody to say that there are absolutely no people in the world who are genuinely gender dysphoric and who find it impossible to live in their biological sex,” said Dr Dianna Kenny, a psychologist. “What I’m saying is it’s been massively and irresponsibly over-diagnosed … (these children and teens) are going to be irrevocably damaged by the treatment they received.”
And the ethics of irreversible medical treatment have not been settled. “Who gave ethics approval for this treatment (at children’s hospitals) when it lacks any scientific basis and therefore is an experiment?” asks Prof John Whitehall, of Western Sydney University. “We should give the psychiatry and psychology a full run before we start castrating children.”
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