A striking paradigm shift in medical ethics

Jul 17th, 2023 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Jennifer Lahl and Kallie Fell, president and executive director respectively of the Center for Bioethics and Culture, write at Reality’s Last Stand:

In recent years, a striking paradigm shift in medical ethics has emerged, driven by progressive political ideologies purporting to champion “Social Justice.” This shift has precipitated a surge in initiatives centered around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). The resulting effects have varied considerably; they include the introduction of explicit racial bias in treatment protocols in a quest for “health equity,” and an unsettling disregard for biological sex as an important variable in both medical research and patient care. Instead, the new radical movement favors categorizing individuals based on their self-identified and medically irrelevant “gender identity.”

A bit like issuing all women with jock straps and all men with bras, only much much much more likely to be fatal.

This trend of overlooking biological sex as a critical medical variable stems from an ideological drive to “queer” the natural world. The proponents of this view resist categorization, arguing that such practices are instruments of oppression wielded by the powerful against the less powerful. According to this perspective, medicine must eschew not only biological categorization of patients, but also traditional notions of what is deemed desirable or adverse patient outcomes.

So we’re queering death now? Queering chronic pain, fatigue, weakness, fever? Health is bad and illness is good?

A provocative new paper in the journal Qualitative Research in Health titled “Medical uncertainty and reproduction of the ‘normal’: Decision-making around testosterone therapy in transgender pregnancy” by Pfeffer and colleagues propels us further down the road of medical malpractice.

The authors, a group of transgender sociologists and enthusiasts, and healthcare activists, with not one medical degree among them, argue to dramatically move the goal posts of medical ethics, choosing to completely disregard the health, safety, and well-being of the developing fetus, all in the name of “trans” inclusion. 

Ok brace yourselves.

The authors argue that “gendered” pregnancy care is too focused on helping women have healthy babies, and that it might be okay for transmen to continue taking testosterone during pregnancy despite the known health risks to the fetus and effects on its normal development. The desire for “normal fetal outcomes,” according to the authors, is rooted in a problematic desire “to protect their offspring from becoming anything other than ‘normal’” and “reflect historical and ongoing social practices for creating ‘ideal’ and normative bodies.”

Ok so why was this published? What reckless cynical sniggering fool decided it would be a good idea to put this disgusting death-cultish garbage out there?

Updating to add: Here is the paper. (There’s a link in the article, but have another for convenience.)

One of the authors is Sally Hines. Of course she is.

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