Eager to finish as many regulations as possible before his term in office ends, President Joe Biden and the Department of Health and Human Services have issued a regulation that could force doctors to perform gender-transition surgeries, even if it violates their conscience.
The regulation, titled “Nondiscrimination in Health Programs and Activities,” is HHS’s new rule for applying Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of a protected class in providing health services. Any hospital or doctor that is found to have engaged in discrimination would forfeit access to federal funding, including Medicare and Medicaid.
The Biden administration’s new rule has added transgender surgeries and procedures to the list of services that healthcare providers must offer, and it ignored requests to include an explicit conscience objection. In other words, HHS is forcing doctors and hospitals that may have personal or religious objections to transgender procedures to perform said procedures or face legal liability — an explicit violation of the First Amendment and federal conscience protections for doctors.
There are a number of reasons why doctors and hospitals may object to providing such procedures. Gender-transition procedures are not medically necessary and usually involve the mutilation of a healthy body part. This only serves to make the patient into a lifelong slave to the medical industry and does nothing for the person’s physical well-being. Furthermore, hospitals run by religious denominations such as the Catholic Church have well-founded philosophical and moral reasons for opposing these kinds of life-changing procedures.
Already, conservative groups are sounding the alarm on this illegal and harmful regulation.
“Healthcare providers will be forced to provide sex-change drugs and surgeries to all comers, including minors, or be forced out of business,” Terry Schilling, the president of the American Principles Project, said. “Insurers will be compelled to cover these practices. And individual doctors, nurses, and other practitioners will be pressured to facilitate sex changes or else risk career-ending lawsuits, even if it goes against their conscience and best medical judgment.”
Chris Faddis, the president of insurance alternative Solidarity HealthShare, said the new regulation “is blatant discrimination against religious Americans who object to participating in or paying for products and procedures that violate their beliefs.”
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While the Biden administration may claim that no doctor or religiously affiliated hospital will be forced to violate their beliefs, the new regulation has muddied the legal waters, and Catholic hospitals that do not offer such procedures could be forced to do so.
For a president who has shown a remarkable contempt for religious freedom, Biden’s latest regulation represents a new low that surpasses the Obama administration’s legal war with nuns. Now he is threatening to shut down hospitals that do not subscribe to the insanity of gender ideology. If these regulations are held up in court, hundreds of hospitals and thousands of healthcare providers could be forced to choose between betraying their consciences, closing up their practices, or facing severe legal repercussions.