A state has no constitutional right to sanction medical child abuse
Eliciting disgust from conservatives, California Attorney General Rob Bonta last week joined a multi-state coalition suing the Trump Administration over its efforts to restrict so-called gender affirming care for minors.
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The lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, claims that the President’s executive order denying federal funding to hospitals that provide this care to minors, as well as the Department of Justice investigations of providers, “trammel” on states’ rights to make the care available because the 10th Amendment guarantees them the right to regulate medicine.
“These efforts to chill the provision of healthcare for adolescents — even in states where such care is legal and protected — show that the Agency Defendants have adopted and are engaged in a systematic effort to leverage the threat of criminal and civil enforcement to eliminate medically necessary care for transgender adolescents in the United States,” the complaint states.
At a press conference announcing the lawsuit, Bonta said that the Trump Administration had “trampled over state rights, overstepped their constitutional authority and endangered vulnerable minors and 18-year-olds.”
State rights, of course, was traditionally an argument made by Southerners in favor of segregation.
As for “vulnerable minors.” Bonta has it backwards. Confused and troubled minors are often cajoled into surgeries and puberty blockers and hormone treatments by doctors and other health care professionals.
Children’s Hospital Los Angeles is currently being sued for bamboozling a young woman into having these procedures.
At the press conference, Bonta also complained about the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles shutting down its transgender youth clinic under pressure from the Trump Administration.
“The shutdown came despite efforts my office took over recent months to assure [the Hospital] that they were protected and required to provide gender-affirming care,” he said.
The lawsuit takes issue with the executive order that Donald Trump issued on sex change procedures for minors and the Department of Justice memorandum implementing enforcement of the order.
The executive order, titled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” was issued on January 28 of this year.
It said that, “Countless children soon regret that they have been mutilated and begin to grasp the horrifying tragedy that they will never be able to conceive children of their own or nurture their children through breastfeeding. Moreover, these vulnerable youths’ medical bills may rise throughout their lifetimes, as they are often trapped with lifelong medical complications, a losing war with their own bodies, and, tragically, sterilization.
“Accordingly, it is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called “transition” of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.”
Section 8 of the order said the Attorney General should “prioritize” enforcement of the federal law that prohibits gender mutilation.
To that end, on April 22, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued an order called “Preventing the Mutilation of American Children” that told all federal prosecutors “to investigate all suspected cases of [female genital mutilation] FGM—under the banner of so called ‘gender-affirming care’ or otherwise—and to prosecute all FGM offenses to the fullest extent possible.”
In June, Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate issued a similar directive to members of the Justice Department civil division, urging them to also investigate providers of “gender-affirming care” for possibly running afoul of civil laws, such as violating the “False Claims Act” by billing the government for “impermissible” services.
