by Diane Robertson
Policy makers in the state of Oregon must love irony. A new health policy allows teens as young as 15 to obtain hormone suppression supplements and surgery to alter their gender without parental permission. The state will even subsidize the cost for the kids. And why? Well to prevent suicide they say.
HERC, the Health Evidence Review Commission, decided that by allowing Medicaid to cover hormone blocking drugs and sex change surgeries for teens, without parental consent, the state would be preventing at least one suicide attempt a year.
Sure it’s ironic that the state does not allow kids that young to drive, smoke, use a tanning bed, get a tattoo or give blood without parental permission. But it’s more ironic that they would consider suicide prevention to be a proper justification for this assault on parental rights.
Oregon happens to be the only state that has no restrictions on abortion. In Oregon, a girl, any age, and without parental consent, can obtain an abortion at any point during the pregnancy. And in Oregon, approximately 16% of their babies are aborted. That’s a lot more unnatural death than one suicide attempt.
That is not all, though. Oregon is one of only three states to have legalized assisted suicide. In fact, Oregon was the first to bring assisted suicide to America. In 2013, 0.21% of all deaths in Oregon, excluding abortion, were due to legal suicide.
Without question, Oregon state laws and policies are the most anti-life in the nation. This new policy is not about protecting the lives of teens. The policy is more about promoting the LGBT agenda. In fact, one could argue that this new policy goes along quite well with the state’s culture of death.
Dr. Paul R. McHugh, the former psychiatrist-in-chief for Johns Hopkins Hospital and its current Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry, reported on a new study that the shows that the suicide rate among transgendered people who had reassignment surgery is 20 times higher than the suicide rate among non-transgender people. But that is not all. The study also reports that 70% to 80% of children who have transgender feelings naturally outgrow those feelings and become well-adjusted adults.
Referring to hormonal treatments and surgery for children, Dr. McHugh has said:
“Such action comes close to child abuse.” And that, “’Sex change’ is biologically impossible. People who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or vice versa. Rather, they become feminized men or masculinized women. Claiming that this is civil-rights matter and encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental disorder.”
The Oregon Health Evidence Review Commission can continue to say that this new policy is scientifically sound and will save lives, yet, speak all they want, it will not change the fact that the State of Oregon’s policies are anti-life, anti-health, and anti-family.