Some day when Planned Parenthood passes away and goes before The Maker to be judged, they’ll have to answer for a lot of sins.
A lot.
Many people believe that Planned Parenthood is guilty of murder. They’re certainly guilty of lying about abortion and making money off the body parts of dead babies.
Now it’s come to light that Planned Parenthood has become one of the largest providers of gender transition services in the country. This, in itself, isn’t a crime. Gender transitioning has become a huge industry as the number of clinics has exploded across the country.
But the numerous clinics fall short of what’s needed to deal with the massive social phenomenon that transgenderism has become. And this is where Planned Parenthood has stepped in.
There used to be general agreement among mental health professionals that it takes months to evaluate an individual to determine if they’re truly suffering from gender dysphoria. The problem in diagnosing the condition is that many patients who believe they’re a different gender from that which they were born are suffering from other mental health issues, including anxiety, self-mutilation, depression, and suicidal tendencies.
But Planned Parenthood has thrown those safeguards out the window and now diagnoses and provides hormone blockers to people after a 30-minute consultation.
“I have always been a very strong supporter of Planned Parenthood and am pro-choice,” said Laura Edwards-Leeper, who co-founded the nation’s first pediatric gender clinic, at Boston Children’s Hospital, in 2007. “But they have taken on something that they are not equipped to handle.”
The lack of oversight is so bad, Dr. Edwards-Leeper added, that some of her patients received hormones from Planned Parenthood even before coming to see her.
Planned Parenthood is one of the largest providers of cross-sex hormones in the United States, and one of the fastest growing. Affiliates in the greater Portland area saw a nearly 400 percent increase in “gender-affirming care visits” between 2021 and 2022, according to their annual reports, while those in Ohio saw a 544 percent increase over the same period. Hormones now appear to be in higher demand than abortion at some branches: A Planned Parenthood in Knoxville, Tenn., told NPR that nearly a fifth of its patients sought hormone therapy in 2021, whereas abortion makes up just 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s services nationally.
The actions in accepting transgender patients with basically no assessment of their mental health issues has precipitated a competition with gender clinics for patients. Clinics that previously had strict guidelines on gender care with patients being required to go through months of assessments have now become much more lax in prescribing hormones. Some now prescribe hormones on the first visit, a Reuters investigation found last year.
But with Planned Parenthood a constant temptation for older teens, even the most conservative clinics have an incentive to reduce gatekeeping if they don’t want to lose patients. The result, Anderson said, is a race to the bottom that pulls all providers, no matter their philosophy, toward the informed consent model adopted by Planned Parenthood, which doles out life-altering drugs to almost anyone who requests them. And that model has alarmed even the liberal pioneers of gender medicine, who say that some 18-year-olds—especially those with special needs—cannot meaningfully consent to hormones without extensive counseling.
“There are 15-year-olds I work with who are much more mature than average and can make these kinds of decisions,” said Edwards-Leeper, who, along with Erica Anderson, a former president of the U.S. Professional Association for Transgender Health, has attacked Republican efforts to ban hormone therapy for minors. “But there are also 20-year-olds who are struggling in various ways that make them less able to give informed consent.”
That’s probably true — in the abstract. But practically speaking, there must be age-appropriate limits in the law regarding hormone treatment to prevent the kind of snake oil medicine being practiced by Planned Parenthood.
Related: They Were Too Young to Consent but Now They’re Old Enough to Sue
How many lives is Planned Parenthood going to destroy with their cavalier attitude toward gender transitioning? Maybe Dante could come back and create a whole new circle of hell where they can all go after they die.
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