Written by Richard Ostling

Suddenly transgender rights is the hot “culture wars” topic. Religious folks with traditional convictions about such matters have been largely silent, or else many newswriters haven’t yet figured how to locate them in order to report the other side of this crucial debate.

Thus, there’s useful sourcing in the strongly-worded “Transgender Identification Ethics Statement” issued by the Christian Medical and Dental Associations.

This group is made up of 16,000-plus professionals who affirm “the divine inspiration and final authority of the Bible as the Word of God.” CMDA had Big 10 origins at the University of Illinois and Northwestern and went national in 1941. It’s one of many such U.S. fellowships for vocational and academic specialists. Most of these were launched by Evangelical-type Protestants but have long since welcomed Catholic and Orthodox participants.

The transgender statement, approved at a CMDA conference April 21 but publicized only recently, urges doctors to treat these patients with understanding and grace. On the other hand, CMDA champions professionals’ right to freedom of conscience, asserting that it is not “unjust discrimination” if a physician in conscience declines treatment that is considered “harmful or is not medically indicated.”

On the religious aspect, CMDA contrasts the Old and New Testament belief that “God created humanity as male and female” with current “confusion of gender identity.” “Gender complementarity and fixity are both good and a part of the natural order,” it says. The “objective biological fact” is that sex “is determined genetically at conception” and is “not a social construct arbitrarily assigned at birth or changed at will.”

The statement focuses on transgender persons whose psychological “gender identity” is the opposite of biology and genetic makeup – the current public issue – and distinguishes this syndrome from medical treatment of rare abnormalities in which the sexual phenotype and chromosomes conflict (e.g. ambiguous genitalia, androgen insensitivity syndrome, congenital adrenal hyperplasia).

That is, “the purpose of medicine is to heal the sick, not to collaborate with psychosocial disorders. Whereas treatment of anatomically anomalous sexual phenotypes is restorative, interventions to alter normal sexual anatomy to conform to transgender desires are disruptive to health.”

CMDA leaders think physicians should be aware of evidence that persons who identify as transgender, use cross-sex hormones, or undergo sex reassignment surgery, generally suffer more depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, substance abuse, and risky sexual behaviors. The organization is especially critical of doctors who prescribe hormones for a biologically healthy child in order to block normal growth and fertility. On sex-change surgery, CMDA says the medical evidence on outcomes is incomplete but there are potential dangers there as well. In addition, “transgender designations may conceal biological sex differences relevant to medical risk factors.”

Such professional concerns, which have received little media notice thus far, provide good fodder for interviews with transgender advocates, physicians included.

Meanwhile, CMDA is involved in another developing story, the federal lawsuit filed July 19 by the Alliance Defending Freedom against Vermont’s Board of Medical Practice and its Office of Professional Regulation. The suit charges that these agencies interpret “Act 39,” the state’s 2013 suicide law, to require death-by-doctor counseling, in violation of medical ethics and conscience rights.

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Resources:

– CMDA media office in Bristol, Tenn.: 423-844-1000.

– Transgender affirmation from the Human Rights Campaign.

– The former chief of psychiatry (and a Catholic) explains why the Johns Hopkins University hospital halted sex-change surgery.

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This article was originally posted at GetReligion.org

Written by Bob Unruh

A developing effort in the United States to turn the organs of aborted babies into a commodity is  a technology bereft of morals, contend a number of pro-life leaders.

“This kind of Frankenscience could lead to more abortion because of the obvious profit motive,” said Leslie Hanks of Colorado Right to Life.

She warned it could be the first step to owning and patenting certain human DNA patterns or even actual human beings.

“Truly the stuff of science fiction, an abomination to Almighty God and sadly a further commodification of human beings,” she told WND.

WND reported this week on what the Genetic Literacy Project website calls xenotransplantation.

The process, being developed by the California company Ganogen, removes the organs from aborted babies, transplants them into a rat or pig and then allows them to grow so they can be transplanted into a human.

Work initially has been done on kidneys.

The Genetic Literacy Project suggested the biggest question would be, “Would you accept an organ from a pig, cow, baboon or a chimpanzee to save your child’s life, or your own?”

It published statistics making its case: More than 123,000 Americans require an organ transplant, but fewer than 30,000 will get one, leaving 21 people to die each day “waiting.”

But members of the pro-life community were alarmed at the reports.

Eric Scheidler is executive director of the Pro-Life Action League, which has been at the forefront of fighting abortion for a generation.

“It’s telling that Ganogen refers euphemistically to ‘discarded human organs’ – they know (that) admitting these organs are harvested from aborted babies will make people recoil. Is it worth it to extend your life with an aborted baby’s heart or kidneys?”

He continued: “But as macabre as this technology is, it does give the lie to the abortion industry’s claim that unborn children are not living human beings. Their humanity is precisely what makes these transplants possible.

“It’s horrifying to think that a company would exploit the deaths of these children in this way, or that sick people would be willing to purchase more years of life at such a moral cost.”

Troy Newman, president of Operation Rescue, also has been a prominent foe of abortion, once buying a building that had housed an abortion business to make sure it was shut down.

“They kill [a baby] in order to grow and harvest organs, and then make a profit,” he said.

He suggested that in such research, there no longer really are any ethics.

“The only thing unethical is to fail to make a profit. It’s anything-goes, full-speed, lead-foot-on-the-gas pedal.”

He cited science fiction movies such as “Coma,” which depicted organs harvested from humans.

“The present has moved beyond science fiction,” he said.

Newman, along with co-worker Cheryl Sullenger, compiled the results of their work to remove abortion from communities in “Abortion Free: Your Manual for Building a Pro-Life American One Community at a Time.”

The book outlines how to find out who does abortions, learn if they are licensed and expose any criminal activities.

WND’s report noted a statement from Eugene Gu, the CEO of Ganogen in Redwood City, California: “Our long-term goal is to grow human organs in animals, to end the human donor shortage.”

But even science publications immediately recognized the ethical problem. For each organ obtained to transplant into a rat or a pig to later help a needy adult, an unborn baby must be killed.

The dilemma is similar to the controversial and so far largely unsuccessful use of embryonic stem cells.

Jim Sedlak, spokesman for the American Life League, the largest grassroots Catholic pro-life movement in the U.S., called the transplant program “totally immoral” and “another outlandish use of aborted babies to produce results that humans think are good.”

“We are totally opposed to any use of aborted cells from human beings to grow organs or for any other purpose,” he said. “Someone died in order for these organs to be grown.”

A video by Ganogen glosses over the source of the organs by euphemistically calling them “discarded.” But obtaining viable human organs requires working in concert with abortion businesses.

The company video explains it is working to end the donor shortage “through organ engineering.”

The science website Natural News addressed the controversy, reporting Ganogen founder Gu took human fetal kidneys and implanted them into rats bred without immune systems.

“This technology is applicable not just to the kidney, but to every kind of organ in the body,” Gu told Natural News.

Natural News said that if the process proves to be successful on a larger scale, “it forebodes a future in which aborted human babies become a commercial commodity for companies to capitalize on artificial organ development.”

CBS News reported the research raises the ethical questions of whether it is acceptable to use human fetal organs in research or to transplant human organs into animals.

Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at Langone Medical Center in New York, told CBS there really isn’t any debate to be had.

“American society is morally uncomfortable enough about abortion that growing organs from fetal remains will never be accepted, and will be banned in state after state.”

WND reported several years ago on the developments in the embryonic stem cell controversy, a procedure created at Johns Hopkins to obtain stem cells, the basic building blocks of human life, without destroying embryonic life.

“Taking a cell from an adult and converting it all the way back to when that person was a 6-day-old embryo creates a completely new biology toward our understanding of how cells age and what happens when things go wrong, as in cancer development,” Elias Zambidis, an assistant professor of oncology and pediatrics at Johns Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering and the Kimmel Cancer Center, said at the time.

Just this week, a report from the Christian Institute in the United Kingdom revealed how much progress has been made on using adult stem cells, which unlike embryonic stem cell research, does not require death.

“Researchers at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield used a new technique known as autologous haematopoietic stem cell transplantation to treat patients aged between early 20s and late 50s.”

The report said the treatment had uses a patient’s own stem cells and “enabled some wheelchair-bound sufferers to walk, run and even dance again,” and enabled “one partially sighted man” to recover his sight.

Originally posted at WND.com.