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What happens when politics infiltrates healthcare?

News of comments by Rebecca Graham, Chief Executive of the SA Women’s and Children’s Health Network, has reached the attention of J.K. Rowling, the Harry Potter author, who has been speaking up for women’s rights in the face of gender activism.

Appearing before a South Australian Select Committee examining the impact of stillbirth on mothers last week, Ms Graham took pains to caveat her evidence with a statement about inclusivity, saying transgender women need to be a part of the conversation.

“In our discussion today, the terms ‘woman’ and ‘women’ will be used, and this is in line with the current research and evidence,” Ms Graham said.

“It is intended to include those with diverse sexualities as well – intersex women and transgender women too.”

Silencing Women

Such remarks have, in many workplaces and government departments, become a routine nod to diversity crusaders. But in this context—noting the medical impossibility of transgender women becoming pregnant or experiencing stillbirth—they struck an especially discordant note.

And rightly so: hemming the conversation in terms that appease the trans community – men who seek the appearance, acceptance and privileges of being a woman, while knowing nothing of the more painful experiences it can entail (like stillbirth) – offended its solemnity.

Worse still, such comments signal a broader trend of silencing women’s sex-specific needs.

Health officials’ repeated deference to such absurdities has carried profound consequences for society at large, emboldening “transactivists” to silence women like Jasmine Sussex, who is now defending herself before a tribunal for stating that men cannot breastfeed.

When politics infiltrates healthcare, healthcare is transformed from a safeguard of life to an arena for social engineering – silencing sense in its wake.

Indeed, a genuine movement is advancing for transgender women to have womb transplants so they can carry pregnancies – experimenting with the very lives of unborn children to pursue a fabricated, final culmination of “womanhood”.

Devastating Consequences

Ideological “rights” – the right to be one’s gender of choice, the right to be a parent, and even the right to end a pregnancy (a claim that mocks the grief of stillbirth) – are the fruit of political ideology usurping science, all rooted in a rejection of created limits.

We are like those who “strive with him who formed him, a pot among earthen pots! Does the clay say to him who forms it, ‘What are you making?’ or ‘Your work has no handles’?” (Isaiah 45:9) Only now, humanity’s striving to remake itself wears the unction of human rights and a counterfeit compassion.

Christian advocates are often criticised for “introducing politics” into healthcare debates. For example, when I raise with MPs the need to consider banning puberty blockers and experimental gender medications for children in my capacity with the Australian Christian Lobby, I am frequently cautioned that such decisions should not be politicised.

But that is exactly the problem we are trying to remedy: healthcare decisions and practice have been politicised.

What has entered medicine is not a new discovery about human nature or the transience of gender, but a political ideology – and one that encroaches every day on children’s futures, schoolgirls’ right to single sex toilets, and perhaps, one day, the very lives of unborn children carried by men who seek to be pregnant.

There is a reason why so many women were upset by Rebecca Graham’s seemingly simple statements to the Select Committee last week: they see where this path of bowing to the LGBTQI+ movement leads – and it isn’t one that advances their needs, their voice, their safety, or the wellbeing of their children. It is a destructive path that relegates them to the margins.

Only in returning to the truth about our created limits can healthcare recover its purpose: to safeguard life, protect the vulnerable, and serve – rather than harm – those ensnared by ideologies to which medicine should be a stranger.

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Image courtesy of Adobe.