Criminalizing Abortion and Gender-Affirming Care Marks Political Invasion of Evidence-Based Healthc

[niyad]

Criminalizing Abortion and Gender-Affirming Care Marks Political Invasion of Evidence-Based Healthcare
6/3/2022 by Jennifer Villavicencio



A Bans Off Our Bodies march in New York City on May 14, 2022. (Rhododendrites / Wikimedia Commons)

I am a physician. Every day, I apply my training and my experience to improve the lives of my patients in deeply personal ways. Unfortunately, this work is increasingly stymied by others’ ideology and the strangled influence that policies and legislation place on the care I am able to offer my patients—and in the world of both transgender care and abortion care, it is only getting worse.
Abortion care is no stranger to the oppressive weight of political ideology, and the current furor over transgender youth healthcare, emblemized by a slew of attacks in state capitals across the country exemplifies a resurgent threat to evidence-based medical practice, patients’ health and lives, and physicians’ consciences and careers.

Government interference is not new, as the lengthy battle for access to comprehensive reproductive care reminds us. State legislatures have built their decades-long assault on abortion access on false and distorted scientific premises. We have seen states ban abortion by misusing the complexities of early pregnancy, misrepresenting early embryonic development, and flat out ignoring the mountains of data demonstrating the safety of abortion. The U.S. Supreme Court appears ready to upend the right to access abortion all together in response to a Mississippi abortion ban legislated on such false premises, with implications for millions of women, people and families across the country.

. . . .

Assaults on science-based medicine invariably have implications for health equity and justice. Criminalizing needed medical care has ramifications not only for the individuals seeking care in those states, but for entire communities. When so much of a person’s health depends on the zip code they live in, their exposure to environmental pollution and hazards, their local infrastructure and social safety net, the historical injustices that continue to ripple through generations of families, bans on evidence-based healthcare only multiply the impact of social determinants of health.

To be a doctor and have to tell the people seeking my help that I cannot help them, is heart-wrenching. It is my duty as a physician and an imperative of my conscience to provide evidence based, compassionate, healthcare to anyone in need. Broad and persistent health inequities, and ongoing assaults on evidence-based care, point to how much work lies ahead of us in safeguarding and advancing the health of all Americans, including transgender youth and people in need of abortion care. It should not be a pipe dream that our lawmakers share that priority and collaborate with us to achieve it by following the science, rather than the bias.


https://msmagazine.com/2022/06/03/abortion-bans-trans-gender-affirming-healthcare-science/