Parental Rights and Youth Gender Medicine
Some people have asked: Why aren’t state statutes limiting youth gender medicine treatments violations of parental rights (given that they apply even when the parents ask for the treatment for their children)? The answer, I think, is that the Court hasn’t generally recognized a constitutional right to get forbidden medical procedures for oneself, much less a right to get them for one’s children. I think Sixth Circuit Judge Jeffrey Sutton correctly summarized the legal rules in L.W. v. Skrmetti (which the Supreme Court just declined to review):
There is a long tradition of permitting state governments to regulate medical treatments for adults and children. So long as a federal statute does not stand in the way and so long as an enumerated constitutional guarantee does not apply, the States may regulate or ban medical technologies they deem unsafe.
Washington v. Glucksberg puts a face on these points…. The Court reasoned that there was no “deeply rooted” tradition of permitting individuals or their doctors to override contrary state medical laws. The right to refuse medical treatment in some settings, it reasoned, cannot be “transmuted” into a right to obtain treatment, even if both involved “personal and profound” decisions….
Abigail Alliance hews to this path. The claimant was a public interest group that maintained that termin
Article from Reason.com
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