The Equality Act would trample on doctors' religious freedom

Published in The Washington Examiner

by Jonathan Imbody  | March 29, 2021

Imagine you are a family physician who entered medical school motivated by the teachings of your faith: to help and bring healing to others.

In medical school, you determined to adhere to the "do no harm" ethical bedrock of the Hippocratic oath: "I will use treatment to help the sick, according to my ability and judgment, but I will never use it to injure or wrong them."

Throughout your medical career, you have treated all your patients with compassion and respect, and you have followed scientific evidence in exercising medical judgment.

But then, one fateful day, the radical federal Equality Act takes effect nationwide.

A 9-year-old boy enters your office and wails that he hates being a boy and demands to become a girl. That demand raises the specter of administering life-altering hormonal treatments that increase the risk of infertility and stroke, followed by elective surgery to remove healthy body parts and create new ones — all to fit the ephemeral preference of a 9-year-old.

Your medical judgment against transitioning draws upon scientific evidence that gender dysphoria in children typically resolves within a few years. But under the Equality Act, any counsel against gender transitioning now traps you inside a thorny bush of legal hazards that trigger sex discrimination charges.

Participating in a gender transition also would violate your faith convictions. But the Equality Act expressly nullifies any application of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act's protection for conscientious objectors.

You begin to realize that the Equality Act has taken control of virtually every aspect of your medical career:

• You put yourself at legal risk if you simply attempt to explore patients' possible reasons for gender dysphoria, which may be strongly influenced by sexual abuse or bullying.
• Neither you nor your medical institution may protect your patients' privacy by maintaining sex-restricted public restrooms or changing rooms.
• When you volunteer at the local women's domestic violence shelter, you and the shelter risk lawsuits and closure simply for keeping transgender individuals with male biology out of the sleeping quarters of women who've been sexually abused and battered by men.
• At the pro-life pregnancy center where you serve as medical director, lawsuit threats now arise under the Equality Act, which raises pregnancy and abortion issues as triggers for sex discrimination litigation.
• As team physician for your daughter's track team, you and your daughter now must watch biologically advantaged males dominate every event, reversing decades of advances and scholarship opportunities for female athletes.
• Trapped in the untenable choice of submitting to the government's coercion or violating all that you believe, you hang up your lab coat and walk out of the healing career to which you devoted your life.

As the new law quickly spreads its intolerant tentacles throughout the country, discrimination charges and lawsuits squeeze out of medicine tens of thousands of your colleagues who share life-affirming moral and ethical commitments. As the Equality Act forces these conscientious physicians who serve the needy out of medicine, millions of marginalized patients lose their access to healthcare.

This Equality Act nightmare is now just one or two votes in the Senate away from reality, having passed the House in February. At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the bill March 17, two witnesses focused on the Equality Act's threats against women.

Attorney Mary Rice Hasson noted, "Biology also makes females uniquely vulnerable when safety and privacy are compromised. When gender identity is privileged over biological sex, females lose; it's that simple."

Journalist Abigail Shrier illustrated the point, recounting how male prison inmates recently exploited an Equality Act-style state law to transfer to the women's prison. The result: rape. Shrier concluded, "Gender ideology, which is at the heart of this bill, is misogyny in progressive clothing."

People appalled at this dangerous and discriminatory bill had better act quickly to strengthen the Senate backstop. Otherwise, we will witness the suppression of science in medicine, the strangling of religious freedom, the loss of women's and girls rights, and the imposition of state ideology over individual freedom of thought and speech.

Jonathan Imbody directs Freedom2Care and serves as director of federal government relations for the Christian Medical Association.