With more than 8,000 children living in Oregon foster care, with 200 awaiting adoption, one might think state officials would jump at the opportunity to place a child in a loving home. Jessica Bates, a mother of five in southeast Oregon, hoped to provide just that to a child in need.
State officials, however, appear to have implemented a last-minute religious litmus test for adoption, preventing Bates from starting a family.
“While Bates’s Christian faith is the reason she felt called to adopt in the first place, that same faith is the reason she is not being allowed to, according to a lawsuit filed Monday,” National Review reported. “According to the lawsuit, state officials denied Bates’s application to adopt, not because of a lack of financial resources or any history of abuse or neglect, but because she acknowledged that her Christian faith informs her that gender and sex aren’t a choice.”
Bates claims her application was rejected because she is unwilling to use pronouns that contradict biological sex. Bates also said she would refuse to bring a child to medical appointments for cross-sex hormones. Such experimental “treatments” for minors, which have permanent implications, are banned or restricted in 11 states. Lawmakers in at least 19 more are considering similar legislation.
“The state then put Jessica to a choice: abandon your religious convictions or forgo the possibility of ever adopting any child,” the lawsuit reads. “When Jessica stood her ground, the Department rejected her application for not meeting its ‘adoption home standards.’”
In other words, the Oregon Department of Human Resources is denying Bates the ability to adopt for her refusal to foster an environment that promises to “affirm” the condition of a child’s extreme distress. The department did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment.
When an anorexic teen confronts a parent, therapist, or teacher about his or her anorexia, the compassionate response is not to “affirm” the dysphoria by calling the child fat with a recommendation for liposuction. That seems to be the new operating standard, however, for children convinced they were born in the wrong body.
Gender dysphoria has become the only area of modern medicine where child patients guide their medical care rather than the licensed clinicians, who are often eager to cash in on what is estimated to be a $5 billion-dollar industry by 2030.
On Monday, The Free Press published another exposé on The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital with services to children. In February, the paper published whistleblower testimony from Jamie Reed, a former case manager at the clinic.
“I left the clinic in November of last year because I could no longer participate in what was happening there,” wrote Reed, a liberal 42-year-old Bernie Sanders supporter. “By the time I departed, I was certain that the way the American medical system is treating these patients is the opposite of the promise we make to ‘do no harm.’”
Monday’s follow-up story from The Free Press gave readers an intimate look at how today’s medical institutions manipulate the health care system to circumvent parents’ wishes. Warnings over the life-long consequences of extreme treatments are often overlooked while “suicide is an ever-present topic.” Caroline, the mother of a transgender-identified son named Casey at the center of the profile, “says it felt as if Casey was leading the meeting” with a therapist in discussions on puberty blockers.
“Meanwhile, evidence shows that the threat of suicide in these circumstances is exaggerated,” the Free Press reported. “This medical journal article by Oxford University sociologist Michael Biggs illustrates how hyperbolic this threat is. Between 2010 and 2020, he found that 0.03 percent of patients at the UK’s Gender Identity Development Service committed suicide.”
More data from the conservative Heritage Foundation last summer found just the opposite of hysterical claims that transgender teens denied “gender-affirming care” are at higher risk of suicide.
“Easier access to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones by minors actually exacerbated suicide rates,” Heritage reported.
Another long-term study out of Sweden showed people who were given “gender-affirming treatment” were 19 times more likely to die by suicide than the general population.
Despite the real risks of suicide by aggressive affirmation of gender dysphoria — beyond the permanent mental and physical impacts of the pseudoscientific procedures being pushed on children — Oregon legislators are proposing a new law to cut parents out of the process entirely.
