By: Dan Bartkowiak
My son nearly died as a newborn due to an undiagnosed heart condition. Miraculously, he was stabilized just in time and required surgery a week later.
Standing outside Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, I was brought back to the two weeks I spent in a children’s hospital in central Pennsylvania, where compassionate doctors and nurses worked tirelessly to save my son’s life.
It’s because of medical advancements that my son is alive today. But that’s also why I’m so deeply concerned about the dangerous new so-called “sex change” interventions happening at CHOP and other children’s hospitals in Pennsylvania.
A recently released nationwide database by the medical watchdog Do No Harm on children’s hospitals that catalogs pediatric so-called “sex change” drugs, procedures, and surgeries revealed the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) as the nation’s worst-offending hospital.
CHOP’s “Gender Development Program” is experimenting on children, contrary to advancing medicine. What’s worse is these harmful experiments are often funded by tax dollars.
For years, medical professionals from CHOP’s gender program lobbied in Harrisburg for policies that lack scientific support and are causing irreversible harm to an increasing number of children. In 2017, CHOP aggressively lobbied state officials to include coverage for what the state euphemistically defines as “sex reassignment and transition-related services and drugs” in the renewal of state funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).
CHOP argued it was “evidence-based” services that these funds would support. Yet the recent Cass Review for the National Health Services in England found the evidence is “remarkably weak.”
There is substantial evidence from thousands of ‘detransitioners’ – individuals who previously experienced gender dysphoria and underwent medical interventions. They now regret receiving these harmful drugs and surgeries that removed healthy body parts, often while they were still children.
Chloe Cole, a patient advocate, received puberty blockers at age 13 following a hasty gender dysphoria diagnosis. At the young age of 15, she underwent a medically unnecessary double mastectomy. She now lives with the regret of those interventions and says: “It destroyed me. It destroyed parts of my body…No child can consent to this.”
If we’re basing our decision on evidence, CHOP and every hospital should be halting their surgeries and cross sex hormones on children experiencing gender dysphoria. Yet not only are these experiments on children continuing in Pennsylvania, but so does the funding and in greater and greater amounts.
According to the PA Department of Human Services, millions of tax dollars are used every year to fund these harmful drugs, procedures, and surgeries. In 2015, there were a handful of children aged 6-12 on the path of taxpayer-funded “sex reassignment.” In 2021, the number grew to 200 children. For children ages 13-18, in 2015 there were less than 100 children total. Seven years later, in 2022, the number of harmful interventions ballooned to 1900.
In 2015, the same year Dr. Rachel Levine was appointed by former Gov. Tom Wolf to be PA’s Physician General, taxpayer funding amounted to just $58,000. In 2023, the amount of taxpayer funding has risen to over $5.1 million.
Funding is not the only lobbying item for CHOP. Dr. Nadia Dowshen, co-founder of CHOP’s gender program, has lobbied extensively for loosening health standards, such as removing any recommended lower age limit for the irreversible top surgery, claiming “age is just a number.” She has also led CHOP’s initiatives for entering elementary and middle schools with training for teachers and staff, with videos encouraging staff to hide information about vulnerable children’s gender identity from parents.
In their independent study of this barbaric industry, the conclusion by the Cass Review simply stated: Children “deserve very much better.”
Two of the top 12 worst offending hospitals in Do No Harm’s database are from Pennsylvania: Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (#1) and UPMC Pittsburgh (#11). Any medical professional who continues to experiment on a child experiencing gender dysphoria or any hospital that allows these experiments is knowingly endangering the welfare of that child and violating their duty to protect the child’s wellbeing.
Yes, children deserve better. As PA State Senator Judy Ward challenged last week at a press conference, “How much longer do we wait before we step up and do something? How many more children will be butchered and allowed to make a decision that they may regret the rest of their life?”
Outside of CHOP is displayed its mission to “transform children’s lives.” To remain true to its mission, their gender program that is destroying children’s lives needs to be shut down.
The time for state officials to act is now.
Dan Bartkowiak is the Chief Strategy Officer for Pennsylvania Family Council.
So what do we do about it??