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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Phone: 215-871-2015

Email: jbrehany@ncbcenter.org

Website: www.ncbcenter.org

 Contact Name: John F. Brehany, PhD

BROOMALL, Pa., October 10, 2024—The National Catholic Bioethics Center has begun to review a report issued by Do No Harm at Stop the Harm Database. The report draws on large sets of publicly available health care data consistent with patient privacy protections under HIPAA. It provides the most up-to-date and comprehensive report on how many minors have received so-called gender affirming care recently in the United States. The sources and reasoning in the report appear to be solid.

According to Stop the Harm Database, almost 14,000 minors ages 0–17.5 received gender transition interventions between 2019 and 2023 across all fifty states. This belies the claim often made that these clinical interventions are rare. They are not.

 Unfortunately, the names of some Catholic health care institutions can be found in the report. This is shocking but not entirely surprising. There has been a great deal of confusion in society over the last 10–15 years about gender dysphoria and pressures to promote gender transitioning interventions—including ones for minors—by the media, medical societies, and the federal government. Clear and specific guidance for Catholic health care institutions has been issued only recently, by the Doctrine Committee of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in March 2023 and by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith in April 2024. Catholic health care institutions named in the report should strengthen their internal guidance, education, and monitoring efforts as soon as possible so they can avoid performing, providing, or cooperating with such interventions in the future.

The NCBC has years of experience in working with the same types of diagnosis, procedure, and medication codes that were analyzed in the Stop the Harm Database report and in proactively examining these codes to help numerous Catholic health care institutions, dioceses, and employers to uphold the integrity of their health care ministries and health insurance plans.

The information available in comprehensive data sets can be accurate, reliable, and powerful when used appropriately. Great care is nevertheless needed to move from finding indications of unethical interventions in data sets to assigning moral responsibility to institutions and individuals.

The NCBC is committed to helping Catholic health care institutions and the bishops who oversee these important ministries of the Church to address these complex issues appropriately and confidentially.

The National Catholic Bioethics Center provides education, guidance, and resources to the Church and society to uphold the dignity of the human person in health care and biomedical research, thereby sharing in the ministry of Jesus Christ and his Church. The NCBC envisions a world in which the integral understanding of the human person underlying Catholic teaching on respect for human life and dignity is better understood and more widely embraced in America and worldwide. More information can be found at ncbcenter.org.

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