Distinction Matter - Subscribed Feeds

Editors’ Note: In recognition of the 100th anniversary of Pierce v. Society of Sisters, this article is published as the second in a three-part series on religious freedom. 

Should children’s parents or should the government shape the beliefs and values of children? Natural law theorists argue that parents have a responsibility, and therefore possess the prima facie authority, to direct the upbringing and education of their children. This, according to natural law theory, is no mere matter of cultural convention but is an objective moral truth. Children are born to parents—a mother and a father—and are therefore theirs (and, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, in a certain sense a part of them), though not in any sense that would reduce children to the status of their parents’ property. Indeed, parents’ rights to direct the upbringing and education of their children are rooted in their duty to bring up their children properly and educate them well. 

On this account, government has no free-standing or independent decision-making right or authority with respect to children. Children do not belong to the state in the way they belong to their parents. In extreme circumstances, government may intervene to protect children from parental abuse or neglect, but such interventions are only legitimate where parents actually abuse or neglect their children, forfeiting their rights by defaulting on their responsibilities. 

Contemporary progressives, by contrast, view the state as having what amounts to a quasi-parental role. It is true that progressives, at least for the most part, do not seek to entirely replace parents with the state—theirs is not, for example, Plato’s famous stipulation in the Republic that children ought to be held “in common” under the state’s supervision and care, such that “neither will a parent know his own offspring, nor a child his parent.” But they do view the state as having a measure of direct authority over children that rivals, and at times may even supersede, the authority of parents. They typically hold that authority over children is shared between the state and the parents. 

Perhaps the most influential proponent of the progressive position is my friend and former Princeton colleague, Dr. Amy Gutmann. Over the course of a distinguished scholarly career that included nearly two decades as President of the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Gutmann has mounted vigorous defenses of the state’s right and duty to shape, even independently of parental wishes, the moral character and fundamental beliefs of children. For the sake of forming adult citizens committed to what she describes as the “secular standards” of modern liberal democracies and who are left “free to choose their own [version of] the good life,” she argues that public schools or other governmental institutions “cannot escape looking after children’s souls in many significant and subtle ways.” Between parents and the state, Gutmann maintains, “we have no a priori reason to favor one paternalistic agent over another.”  

A more blunt—to put it politely—expression of the progressive view comes from Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Bartholet, who argues that practices such as homeschooling have been abused by parents who are “ideologically committed . . . to isolating their children from the majority culture and indoctrinating them in views and values that are in serious conflict with that culture.” (The subtext, of course, is that such “ideologically committed” parents are those who are committed to living lives and raising families in conformity with traditional religious and moral values.) Criticizing what she identifies as “absolutist” views of parental rights, Bartholet said in a 2020 interview that: 

Many homeschooling parents are extreme ideologues, committed to raising their children within their belief systems isolated from any societal influence. Some believe that black people are inferior to white people and others that women should be subject to men and not educated for careers but instead raised to serve their fathers first and then their husbands. The danger is both to these children and to society. The children may not have the chance to choose for themselves whether to exit these ideological communities; society may not have the chance to teach them values important to the larger community, such as tolerance of other people’s views and values. 

In truth, the natural law view of parental rights is far from absolutist—and is neither rooted in nor designed to abet prejudice or bigotry. As I’ve noted, the natural law view’s prima facie parental authority over children’s upbringing and formation is not an exceptionless claim—parental authority can be forfeited and government may, in cases of child abuse or neglect, intervene to protect children from demonstrable harm. In cases of genuine abuse or neglect, such as when parents are harming or abjectly failing to protect their children’s physical health, parental rights can be overridden. The state, acting on its duty to advance and protect the common good, could legitimately step in to remove the child from an objectively harmful or dangerous situation by, for example, temporarily placing the child with a relative or in a foster home until the child’s parents are able (if they indeed become able) to fulfill their parental responsibilities again. 

Still, under the natural law view, the state plays a purely supportive and subsidiary role in the child’s upbringing, moral formation, and overall well-being. When, in extreme situations, the state justly moves to intervene on behalf of the child, the state’s intervention is still in a sense supplementary to the parents’ fundamental role—never subsuming the parental right, and always moving towards the ultimate goal of restoring the child to his core family unit (though, of course, sometimes this will ultimately be impossible). 

Furthermore—and contrary to Bartholet’s caricature—the natural law view of parental rights does not promote, endorse, or sanction indoctrination. Parents are charged with the grave responsibility of forming their children, to the best of their ability, to be good people and to lead good lives. 

Formation includes the inculcation of certain values, to be sure; all parents should teach their children to conduct themselves honorably and with integrity. Indeed, any notion of strictly-neutralist parenting is absurd; when parents, no matter their fundamental commitments, teach their children that stealing is wrong, that they shouldn’t cheat on exams, that they should keep their promises, and that they should sit with the fellow student who always eats lunch alone, they are acting on normative judgments to inculcate the virtues and values their children need in order to lead good lives.  

But proper formation is not indoctrination. Forming one’s children to be sophists or sycophants, unable to formulate, articulate, and defend their own views in an intellectually robust fashion, is one thing; raising them in accordance with certain religious or moral precepts is something else, and something that all parents inevitably must do. Proper formation encourages the development of an authentic sense of agency and freedom—the freedom to engage in morally worthy choosing—that indoctrination not only fails to impart but actually destroys. 

The critic would point out the cases, and they will always exist, in which parents fail to raise their children in accordance with sound moral values. Perhaps a parent will teach a child that stealing can be good, that you should only keep your promises if it benefits you to do so, or that you should cheat on exams if it helps you to get ahead. And I have no doubt, as the critic would point out, that there are parents who seek to indoctrinate their children, rather than authentically form them to be independent and critical thinkers. But the truth is that the state must be willing to tolerate some abuses of parental rights lest the efforts to prevent the abuses undermine the rights themselves. 

The same is true of other rights—for example, the right to freedom of speech. We rightly tolerate abuses of the right to speak freely, lest our efforts to prevent abuses (by licensing government to engage in censorship) undermine the right. Of course, we draw certain lines. For example, we tolerate the abstract advocacy of violence, but we draw the line at deliberately inciting people to imminent violence. (This distinction is expressly drawn by the Supreme Court in the 1969 case of Brandenburg v. Ohio, which remains the leading precedent on the subject.) Similarly, we tolerate a misguided parent’s teaching his child that stealing is good, but we punish the parent who is convicted of sending his child to rob the local convenience store. 

The progressive approach’s concrete implications—and perhaps indicative of the true intentions all along of some of those seeking to curtail parental rights—can be observed in recent efforts by progressive activists to erode parents’ control over children’s education in order to convert their children to social progressivism. Consider, for example, the recently argued US Supreme Court case Mahmoud v. Taylor, in which progressive activists asked the Court to uphold a decision by Montgomery County, Maryland’s public school system banning parents from opting their children out of programs promoting LGBTQ ideology at the pre-K and elementary school level.  

Montgomery County’s case for subjecting young children to overtly pro-LGBTQ materials hinged fundamentally on this same progressive paternalistic conception of the state’s role in child rearing—the view that the state has an independently-grounded, non-subsidiary role to play in making normative judgments about the sorts of ideas that ought to guide a child’s moral and intellectual upbringing. Defending the policy, the county’s lawyer told the Supreme Court that allowing parents to opt their children out of pro-LGBTQ lessons would risk “exposing students who believe the storybooks represent them and their families to social stigma and isolation.” To be frank, the local government’s argument in Mahmoud was that the state has a legitimate role to play in ideologically influencing the moral formation of children enrolled in public schools, at least in part because not doing so would allegedly have a negative impact on other children whose parents seek to raise them with socially liberal moral commitments. (Of course, they are utterly unconcerned with how students whose families hold traditional values are subjected to “stigma and isolation” when they resist pressure to believe that such values are backward or bigoted.) 

For the sake of the supposed comfort of their socially progressive peers, the government in Mahmoud claimed an interest in encouraging all students to adopt views normatively favorable to and disposed toward same-sex marriage, transgenderism, sexual liberation, and hotly-contested conceptions of sexuality and gender identity—and claimed that parents had no right to stop their children from being subjected to what truly was indoctrination. It is in cases like Mahmoud that we see the real reason that many progressives are so keen for organs and institutions of the state, at least when they are dominated by ideological allies of social and cultural progressivism, to “share”—and eventually override, as Montgomery County sought to do through banning opt-outs—parental authority with actual parents.  

The Supreme Court is, I believe, likely to side with the parents in Mahmoud and reaffirm that our Constitution protects not only the free-exercise rights of parents and their children, but also, and relatedly, the fundamental right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children. This is because the United States has a long tradition of articulating and upholding the natural law account of parental rights within our constitutional order. Indeed, beginning with the landmark case Pierce v. Society of Sisters, whose one-hundredth anniversary we celebrate this year, we can trace in our constitutional order an essentially unbroken line of efforts to uphold the natural law account of parental rights against myriad efforts to undermine it.  

Pierce concerned a statute enacted by Oregon that sought to compel all children, including those enrolled in what had been state-recognized private schools, to attend public schools. The bill was aggressively promoted by the Ku Klux Klan. Its principal targets were Catholic parochial schools—many supporters of the law, such as Oregon’s Democratic governor Walter Pierce, hoped to see Catholic schools shut down and the children who would have attended those schools, many of them immigrants themselves or from immigrant families, incorporated into the dominant Anglo-Protestant culture through compulsory public education. Writing for a unanimous court, Justice James Clark McReynolds held that the law “unreasonably interfere[d] with the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children,” adding that “The child is not the mere creature of the State.” 

But as Professor Melissa Moschella, my brilliant former student, has argued, the Pierce ruling and its implications went beyond merely affirming that parents, and not the state, have the right to decide on their children’s education—e.g., about where to send them to school. The Court—in keeping with past common law precedents and lower court findings—also upheld a robust account of fundamental parental rights, concordant with the natural law view, that does not stop at the schoolhouse door.  

While critics, like University of Connecticut law professor Anne Dailey, have claimed that Pierce is an “ambiguous” ruling, and have (strictly speaking correctly) observed that the proclamation that the child is not the “mere creature of the State” does not mean that the child is the “mere creature of the parents either,” the natural law view of parental rights found in our tradition does not regard children as objects or wholly subservient creatures of anyone—including their parents. While it is true, as I have observed, that under the natural law view of parental rights children do belong to parents in a sense, it is in a very particular and narrowly-tailored sense. Children are neither pieces of parental property nor creatures that possess any less dignity or worth than full-grown adults; rather, they are participants in a unique and timeless person-to-person relationship between themselves and their parents that is replete with duties on the part of parents. And, as I have already noted, proponents of the natural law account freely acknowledge that parental rights are defeasible—not absolute, as someone’s rights might be over a piece of property or some other legitimately instrumentalized object. 

As Pierce illustrates, the fight to protect and preserve parents’ fundamental rights to direct their children’s education and shape their values is nothing new when it comes to the American story. But, as the case also demonstrates, the natural law-rooted conception of the relationship between child and parent is deeply rooted in our nation’s constitutional self-understanding. It is not a doctrinally sectarian or even an explicitly religious or theistic position. The natural law account of parental rights is a substantively robust and reason-based position—one that must be defended for all Americans of all faiths and shades of belief. As supporters of the natural law account confront the challenges of today—struggles such as that against Montgomery County’s LGBTQ indoctrination efforts—we must be courageous defenders of the truth of parental rights. These are not rights conferred by a merely human authority, and subject to the whims of such an authority. They are, rather, natural rights. 

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.

(h/t Harvey Millican and Supernerd)

I’m 80 Percent Blind From Glaucoma

Peggy Noonan’s wrote “The End of Roe v. Wade Will Be Good for America” just weeks before the Supreme Court’s June 24, 2022, decision to overturn Roe. The decision had been leaked and even though the Supreme Court said it was a terrible breach of protocol and endangered the lives of justices, the source of the leak was never found.

Last Monday, “FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino announced on X that he and FBI Director Kash Patel would be reopening several cases that occurred under the Biden administration, including the leak of the Dobbs case,” Bridget Sielicki wrote.

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Noonan’s insights were keen and very much worth pondering as we now live in a post-Roe world, and while she covers numerous aspects of Roe’s awful impact on our culture, what I find most inspiring is her explanation for why she is pro-life:

I am pro-life for the most essential reason: That’s a baby in there, a human child. We cannot accept as a society—we really can’t bear the weight of this fact, which is why we keep fighting—that we have decided that we can extinguish the lives of our young. Another reason, and maybe it veers on mysticism, is that I believe the fact of abortion, that it exists throughout the country, that we endlessly talk about it, that the children grow up hearing this and absorbing it and thinking, “We end the life within the mother here,” “It’s just some cells”—that all of this has released a kind of poison into the air, that we breathed it in for 50 years and it damaged everything.

Yes, Roe changed everything—“damaged everything.”  Roe undermined the moral obligation mothers—and fathers!—have to their unborn children. Like acid, Roe ate away at the foundations of our culture making abortion seem to be acceptable, a reflex “solution” to an unplanned pregnancy.

Not surprisingly, now that Roe is in the rearview mirror, pro-abortionists have lashed out. Along with their legion of allies in the media, they are formidable foes.

Yet pro-lifers are the eternal optimists. Why? Because we believe the better angels of our nature will not –cannot–be forever silenced.  As a nation, we are better than turning a blind eye to well over 900,000 abortions a year would have you believe. Reminding our fellow citizens of this tragedy is among the most important tasks you do, day in and day out.

Noonan’s conclusion is immensely powerful. Remember this was written before June 24, 2022,  Dobbs decision was rendered:

And if Roe is indeed overturned, God bless our country that can make such a terrible, coldhearted mistake and yet, half a century later, redress it, right it, turn it around. Only a thinking nation could do that. Only a feeling nation could do that. We’re not dead yet, there are still big things going on here.

LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. He frequently writes Today’s News and Views — an online opinion column on pro-life issues.

The post I’m Pro-Life for the Most Essential Reason. That’s a Baby in There appeared first on LifeNews.com.

The New York Times Magazine has a very long article out Sunday highlighting cases of nonterminally ill people being killed by doctors in Canada. It is too long to comment on the whole thing. (Please take the time to read it.) But one story described was so starkly abandoning, I have to bring it to your attention.

The story describes a woman named Paula, who seems to have been deeply depressed and experiencing chronic pain that could not be diagnosed. She had been abused by her father. She had attempted suicide more than once. After her mother died of cancer, she hit the skids, and she was on the verge of homelessness. Her life went into what would eventually become a literal death spiral. From, “Do Patients Without a Terminal Illness Have the Right to Die?”:

Paula stopped seeing her therapists and her social workers. She stopped seeing a family doctor because she couldn’t find one. She stopped taking mood stabilizers. She didn’t have a cellphone or a computer, and she spent hours a day just talking on an old black landline phone to people back in Perth. Still, Paula said, she was managing things — she was holding it together — until the concussion.

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She was beaten up by two women with whom she had been feuding at the housing complex, suffering a concussion, which caused her life to spiral even further. She wanted euthanasia. Tests showed no brain damage. But she was miserable and wanted to die. She went on a crusade to find a doctor — any doctor — who would approve her being killed by lethal injection under Canada’s “Track 2” euthanasia protocol for the nonterminally ill.

She finally found a death doctor who was willing to kill her, despite knowing that many of her problems were social:

Fundamentally, he [the death doctor] didn’t think the best way to protect poor and marginalized patients was to force them to stay alive, because in some counterfactual version of events, in which the world was a better and more just place, they might have chosen differently. That wasn’t how anything in medicine worked; a doctor always treated the patient as she was. How could it be otherwise? If only those who were rich or well connected were recognized to have autonomy and allowed to choose? . . .

He had read the report from Paula’s neurologist, which said that Paula did not have permanent brain damage and was not eligible for MAID. But he thought the specialist, who was not a MAID provider herself, misunderstood the eligibility criteria. There was nothing in the law that said that Paula’s neurological condition had to be tied to actual, physical damage to the brain. Paula’s pain was real either way. She felt it the same either way.

On the day of the homicide, Paula says she is “terrified.” Of course! She is about to be killed! A “pastor” arrives to “counsel” her. She pushes the killing! This made me regurgitate my lunch:

Then the minister walked in. Paula had spent days calling religious leaders and asking if they would come sit with her while she died. Some said they would not but that they would pray for her. Others wouldn’t even do that. But then, finally, someone agreed to come. She introduced herself as the Rev. Takouhi Demirdjian-Petro, from the United Church of Canada, and she was tall and sturdy, in a pink clerical blouse. She looked down at Paula and took stock of the tearful situation. “You’re in the hands of the everlasting love of God,” she said firmly.

Paula started to cry harder, until she was nearly convulsing. “God have mercy on my soul.”

“God is with you,” the minister said. “And he is guiding you.”

“What if I get lost?” Paula asked. “My mind doesn’t have a very good GPS. I’m scared of getting lost.”

“You won’t. I promise you, honey.” The minister told Paula that she had a vision of Paula’s mother waiting for her, like a mother might wait for her daughter at the airport. “And I’m not B.S.ing you. So just let go of this empty, empty world.”

The death doctor arrives:

For days, Paula had worried that, at the final moment, she would waver, as she did when she tried to take her life before: pick up the pills, put them down, pick them up again; wade into the river, swim back, over and over. She imagined that when Wonnacott reached for the syringe, she would flinch. But Paula was calm and still as the drugs went in. “I don’t feel anything,” she whispered.

“Oh, wow,” she said. “This is horrible. I’m just so sorry.” Paula coughed as if she might vomit. Deep, guttural hacks. After a few moments, her body relaxed. A wet tissue fell from her hands. Her skin slowly turned a pale white.

Soon, Paula is dead.

Paula is not an anomaly. I just interviewed a Canadian man named Roger Foley for my Humanize podcast. The episode will be posted in a week. He is in a hospital with a progressively disabling condition for which doctors, he says, have repeatedly pushed euthanasia on him for several years — as they concomitantly deny him the kind of care that would make his life easier to bear. I’ll link to that interview here when it’s posted.

I also included Alex Schadenberg, the founder of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, in the interview. He described how hospital “MAiD teams” visit patients who might qualify to be killed, offering their death services. Can. You. Imagine?

Euthanasia is awful “medicine” and even worse public policy. It exposes the most vulnerable among us to abandonment and death. It pretends to be kind. It claims to be compassionate. But in the end, it justifies the most callous cruelty.

LifeNews.com Note: Wesley J. Smith, J.D. is Chair and Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. Wesley is a contributor to National Review and is the author of 14 books, in recent years focusing on human dignity, liberty, and equality. Wesley has been recognized as one of America’s premier public intellectuals on bioethics by National Journal and has been honored by the Human Life Foundation as a “Great Defender of Life” for his work against suicide and euthanasia. Wesley’s most recent book is Culture of Death: The Age of “Do Harm” Medicine, a warning about the dangers to patients of the modern bioethics movement. He blogs at Human Exeptionalism.

The post Canadian Doctors are Euthanizing Patients Who Aren’t Even Terminally Ill appeared first on LifeNews.com.

There are a lot of us at National Right to Life that closely scrutinize medical journals. Not, you understand, that they are immune to pro-abortion bias, but you can still learn a lot.

And, every once in a while, the truth seeps out. Take “Ob/Gyns Mostly Stayed Put After SCOTUS Overturned Roe, Study Finds:  Surprising results go against the idea that ob/gyns moved from abortion-restrictive states” that appeared here which I wrote about here.

As Rachael Robertson, Enterprise & Investigative Writer, for MedPage Today wrote back in April, “In the post-Roe v. Wade era, ob/gyns continued to practice in similar locations as before, according to a descriptive cohort study.”

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She quoted the authors

“The only statistically significant difference suggested that the share of physicians who are ob/gyns decreased less in threatened states than in protected ones, opposite to the expected finding if ob/gyns were leaving states where abortion is threatened,” the authors wrote.”

Well, Becky Staiger and Valentin Bolotnyy, two of the three authors of the April 21 JAMA Network Open article, brought their results to a larger audience yesterday—The Hill.

The headline was even more explicit: “No, OBGYNs are not systematically fleeing states that banned abortion.” They begin by writing that the 2022 Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe, supposedly “added a new layer of legal risk” for ob-gyns. However, this has not caused them to hightail it to pro-abortion states.

But in research just published in JAMA Network Open, we and our co-authors find no evidence of such an exodus of obstetrician-gynecologist physicians from states with abortion bans.

Really? “OBGYNs also continued to move into states with abortion bans at similar rates to other states,” they wrote. “We also considered trends in the practice locations of recent residency graduates and subspecialists in maternal-fetal medicine, as well as trends in the share of OBGYNs who are female and who are licensed to practice in more than one state. All were similar between states, regardless of abortion’s legality.’ [Emphasis added]

They also acknowledged that “Our findings are not unique.”

In December 2024, an independent group of researchers using a different data set came to the exact same conclusions. And in March, researchers showed that the number of obstetrician-gynecologists in states with bans has increased since Dobbs, though perhaps at a slower rate than in a group of states with mixed status.

Michael New came to a perfectly reasonable conclusion:

All in all, these results are unsurprising. Surveys consistently show that a low percentage of OBGYNs perform abortions. The legal status of abortion would likely have little impact on the decisions of most OBGYNs as to where to move or locate their practice.

LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. He frequently writes Today’s News and Views — an online opinion column on pro-life issues.

The post OBGYBNs are Still Providing Great Care for Women in Pro-Life States appeared first on LifeNews.com.

The American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) affirms limiting screen time due to the negative effect of excessive screen time and early use of screen time on the health of children and adolescents. All forms of media, especially visual media, play an increasing role in the lives of children, adolescents, and families in the United States. While very limited use of high-quality and developmentally appropriate media under adult supervision may have a positive influence after two years of age, excessive or developmentally inappropriate use carries grave health risks. Excessive exposure to screens (television, tablets, smartphones, computers, and video game consoles), especially at young ages, is associated with lower academic performance, sleep disturbances, obesity, attention deficit disorder, increased aggression, lower self-esteem, depression, and increased rates of high-risk behaviors. ACPeds encourages parents to become media literate and limit screen time for their children, and to set a positive example by limiting screen time for themselves, which will also contribute to fostering healthy relationships with their children.

Approved by the ACPeds Board of Directors (May 2025)
Approved by ACPeds Members (June 2025)

Corresponding ACPeds Referenced Paper: 

Media Use and Screen Time – Its Impact on Children, Adolescents, and Families (May 2020)

Other Pertinent ACPeds Referenced Papers:

The Adolescent Brain: Under Construction (May 2022)

The Impact of Pornography on Children (Aug. 2024)

Response to another flawed semi-trad argument…

Don’t Be Like Judas!
(Nor Like Eric Sammons, For That Matter)

OK, so we doctored this screenshot a little: The painting on the left doesn’t actually show the betrayal of Judas

Eric Sammons, editor-in-chief of Crisis Magazine, recently released a video clip on YouTube that’s a composite of highlights from his 35-minute Crisis Point podcast episode “Don’t Be Judas” of Apr. 15, 2025.

As the clip is less than a minute long (a so-called YouTube ‘short’), a lot more people will be exposed to what Sammons says there than would take the time to sit through the full-length episode.… READ MORE

The American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) affirms that parents provide the foundational role of support, nurturance, and guidance for their children.1 That role includes the fundamental right to direct the child’s upbringing. It is essential that society supports parents by respecting their natural right and legal authority to make decisions for their children, including educational and medical decisions. Parents, in this context, include biological and adoptive parents, as well as state-appointed guardians and custodial grandparents.

Parents have no right to physically, sexually, or emotionally abuse or neglect their children. Parents also do not have the right to agree to mutilating function-reducing surgeries or potentially sterilizing treatments except when necessary to preserve their child’s life from a physical illness (e.g., agreeing to chemotherapy treatments for cancer).

Disciplinary measures such as time-out, transient restraint, and properly applied disciplinary spanking do not qualify as physical abuse.2  Pediatricians are obligated to attempt to prevent potential abuse before it occurs through education of parents, mediation with parents and adolescents, and referrals for counselling when appropriate.  If pediatricians suspect abuse is occurring, or has occurred, they are obligated to report it and protect the child/adolescent.

Current scientific research demonstrates that:

1. Children and adolescents have immature brain development indicating the need for strong parental guidance in decision making. Brain development in humans continues until the early to mid twenties, particularly in the areas involving decision making under stress.3
2. Children and adolescents do better in an authoritative environment in which parents state their expectations and provide consequences for inappropriate behavior.4
3. Adolescents are less likely to participate in high-risk behaviors if their parents are “hands on” parents who monitor and guide all of their activities.3,4
4. Adolescents are less likely to participate in high-risk behaviors if they feel connected to their parents and family.3,4
5. Successfully navigating adolescence and avoiding high-risk behaviors will allow youth to enter adult careers, relationships, responsibilities, and parenting with better skills and increased likelihood of optimal outcomes.

Laws regarding adolescent confidentiality and parental notification or consent vary widely among states.  All states allow adolescent confidentiality regarding sexually transmitted diseases, but not all states require it.  Some states require that one or both parents be notified of a minor’s abortion, others require consent of one or both parents, and others deny parents any knowledge or rights.  Pediatricians should be knowledgeable regarding the legal requirements of the state in which they practice.  When feasible, ACPeds recommends pediatricians offer to assist their adolescent patients in confiding in their parents and encourage open communication between parent and child/adolescent.  Often parents know family medical history of which adolescents are unaware.  Discussing the benefits of avoiding sexual activity before marriage, of keeping the brain drug-free, etc. with parents and the adolescent in the exam room together, can open lines of conversation.  Laws mandating adolescent confidentiality put pediatricians in an adversarial position and interfere with the ability of parents to provide needed guidance as the primary educators of their children. Such laws are harmful to both adolescents and parents. Thus the American College of Pediatricians opposes them.

Approved by the ACPeds Board of Directors (May 2025)
Approved by ACPeds Members (June 2025)

Corresponding ACPeds Referenced Paper:

Adolescent Confidentiality (Sept. 2020)

Other Pertinent ACPeds Referenced Papers:

Discipline of the Child (Dec. 2021)

The Adolescent Brain: Under Construction (May 2022)

The Roles, Responsibilities and Rights of Parents (May 2023)

Parental Involvement and Consent for a Minor’s Abortion (May 2016)

The American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) affirms the medical fact that the sex of an individual is based upon an immutable, genetically-determined biological reality.1 The two sexes, male and female, are defined by reproductive design. A female has the anatomy (ovaries) to form the larger gametes (eggs) and support the development of the offspring in her uterus. A male has the anatomy (testicles) to produce the smaller gametes (sperm) and a penis which delivers the sperm into the female by way of her vagina. Sexually specific genes are encrypted in every nucleated cell of the body.  Outward appearances as well as hormonal or surgical interventions do not change a person’s sex. The “transition” that individuals who are uncomfortable with or distressed by their biological sex (“gender dysphoria”) undergo only involves a change in outward appearance or presentation.

Those with gender dysphoria have higher rates of co-occurring mental health concerns than other LGBTQ+ identifying adolescents.2 Many children and adolescents with sexual identities incongruent with their sex have experienced significant psychological trauma leading to their gender dysphoria.  Although parents are often told that their children will commit suicide if their false sexual identity is not supported, there is no long-term evidence that transgender interventions prevent suicidal ideation or behaviors.  In fact, pursuing interventions to align with the opposite sex is more likely to result in deleterious long-term mental and physical health outcomes, including sterility.  Many individuals who have gone through those interventions later regret them and seek to align again with their biological sex.

Social affirmation, puberty blockers, cross sex hormones and drugs, and surgical interventions used with the intent of “transitioning” a child are harmful to the physical, psychological, and emotional health of the child.3 Informed consent for these interventions from either the parent or the child cannot be obtained without good long-term studies on the risks and benefits of the procedures. Thus far there are no good long term studies showing any benefits. Nor can informed consent by pediatric patients be legitimate given the immaturity of their brains.3  In many cases, these interventions are irreversible and may render the adolescent infertile for life.  Because of discovered risks and unrealized benefits of social, medical, and surgical interventions, many European countries are now cautioning against these interventions while encouraging mental health therapy as the proper course of treatment for children and adolescents.

Therefore, the ACPeds cannot condone any of these interventions for children and adolescents. Intensive psychotherapy for the individual and family to determine and hopefully treat the underlying etiology of their gender incongruence should be pursued. That approach has been shown to resolve gender dysphoria while allowing the child to progress through natural puberty.

Approved by the ACPeds Board of Directors (May 2025)
Approved by ACPeds Members (June 2025)

Pertinent ACPeds Referenced Papers:

Sex is a Biological Trait of Medical Significance (March 2021)

Mental Health in Adolescents with Incongruence of Gender Identity and Biological Sex (Feb. 2024)

Gender Dysphoria in Children (Oct. 2018)

Adolescent Brain: Under Construction (May 2022)

Other ACPeds Resources Available:

Biological Integrity: Integrating the Mind and Body

Doctors Protecting Children

Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys filed their opening brief Friday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in Wuoti v. Winters. ADF attorneys represent two Vermont families who had their foster-care licenses revoked by the state because of their religious beliefs.

Despite a track record of success and high praise from social workers who knew Brian and Katy Wuoti and Bryan and Rebecca Gantt, Vermont’s Department for Children and Families revoked their foster-care licenses after the couples expressed their religiously inspired and widely held belief that girls cannot become boys or vice versa. The state applies this policy categorically—prohibiting families with these views from caring for any child, even if they sought to care for a relative, provide respite care for an infant for just one day, or care for a child who shared their faith.

“Vermont’s foster-care system is in crisis: There aren’t enough families to care for vulnerable kids including many victims of the state’s opioid crisis. Yet Vermont is putting its ideological agenda ahead of the needs of these suffering kids,” said ADF Senior Counsel Johannes Widmalm-Delphonse. “The Wuoti and Gantt families have adopted five beautiful children between them, including children with special needs. Now Vermont says they’re unfit to parent any child because of their widely held religious beliefs about human sexuality. We’re urging the 2nd Circuit to protect the constitutional right of citizens caring for suffering children.”

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The state’s foster-care system has more children in need than families willing to care for them, and officials have even had to place some children in institutions and unlicensed placements, including hospitals and police stations, to fill the gap. To help meet this need, the Wuotis became foster parents in 2014 and adopted two brothers from foster care. The Gantts became foster parents in 2016 and focused on caring for children born with drug dependencies or with fetal alcohol syndrome. The Gantts have since adopted three children.

Vermont officials described the couples as “amazing,” “wonderful,” “kind,” and “welcoming.” Yet the state revoked both families’ licenses when they expressed their religious belief that a person should live consistent with their sex and marriage is the union of one man and one woman. According to the state, that made them “unqualified” to parent any child regardless of the child’s age, beliefs, or identity. Vermont will not license these families to provide any type of foster care or even respite care. As the opening brief explains, this exclusion burdens constitutional rights as much as it needlessly deprives children of loving homes.

“In the Green Mountain State, families must be ‘holistically affirming and supporting’ of a child’s sexual identity and gender expression ‘even if the foster parents hold divergent personal opinions or beliefs,’” the brief states. “This requires foster parents to speak words like chosen pronouns and to attend events like pride parades. They must also refrain from exposing children to the view that sex is fixed and cannot be changed. The goal is to suppress ideas and viewpoints with which Vermont disagrees—exactly what the First Amendment prohibits.”

“Every family comes with a unique religious or cultural background, and Vermont concedes it does not force others to ‘compro­mise their own beliefs,’” the brief continues. “Yet on this one issue, Vermont demands uniformity—excluding anyone who holds a different view.”

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It does not make sense for New York to consider legalizing assisted suicide while it simultaneously works to prevent suicides in its communities, Cardinal Timothy Dolan wrote in a May 29 op-ed for The Wall Street Journal.

He detailed how he was once driving on the George Washington Bridge when the traffic came to a sudden halt; drivers at first were angry at the disruption, until they realized that a man was considering jumping off the bridge.

“Everyone’s mood changed in an instant,” Cardinal Dolan wrote. “Instead of being impatient, angry, in a rush, we prayed for that man and the rescue workers trying to coax him back to safety. We all rallied on behalf of a troubled man intent on suicide.”

This is the normal response to when someone is considering suicide, the archbishop of New York explained, adding that there are many local public resources to help prevent suicides, such as school-age prevention programs with the Archdiocese of New York, and collaboration between NYC Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch and religious leaders to address the suicide epidemic of officers.

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“Our state spends millions on anti-suicide efforts,” Cardinal Dolan continued, noting that Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul has spearheaded unprecedented investment in mental health resources.

“Which is why I am more than puzzled, I am stunned, when I read that New York lawmakers are on the verge of legalizing suicide — not by leaping from a bridge but via a poison cocktail easily provided by physicians and pharmacists,” he wrote.

In April, New York’s State Assembly voted 81-67 in favor of legalizing assisted suicide, advancing the bill to the state Senate.

Cardinal Dolan decried the state’s disparity in responses, noting that on one hand it “will marshal all its resources to save the life of one hopeless and despondent man” — and on the other, “it may conclude that some lives aren’t worth living — perhaps due to a serious illness or disability — and we will hand those despondent women and men a proverbial loaded gun and tell them to have at it.”

Noting particularly weak spots in the legislation, Cardinal Dolan wrote that the bill does not require a psychological exam before the lethal drugs are offered. Further, supporters have argued that assisted suicide is only for those who are diagnosed with six months or less to live, but the cardinal also pointed out that “many controllable illnesses can become terminal if untreated.” He added that other places that have legalized euthanasia or assisted suicide, such as Canada, have since stripped away initial safeguards and widened the scope of the deadly practice.

Cardinal Dolan said he is praying that New York’s political leaders will ultimately reject the bill.

“The prospects of defeating the bill look bleak, and it’s tempting to give into hopelessness. But those brave first responders on the bridge didn’t give in; they worked together to stop a tragedy,” he concluded. “Will state senators or Ms. Hochul step up to protect precious human life? That is my prayer.”

LifeNews Note: McKenna Snow writes for CatholicVote, where this column originally appeared.

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