Little Rock, Arkansas, April 9, 2021
Photo: yimg.com
Arkansas became the first state to show care for its children and officially protect them from harmful gender transitions on Tuesday.
The Arkansas Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act was voted into law 71-24 in the House and 25-8 in the Senate, overriding Governor Asa Hutchinson’s veto from the day before, reports Christian Headlines.
Both votes were largely along party lines, with Republicans controlling the House and Senate. Hutchinson, also a Republican, had described the bill as legislative overreach into the relationship between doctors, patients, and their families, reports the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.
The bill states: “A physician or other healthcare professional shall not provide gender transition procedures to any individual under eighteen (18) years of age.” It defines "gender transition procedures" as the use of puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, or “genital or nongenital gender reassignment surgery performed for the purpose of assisting an individual with a gender transition.”
Medical personnel could lose their license for violating the new law.
“Our children stand as pawns right now. They’re minors and they’re children and they need to be protected” from the medical profession, said State Rep. Robin Lundstrum, one of the sponsors of the bill. “Even medicine sometimes is wrong. We should never experiment on children. Ever.”
“Arkansas has a compelling government interest in protecting the health and safety of its citizens, especially vulnerable children,” the bill’s legislative findings say.
The bill cites studies showing that that majority of “gender-nonconforming children” eventually come to identify with their biological sex, “thereby rendering most physiological interventions unnecessary.” The legislative findings also note that transgender people have not benefited from society’s embracing of them.
“Even among people who have undergone inpatient gender reassignment procedures, suicide rates, psychiatric morbidities, and mortality rates remain markedly elevated above the background population,” the bill says.
“According to the legislation, health care providers are not prohibited from providing procedures to people born with anatomy or chromosomes that fall outside the binary understanding of sex; services to address disorders of sexual development; treatments of any infection, injury, disease or disorder that has been caused by or exacerbated by transition-related care; or procedures treating a physical disorder, injury or illness that would place the person in imminent danger of death or impairment of a major bodily function unless surgery is performed,” reports the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.
The ACLU is already preparing litigation to fight the new law.
Officials in the Orthodox nation of Georgia capitulated to pressure from the LGBT lobby last month, as the Tbilisi Civil Registry Service of the Agency for the Development of Public Services of the Ministry of Justice of Georgia issued official documents recognizing a man as a woman for the first time in the nation’s history.
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