In a major vote that came on Wednesday, November 12, the Bishops of the United States decided to approve a number of huge amendments to the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (ERDs). The amendments now explicitly forbid Catholic hospitals from providing so-called gender affirming care, whether surgical or hormonal, to transgender patients.
For reference, the guide at issue is one that is issued by the bishops to offer ethical standards in health care provided by Roman Catholic doctors and hospitals, and is based on Catholic teachings about ethics and human dignity. The guide is periodically updated, and is currently in its sixth edition, which was created seven years ago. The amendments will be incorporated in the seventh edition, which will come out sometime in late 2025 or early 2026.
The amendments were passed by the required two-thirds majority of the US bishops’ conference membership, and the changes regarding transgender “gender affirming care” apply to the sections regarding proper professional-patient relationships. Now, medical interventions are forbidden if they “alter the fundamental order of the human body in form or function.” The conference occured in Baltimore.
After the changes voted on by the bishops, the amended text of the relevant ERDs provides that “Since the human person is a unity of body and soul, Catholic health care professionals and their patients have the duty and the right to preserve the integrity of the human body.”
Continuing, the text provides, “It can be morally permissible, however, to remove or to suppress the function of one part of the body for the sake of the body” under a few certain, limited conditions: “There must be no other reasonable means of addressing the pathological condition, the efficacy of the procedure must be reasonably well assured, and the benefits expected from the procedure must be proportionate to the burdens it imposes, including suffering, cost, and damage to the body.” That does not include so-called gender-affirming care.
These amendments follow a major meeting and note in 2023, which concluded that transgender surgeries are immoral under Catholic doctrine because they “do not repair a defect in the body…these interventions are intended to transform the body so as to make it take on as much as possible the form of the opposite sex, contrary to the natural form of the body. They are attempts to alter the fundamental order and finality of the body and to replace it with something else.”
In any case, the Catholic Health Association thanked the bishops for the amendments to ERDs and noted that it would still care for transgender patients, but would not be performing the prohibited medical intervention practices, saying, “Catholic providers will continue to welcome those who seek medical care from us and identify as transgender. We will continue to treat these individuals with dignity and respect, which is consistent with Catholic social teaching and our moral obligation to serve everyone, particularly those who are marginalized.”
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The bishops did, however, attack Trump for his illegal immigration stance, saying, after the Wednesday meeting, “We are disturbed when we see among our people a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement.” They added, “We are saddened by the state of contemporary debate and the vilification of immigrants. We are concerned about the conditions in detention centers and the lack of access to pastoral care.”
Watch a transgender activist go ballistic over a transgender bathroom bill here: