When I was a young adult, I decide to read two books on every kind of policy. Health care, education, firearms, abortion, divorce. I wanted to quickly get up to speed on how everything in the world really works. I read a book by Dr. Jay P. Greene on education policy, called “Education Myths”. He has put out a new study for Heritage foundation on “gender affirming care” and suicide rates.

Here is the study.

Summary:

Lowering legal barriers to make it easier for minors to undergo cross-sex medical interventions without parental consent does not reduce suicide rates—in fact, it likely leads to higher rates of suicide among young people in states that adopt these changes. States should instead adopt parental bills of rights that affirm the fact that parents have primary responsibility for their children’s education and health, and that require school officials and health professionals to receive permission from parents before administering health services, including medication and “gender-affirming” counseling, to children under 18. States should also tighten the criteria for receiving cross-sex treatments, including raising the minimum eligibility age.

Key points:

• U.S. policymakers are seeking to make it easier for minors to access puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones based on the claim that doing so reduces suicide risk.

• Studies finding that “gender-affirming” interventions prevent suicide fail to show a causal relationship and have been poorly executed.

• A superior research design shows that easing access to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones by minors without parental consent increases suicide rates.

And this is the interesting part:

In the past several years, the suicide rate among those ages 12 to 23 has become significantly higher in states that have a provision that allows minors to receive routine health care without parental consent than in states without such a provision. Before 2010, these two groups of states did not differ in their youth suicide rates. Starting in 2010, when puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones became widely available, elevated suicide rates in states where minors can more easily access those medical interventions became observable.

Rather than being protective against suicide, this pattern indicates that easier access by minors to cross-sex medical interventions without parental consent is associated with higher risk of suicide. The Heritage model plotted the difference in a three-year rolling average of suicide rates between states with minor access provisions and states with no such provision. Chart 2 plots the trend in this difference for those ages 12 to 23 who could have been affected by the policy when cross-sex medical interventions became available. For comparison, Chart 2 also shows the trend in this difference for a group ages 28 to 39, who could not have been affected by these policies, since the people in this group would have been at least 18 when puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones became available.

Without making any adjustments, suicide rates among those ages 12 to 23 (blue line) begin to spike in states that have provisions that allow minors to access health care without parental consent relative to states that have no such provision around 2016, after cross-sex medical interventions became more common. By 2020, there are about 3.5 more suicides per 100,000 people ages 12 to 23 in states with easier access than in states without an access provision. There is no similar spike in suicide rates among those ages 28 to 39 (grey line) at that time.

I have a few thoughts about this.

First, secular leftists form their beliefs based on what makes them feel good, and what makes people have a high opinion of them. There is no rational, evidence-based case for giving depressed children access to drugs and surgeries that cause permanent effects on those children. These are not views that people come to by studying evidence and processing fair, reasoned debates.

Second, it’s important to understand that there is a continuum from secular leftism to infanticide to child abuse. With rare exceptions, secular leftists accept the Darwinian notion of survival of the fittest. They have no rational grounding for human rights. They are incapable of subjecting their own desires to boundaries prescribed by the moral law. If they are not actively participating in infanticide and child abuse, then they are voting to make these things legal, to make them subsidized by taxpayers, and finally to punish anyone who disagrees with it… up to and including seizing the children of those who dissent. (This is currently being done in Canada and the United States)

Third, to stop these secular leftists from abusing our children, and driving them into suicide, we need to make all the actors involved in grooming the kids – teachers, school administrators, counselors, doctors, nurses, lawyers, judges, librarians, police officers, legislators, social media companies, etc. – subject to civil lawsuits filed by the children once they are old enough to file. We need to clean out the bank accounts of the secular left child abusers. Just let the children name anyone who influenced them in a lawsuit, and then force those “don’t judge” people to defend the charges.