Biden’s Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra declared during a House Education and Workforce Committee hearing that hospitals refusing to provide sex-change surgeries for children may lose federal funding.
“Can you commit here today that your department will not withhold federal funding from hospitals or doctors who refuse to provide the gender-affirming care that you are, you know, mandating, if it violates their religious beliefs?” committee chairwoman Mary Miller (R-IL) asked.
Becerra responded, “You’re going somewhere completely different.”
“First, you started talking about how a doctor should have the rights to not offer particular care,” he said. “Then you stretch it out to provide for the system-wide services. Very different.”
Discussing religious objections to sex-change surgeries, Becerra said that doctors do not receive federal funding, only hospitals.
Miller asked, “Doctors are working for these hospitals. Are you going to say today, are you committing that you will not withhold federal funding from those health care facilities?”
Becerra asserted that hospitals that are “not providing the service they’re required to” are “not entitled” to federal resources.
Following the questioning, Miller said in a statement, “Secretary Becerra is complicit in Joe Biden’s efforts to force doctors to perform sex-change operations on young children even if they have religious concerns. When I questioned Secretary Becerra today, he admitted that the Biden administration will indeed withhold federal funding from religious hospitals if doctors do not comply with their inhumane mandate.”
“I will continue to oppose the brutal mutilation of our children, and I will continue to be a voice in Congress for the parents who are outraged by Joe Biden’s radical agenda,” she noted.
HHS was previously accused of violating scientific integrity policies after Assistant Secretary Rachel Levine offered limited evidence for why “gender-affirming care” is “necessary.”
Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) filed a Freedom of Information Act request for data supporting the claim that gender-affirming care is necessary, to which HHS provided a two-page document.
The document was not a scientific study supporting the HHS’s claims, but a paper asserting that “research demonstrates that gender-affirming care improves the mental health and overall well-being of gender-diverse children.”
After receiving the documents, PPT wrote to the HHS Inspector General, alleging that Levine violated the department’s scientific integrity policies by making politically-motivated claims.