Commentary

The ANA Just Went AWOL

  • By Do No Harm Staff
  • May 31, 2023

The American Nurses Association just made it official: It’s a partisan organization for radicals, not a professional organization for nurses. Policymakers and the public should keep this in mind before listening to the ANA, which now puts extreme ideology ahead of expert medical care.

Figure 1. American Nurses Association position statement opposing legislation against DEI in education (May 15, 2023).

In May, the ANA released two statements proving its descent into woke identity politics. The first stated that “ANA opposes actions that prohibit DEI education and programs.” The second showed the ANA’s full support for the most extreme transgender treatments and policies.

Figure 2. American Nurses Association position statement against policies allowing conscious objections to gender ideology.

What, exactly, is the ANA standing for? In the context of DEI, it’s backing the indoctrination of nurses in divisive and discriminatory ideas, including the racist concept that it’s acceptable to treat people differently based on skin color. This is the core of DEI, and the ANA should be fighting to get discrimination out of nursing school. Instead, it’s calling on these institutions to “adopt and aggressively maintain policies, procedures, and practices” grounded in this disturbing worldview.

The ANA’s foray into transgenderism is just as concerning. It supports forcing nurses and other medical professionals to provide invasive and irreversible transgender treatments even when it violates the provider’s conscience. This presumably includes forcing nurses to provide these procedures to children, despite very real concerns about long-term physical and mental health. This is an area that demands further study and constant caution. Instead, the ANA is embracing the most radical position imaginable.

The American Nurses Association claims to speak for all nurses, and you can bet it’s using its heft to fight reforms at both the state and federal level. Yet as its recent actions show, the ANA doesn’t really speak for nurses at all. It speaks for the radical activists who now run health-care’s elite institutions. The last thing lawmakers should do is listen to a corrupted organization like the ANA.