If one ever needed proof that medical associations are subject to institutional capture by activists, the American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists (ACOG) provides it.
Boasting 62,000 members, ACOG is, according to its own materials, “the leading professional membership organization for ob-gyns.”
The association states that it provides “comprehensive, expert-reviewed practice guidelines” to its members and that those practitioners “maintain the highest professional standards and are united in their delivery of exceptional, respectful, science-backed care for patients.”
Yet these encouraging pledges are joined on the same webpage by ACOG’s commitment to “equitable” care, a now-familiar indicator of politicization.
Moreover, the organization’s self-defined mission is to “support our members to improve the lives of all people” — not women — “seeking obstetric and gynecologic care.”
That particular word choice is explained on ACOG’s “Inclusive Language” page, which argues that “[v]aluing, respecting, and affirming an individual’s identity contribute to improved health outcomes.”
Later on the same page, the association declares, “To be inclusive of women and all patients in need of obstetric and gynecologic care, ACOG will move beyond the exclusive use of gendered language and definitions.”
Do No Harm notes with alarm the irreconcilability of the organization’s commitment to “science-backed care” and its assertion that “all people” may benefit from gynecologic medicine. (We concede that gynecologists may occasionally treat biologically male patients for sexually transmitted infections or screen biological men for anal cancer, but that has been the case since well before ACOG’s revision of its mission-statement language. The revision is about transgenderism.)
We note, furthermore, that ACOG’s policies and practices impact not only adult patients but minor children.
Among ACOG’s resources is a committee opinion titled “Health Care for Transgender and Gender Diverse Individuals,” which explicitly concerns both adults and adolescents and which directs site visitors to the radical World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) “[f]or guidance on the medical and surgical care of transgender adolescents.”
Elsewhere, on its “Adolescent Health” page, ACOG advocates for “privacy and the ability of adolescents to consent to health-care procedures” and argues that “education about … gender … empowers and prepares children, adolescents, and young adults to make educated decisions about their health and their relationships.”
Simply put, the organization’s embrace of transgender ideology is not limited to the “adult” corner of its operations. Minors, too, are necessarily implicated in ACOG’s woke “gender”-related ideas.
On the matter of DEI, the association is little better. As its “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusive Excellence at ACOG” page makes clear, the organization believes it “essential that the culture of our organization, membership, leadership, and fellowship be diverse, equitable, inclusive, and just.”
A “Collective Action Strategy” page condemns the “racial inequities present in our field,” while a statement of policy titled “Racism in Obstetrics and Gynecology” argues that “[r]acism has been and continues to be systemically embedded into our society and the practice of medicine.”
Echoing the totalism to which ideological progressives often fall prey, the second of those pages insists that “[r]acial and ethnic inequities in obstetrics and gynecology cannot be reversed without addressing all aspects of racism and racial bias, including the sociopolitical forces that perpetuate them” (emphasis added).
So much is wrong with these claims that one hardly knows where to begin. Most obviously, they substitute unfalsifiable, quasi-magical forces (“systemic racism”) for matters that physicians are equipped to address (e.g., patient behavior and medical discovery).
They encourage doctors to engage in policy work outside of their realms of expertise, thus lending the authority of medicine to policy prescriptions that may not be reasonable or practical.
Most importantly, they compromise the aforementioned standard of “science-backed care” to which ACOG pledges itself and to which all medical associations should be held.
Happily, the solution to these problems lies in plain sight: ACOG should depoliticize its activities and webpages and return to the irreplaceable business of providing evidence-based obstetric and gynecologic care to women and girls.
Do No Harm joins all who oppose the politicization of medicine in eagerly awaiting such a move.
