The legal advisors for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) have urged the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate what they called deceptive advertising of so-called “gender-affirming care,” warning that drugs used to “transition” children cause “physical, psychological, and spiritual harms.”
In a Sept. 26 letter to the FTC, USCCB General Counsel William Quinn and Assistant General Counsel Daniel Balserak said that the puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones promoted by groups such as Planned Parenthood are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration for the use of “gender-affirming care” (GAC) and rely on “weak and increasingly questioned” scientific evidence.
Advertising such drugs, they argued, risks misleading the public and violating the FTC’s own standards on health-related advertising.
The attorneys stressed that beyond physical and psychological risks, GAC inflicts a deeper spiritual damage on the patients and medical professionals involved.
“Indeed, the spiritual harm wrought by GAC is no less real and even more profound,” they wrote. “Rejection of our God-given bodies, such as by modifying them to appear as the opposite sex, is a grave matter, and when done with full knowledge and complete consent, is a grave sin.”
The USCCB lawyers warned that gender “transition” procedures distort the unity of body and soul, harm not only patients but also medical professionals who participate, and contradict “the fundamental order of the human person.”
“Furthermore,” they continued, “interventions that alter the body to reject one’s sex attempt to compromise the integrity of the body-soul unity and are thus damaging to the soul because they disregard the fundamental order of the human person, viewing the body as ‘an object, a mere tool at the disposal of the soul, one that each person may dispose of according to his or her own will.’”
While spiritual wounds can be healed through repentance and grace, the USCCB lawyers concluded, physical and psychological scars often remain. They called on the FTC to halt deceptive promotion of interventions “that do not heal but rather harm, across multiple dimensions.”
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