One-hundred-and-seventy-four years ago a not-for-profit professional organization was formed “to promote the art and science of medicine and the betterment of public health.” Today, the American Medical Association (AMA) is about as far removed from that lofty goal as is the contemporary Democrat Party from its avowed status as “the party of the common man.”
The length by which the AMA has strayed from its original goal of promoting the science of medicine is perhaps best illustrated by its recent decision recommending that birth certificates no longer include the gender of the newborn.
Such nonsensical assertion that human beings are not born with male or female physical attributes has taken hold in a number of medical schools across the country. This has led to absurd instances in which professors feel obligated to apologize to students for inadvertently intimating, even indirectly, that there are differences between men and women. As noted in an article last week by Katie Herzog, for example, a professor of endocrinology at a medical school in the massive University of California system apologized profusely to students for uttering the verboten phrase, “pregnant woman.”
It is in this same Bizarro World that a medical doctor, Valinda Riggins Nwadike, MD, lent her name to an article in Healthline.com in December 2018 that declared, “Yes, it’s possible for men to become pregnant.” With an assertion like this enjoying the imprimatur of medical doctors, and with professors of medicine afraid to use terms “male” and “female” for fear of being labeled “transphobic,” it may not be long before the AMA declares “the end of disease as we know it.”
The AMA’s conclusion that gender identity at birth is to be ignored, if not denied outright, follows a pattern by the formerly respected organization of involving itself in matters wholly unrelated to “the betterment of public health.”
The Association for years has advocated openly and aggressively for all manner of gun control legislation, including bans on “assault-style” guns and “high capacity” magazines, limits on “concealed carry” permits, advocacy of so-called “gun buyback” programs, and essentially any other mandated measures pressed in the political arena by activists like Michael Bloomberg and George Soros.
Then there is the issue of abortion. The AMA now stands firmly on the side of physicians performing abortions so long as such procedure is lawful in the state in which they practice. This is a position starkly at odds with the view of abortion as antithetical to the moral underpinnings of the medical profession for many decades prior to the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing the procedure in 1973’s well-known Roe v. Wade.
The practice of medicine at the time the AMA was established and until very recently, was founded in “science” and understood to be based on fundamental factors capable of identification, measurement, analysis and eventual cure. This reflects a process that has led to phenomenal breakthroughs in fields such as cardiology and oncology, with survival rates among cancer survivors and heart attack victims undreamed of a generation ago.
Yet, for today’s “woke” doctors and medical professors, worrying about whether “men can get pregnant” appears more important than the fight to treat and cure diseases such as cancer.
With the “science” of medicine seeming to drift from one political issue to another, and woke practitioners rushing to embrace the cultural phenomena du jour (no matter how unmoored from reality the issue may be), the formerly respected American Medical Association is in danger of losing whatever degree of credibility it may still enjoy even among the minority of practicing physicians it represents. Then again, for the eighty or more percent of doctors who no longer pay dues to the AMA, this is hardly a noteworthy loss.
Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.