The Trump administration has launched investigations into health care organizations in an effort to allow providers to refuse care for transgender patients on religious or moral grounds.
One of the most recent actions by the Department of Health and Human Services, launched in mid-June, targets the University of Michigan Health system over a former employee’s claims that she was fired for requesting a religious exemption from providing gender-affirming care.
An administration release announcing the probe says the Michigan case is the third investigation in “a larger effort to strengthen enforcement of laws protecting conscience and religious exercise” for medical providers, citing federal laws known as the Church Amendments.
The probes are the first time HHS has explicitly claimed the amendments “allow providers to refuse gender-affirming care or to misgender patients,” said Elizabeth Sepper, a professor at the University of Texas who studies conscience laws. Those laws, Sepper said, primarily allow objections to performing abortions or sterilizations but “don’t apply to gender-affirming care, by their very own text.”
But religious freedom groups that supported the health worker in the Michigan case, Valerie Kloosterman, say the investigation is a welcome recognition of existing protections for medical professionals to refuse to provide some types of care that conflict with their beliefs.
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“We are pleased to learn that the Department of Health and Human Services is taking its responsibility seriously to enforce the federal statutes protecting religious health care providers,” said K …