Other people’s healthcare should not be a matter of personal politics
Who gets to decide who gets which medical treatment, or even what gets defined as medical treatment, has become hyper-politicised due to both the anti-abortion lobby and anti-trans activists. While some form of regulatory body is necessary to ensure safe medicine and equitable access to healthcare, demanding that access to any form of healthcare be restricted solely on your personal politics is patently wrong, if not immoral.
Talk of harm are always loaded from personal perspective. If harm was a measurement of restricting access to procedures and medication then ADHD medication would be banned, Viagra would require a full four month health review, and hip surgeries would be banned by legislatures based on regret rates. What procedures, medication, and treatments are politically banned remains about who has control over the leavers of power and who those with that power want to subordinate.
Trans healthcare has a 99% satisfaction rate, and while people do de-transition and regret their status in life, the overall satisfaction rate far exceeds most other medical issues. While I might fundamentally disagree with the gate keeping and access to trans healthcare, one thing that cannot be denied is that trans folk are overwhelming content with their post-transition lives. Yet, it is the outliers and unhappy ones who get the spotlight, launch court cases, and are spun across the media.
The same goes for abortion and post-natal care. Abortion is not something any pregnant takes lightly. It can be heartbreaking, it can be liberating, or a whole bundle of other emotions that is personal to the person making the decision. Politics projects onto pregnancy a halo of mystery, a divine miracle that should be embraced to the bloody end not matter the consequences on the person, the baby and society at large. Life may be sacred to you, but life is also complex, messy, and full of unexpected turns. To remove the option of abortion condemns others to potential suffering and misery, parent and prospective child.
By mandating and legislating healthcare based on gut feeling, misunderstanding, and bigotry society embeds cruelty into the law. The law has no place for stripping rights, no place for mandating a person suffers through puberty or an unwanted pregnancy that could kill them. If life is about living the best life we can, to be fulfilled and given the room to live the dolce vida no matter how different that may look from person to person. My rights, your rights, your health, our health should only be regulated to prevent quacks, mistreatment, and abuses by medical charlatans.
The fact we label abortion practitioners and trans health care charlatans and purveyors of harm shows just how skewed the conversation has become. A hundred years ago helping sex workers and unmarried women access healthcare was slammed as immoral. 150 years ago arguing for sterile surgery was enough to consign you to the asylum. Yes, medicine has always been political, and the tussle for reproductive and gender medicine rights has be tumultuous, but this only strengthens the argument that we need to strip personal politics out of health care.
Women and trans folk are in the crossfire now because those with political power see us as easy targets to rile their core base up. Trans folk make up 1–2% of most populations, women 51%. All our rights are under attack because the right wing see it as the wedge issue to drive potential allies apart. First they came for abortion rights, then they came for the trans healthcare, and they will come for social care, elder medicine, and whatever next will win them votes. Get personal politics out of healthcare, and make regulators politically neutral basing their decisions on scientific evidence.
