A Brief History of "Informed Consent"
designed to protect, used to abuse
The concept of informed consent, which involves making patients aware of the risks of certain medications and procedures, is used as a rationalization for providing adolescents with puberty-suppressing drugs and irreversible surgeries, including double mastectomies, in the name of gender ideology.
Yet the legal precedents that established the principle in the United States were a result of lawsuits filed by women against male surgeons who unnecessarily removed or damaged healthy parts of their bodies, including a hysterectomy that was performed on a woman for an unrelated condition.
Internationally, the concept developed in response to horrific Nazi human experimentation — and the surgeon who developed the first transsexual vaginoplasty would later go on to work for the Nazis.
In a terrifying reversal, young women and girls are signing informed consent documents in gender clinics across the United States in order to have their healthy breasts surgically removed or to be placed on testosterone — in which case a hysterectomy is often recommended in order to prevent cancer of the uterus.
According to Alix Aharon of Gender Mapper, “Planned Parenthood is the Number 1 Dispenser of wrong sex hormones to young women, with over 300 self declared "informed consent" clinics throughout the United States. The age at which one can give informed consent without the approval of a parent varies from 13 to 18, depending on what state you are in.”
In a 2020 Journal of Sexual Medicine paper, researchers explained the informed consent model as follows:
“The informed consent model of [gender-affirming hormone therapy] prescription emerged in the early 2000s with the intention of depathologizing gender diversity and reducing barriers to medical care for [transgender (including gender diverse and non-binary)] individuals. Its hallmark is a shift from the requirement for formal psychiatric approval before accessing [gender-affirming hormone therapy] to a shared decision-making process between the patient and their treating clinician.”
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) cites “informed consent” in their 2012 Standards of Care, Version 7, saying:
“A number of community health centers in the United States have developed protocols for providing hormone therapy based on an approach that has become known as the Informed Consent Model. These protocols are consistent with the guidelines presented in the WPATH Standards of Care, Version 7. In order for adolescents to receive puberty suppressing hormones… the adolescent [must give] informed consent.”
A checklist created by the Trans Health Project titled, “Top Surgery for a Minor” highlights that it is necessary to provide “a statement about the fact that informed consent has been obtained from the patient,” and refers back to the WPATH document.
Writing for The Wall Street Journal in 2019, journalist and author Abigail Shrier stated: “Planned Parenthood furnishes testosterone to young women on an ‘informed consent’ basis, without requiring any psychological evaluation. Student health plans at 86 colleges cover not only cross-sex hormones but surgery as well.”
The Informed Consent Model has become the main justification for the transgender health experiment on children and adolescents and figured prominently in a 2020 UK ruling in the Bell v. Tavistock case:
“Puberty blocking drugs can in theory be, and have in practice been, prescribed for gender dysphoria through the services provided by the defendant to children as young as 10. It is the practice of the defendant, through GIDS, to require the informed consent of those children and young persons to whom such drugs are prescribed.
The issue at the heart of this claim is whether informed consent in the legal sense can be given by such children and young persons.
There is no age appropriate way to explain to many of these children what losing their fertility or full sexual function may mean to them in later years.”
The informed consent principle in the United States healthcare system was developed in response to four judicial rulings involving male surgeons experimenting on female patients. All of the cases were filed before women had gained the right to vote in the U.S.
In two instances, surgeons removed women’s healthy reproductive organs without their knowledge in order to experimentally treat unrelated conditions — including a hysterectomy that was ostensibly intended to treat epilepsy, a neurological condition.
The legal decisions which established informed consent began in 1905 with the case of Mohr v Williams. Plaintiff Anna Mohr had consented to an operation on her right ear; however, once she had been anesthetized, her physician changed the plan of surgery from the right ear to the left. The surgeon, mid-operation, decided that Mrs. Mohr’s right ear was not as severely affected by disease as he had expected. Mrs. Mohr’s hearing was further impaired by the operation. In addition to her right ear, her hearing was impaired in her left ear, as well. Mrs. Mohr sued the surgeon for assault and battery in changing the course of her operation without consent.
Similarly, in the case of Pratt v Davis, a 1905 Illinois appellate decision, the plaintiff, Mrs. Parmelia J. Davis, filed charges against her surgeon alleging battery after he performed a hysterectomy without her consent. The physician had obtained consent for an earlier operation but admitted to failing to obtain consent for the second procedure and not disclosing the fact that he intended to perform a hysterectomy to treat Mrs Davis’s epileptic seizures. The surgeon, Dr Edwin H. Pratt, acknowledged intentionally misleading the plaintiff as to the purpose of the operation, claiming that because Mrs Davis suffered from epilepsy, she was not competent to give her consent or to deliberate intelligently about her situation. In its decision in favor of Mrs Davis, the appellate court stated,
“…under a free government at least, the citizen's first and greatest right, which underlies all others—the fight to the inviolability of his person, in other words, his right to himself is the subject of universal acquiescence, and this right necessarily forbids a physician or surgeon, however skillful or eminent, who has been asked to examine, diagnose, advise and prescribe (which are at least the necessary first steps in treatment and care) to violate without permission the bodily integrity of his patient.”
The third judicial ruling, Rolater v Strain, extended the findings of the legal decisions in the Mohr and Pratt cases to similar situations in which surgeons performed procedures on a female patient without her permission. In Rolater, the plaintiff sued her surgeon for removing a bone from her foot during an operation that was ostensibly to treat an infection. While the surgeon had obtained consent to perform the procedure to drain the infection, the patient had stated her wish that the surgeon not remove any of her bones during the surgery.
As the surgeon expressly contradicted her stated request, the removal of a bone from the patient’s foot legally constituted a trespass to her person and resulted in the charges of assault and battery. In contrast to the rulings in Mohr and Pratt, the surgeon in the Rolater case had obtained the patient’s permission before the surgical procedure and performed the operation on the proper foot. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court of Oklahoma ruled that the legal principles of the earlier cases were applicable because the surgeon had not performed the procedure in a manner agreed upon between both the physician and the patient.
The fourth and final case of Schloendorff v Society of New York Hospital took place in 1914 and legally established the principle of patient autonomy. Mary Schloendorff, the plaintiff, had explicitly stated her wish not to undergo surgery. Despite this, she was subjected to a hysterectomy to remove a fibroid tumor without her consent.
In the ruling, Judge Benjamin Cardozo wrote,
“Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body; and a surgeon who performs an operation without his patient's consent commits an assault, for which he is liable in damages.”
According to a summary of these foundational legal decisions published by the National Institute of Health (NIH):
“Notably, these landmark cases that established the legal precedent of patient autonomy all had female plaintiffs at a time when women did not have the right to vote in the United States, indelibly intertwining the right of patient autonomy with the right of a woman to consent to procedures on her own body.”
To add insult to injury, the concept of informed consent remained nameless and was not legally binding until 1957 — when a man, Mr. Martin Salgo, filed a lawsuit against a medical university and its chief surgeon for not fully informing him of the risks involved in a procedure on his aorta.
Moreover, the international standard for informed consent began to take shape in direct response to Nazi war crimes and the use of human subjects for medical experimentation detailed in the 1947 Nuremberg trials.
According to A Modern History of Informed Consent and the Role of Key Information: “The Nuremberg Code represents the first direct and documented attempt to regulate the ethical conduct of research experiments with human subjects and is notable for the emphasis it places on voluntary consent.
A section of the ruling entitled ‘Permissible Medical Experiments’ states, ‘…certain basic principles must be observed in order to satisfy moral, ethical and legal concepts’ in human subjects research. The first of these concepts is the voluntary consent of the human subject. In further statements, the court defined the specific context and meaning for this concept:
“This means that the person…should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved, as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that, before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject, there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person, which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment.”
Surgeon Erwin Gohrbandt, a pioneer of the transsexual vaginoplasty, would later go on to work for the Nazis and conducted horrific human experiments involving the forced sterilization of the disabled at Dachau.
Gohrbandt was commissioned by Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexual Research and performed “sex reassignment” surgeries on both Lili Elbe and Dora Richter, two of the men frequently cited as the earliest modern “trans women” to undergo such procedures.
Through gender identity ideology, a legal measure designed to prevent medical abuse is being implemented in exactly the opposite manner it was intended, and is instead wielded to protect the surgeons and pharmaceutical companies who are profiting from the state-sanctioned experimentation that is called “transgender medicine”.
But public awareness is growing.
According to Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans (PITT):
The pathway of puberty blockers and hormones is promoted by hospital gender clinics in cartoon graphics designed to appeal to the younger set. We are told that sterilizing gender nonconforming children with drugs is analogous to cancer treatment, as they will otherwise commit suicide (this is of course untrue). Gender clinicians are now proposing blocking the puberty of “nonbinary” children on an ongoing basis, claiming that their concerns about pubertal changes (which are of course very common and entirely normal emotions) in fact relate to some sort of mystical “gender identity”, and that “remaining in an androgynous, peripubertal state is the only way that their body can truly reflect their non-binary gender identity”.
Genspect reports that legal help is on the way.
In recent weeks, law firms in both the US and the UK have put out a call for claimants wishing to take legal action as a result of harm done to them or their family members by trans drug treatments and surgeries.
Girard Sharp, a national law firm focusing on class action litigation in the realms of unfair and deceptive trade practices, financial fraud, and consumer protection, has commenced an investigation into the use of gonadotropin-releasing hormone analogues (“puberty blockers”) in children. As stated on the firm’s website, the investigation seeks to determine the “adverse effects of puberty blocking medication on transgender minors who have taken the drugs.”
To that end, Girard Sharp has set up an online contact form soliciting information from parents and legal guardians of minors who may have been adversely affected by such brand medications as Lupron, Supprelin, Zoladex, Zytiga, and Eligard.
Absolutely staggering.