“They must employ all appropriate resources to mitigate the suffering of those who struggle with gender incongruence, but the means used must respect the fundamental order of the human body. Only by using morally appropriate means do health care providers show full respect for the dignity of each human person.”
The March 20 statement, titled “Doctrinal Note on the Moral Limits to Technological Manipulation of the Human Body,” is intended, the bishops say, to provide moral criteria for Catholic health care institutions for discerning which medical interventions promote the authentic good of the human person and which are injurious. The bishops said they developed the statement in consultation with medical ethicists, physicians, psychologists, and moral theologians.
The bishops note that modern technology offers chemical, surgical, and genetic interventions for the functioning of the human body as well as for modifying its appearance. There are two scenarios, they said, whereby “technological interventions” can be morally justified: when they are aimed at repairing a defect in the body or sacrificing a part of the body for the sake of the whole, such as with amputation. These kinds of interventions “respect the fundamental order and finality inherent in the human person.”
However, gender transition surgeries “regards this order as unsatisfactory in some way and proposes a more desirable order, a redesigned order,” and thus are not morally permissible.
“These technological interventions are not morally justified either as attempts to repair a defect in the body or as attempts to sacrifice a part of the body for the sake of the whole,” the bishops asserted.
The bishops said one of the reasons for this moral calculus is that the “transitioning” person’s organs, which undergo mutilation and reconstruction during the gender transition process, are not disordered but are healthy. Moreover, “when a part of the body is legitimately sacrificed for the sake of the whole body, whether by the entire removal or substantial reconfiguration of a bodily organ, the removal or reconfiguring of the bodily organ is reluctantly tolerated as the only way to address a serious threat to the body. Here, by contrast, the removal or reconfiguring is itself the desired result.”
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