My daughter’s life was saved by care that lawmakers want to ban

Seventeen years ago, my wife and I joyfully stood in front of our congregation, before our families and before God, and vowed to love, nurture and protect our newborn baby.

In the ensuing years, we have done just that. We have devoted ourselves and our energies to being the best, most supportive and loving parents we can be; and we believe with God’s help, we have been largely successful.

When our teen daughter became suicidal, we faced every parent’s worst nightmare. No parent wants to see their child hurt, or suffering. In our child’s case, she was suffering from severe gender dysphoria.

As health care professionals (I am a physical therapist, my wife is a family physician), we made sure that our daughter had all of the counseling and professional help she needed. After a couple of years of therapy, our daughter’s providers recommended medical treatment for her situation. Because of our respect for standard practices of medical care and our faith, we facilitated this treatment and watched our daughter blossom into the amazing, happy, well-adjusted and successful teenager she is today.

Without the medical care she received, our daughter would not be alive today.

Now, legislators across the country believe that they and the state know better than my wife and I do when it comes to raising our daughter. They believe that our parental autonomy and our religious faith are secondary to their poor understanding of and lack of compassion for our family and families like ours. In some instances, including in my home state of Idaho, they believe my wife and I deserve to spend 10 years in prison for providing life-saving, standard medical care to our daughter.

Let me be very clear: The care we have provided our daughter is standard practice endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association.

They are inserting the power of government into the most personal relationships and deepest freedoms we all hold dear. They are trying to tell me and my wife how to raise our children and threatening to imprison us and our daughter’s health care providers for performing standard medical care — in our case, life-saving care — for our child. This is not the “freedom” and “parental rights” that Republicans claim to champion. This is textbook big-government overreach and a violation of basic parental autonomy and religious freedom.

Lest you think your parental rights and religious freedom are safe from government overreach, know this: We used to believe that, too.