JEFFERSON CITY, Missouri (LifeSiteNews) — On Thursday, Missouri courts ordered Planned Parenthood’s St. Louis affiliate to hand over documents pertaining to its subjection of minors to “gender transition” procedures.
The Missouri Circuit Court for the 22nd Judicial Circuit ruled that, while the attorney general’s office was not entitled to “federally protected documents under the Health Insurance Portability Accountability Act” (HIPAA), it agreed that it had “broad investigative powers” and therefore Planned Parenthood St. Louis had to produce “any and all documents not protected by HIPAA.”
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey announced on Thursday that his office “will get to the bottom of how this clandestine network of clinics has subjected children to puberty blockers and irreversible surgery, often without parental consent. There is no more important fight than to ensure Missouri is the safest state in the nation for children. No stone will be left unturned in these investigations.”
READ: Planned Parenthood paying teens to participate in radical ‘Sex Ed Summer Camp’
The press release added that Bailey “is now 3/3” in lawsuits to force facilities involved in “transitioning” minors to comply with the state’s investigations.
While Planned Parenthood is best known as the nation’s largest abortion chain, the case highlights that it is also deeply involved in the LGBT movement. It advertises itself as a “safe and welcoming place to get transgender/nonbinary hormone therapy [sic],” including estrogen, anti-androgen, testosterone, and puberty blockers. Its expansion into the “transitioning” industry has risen substantially since 2021.
Last year, it was reported that a Planned Parenthood location in New Jersey provided estrogen to an autistic teenager after less than a half-hour of consultation, without his parents’ knowledge or consent.
A significant body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them. Studies find that more than 80% of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, whereas reinforcing dysphoria often fails to resolve, and may even exacerbate, mental strife by perpetuating delusion and neglecting the actual root causes.
READ: Republican states are cracking down on America’s horrific transgender mutilation crisis
Yet such “services” are highly lucrative, as illustrated by a 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money” – as much as $40,000 per patient for “chest reconstruction” and more than $20,000 for vaginoplasty.
Bailey has long been fighting the underage “transition” industry. Last year, he sued Southampton Community Healthcare, one of the state’s last remaining health centers, for continuing to “transition” minors in violation of the state’s Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act.