Healthcare is always political. Get used to it.

Political groups yell it at their opponents all the time. They said it about COVID, they say it about abortion, and now they’re saying it about the Texas government’s attitude towards puberty blockers for kids: “Stop politicizing healthcare!”

What “politicizing” means varies wildly. Generally, progressives wanted the state to have more control over people’s COVID related decisions. Many of these same people want the state to be less involved in women’s choice to abort and parents’ decisions about whether to put their kids on puberty blockers.

Conservatives are equally inconsistent. A fair share of right-leaning people viewed the government’s involvement in people’s COVID decisions as medical tyranny. However, this same crowd tends to support the criminalization of abortion and doctors’ prescription of puberty blockers to kids.

So, sometimes the alleged politicizers want more state control, sometimes less. “Stop politicizing healthcare!” boils down to “Stop disagreeing with me about how much control the state should have over this specific bodily procedure.”

I use “bodily procedure” and not “medical procedure” or “healthcare decision” because people disagree about how things should be framed. It doesn’t help that “healthcare” has a personal and an institutional sense that are frequently equivocated. Framing disputes aren’t simple semantic quibbles; they are deep moral disagreements that have downstream effects on the healthcare politicization discourse.

You may think that abortion isn’t healthcare in the personal sense because you believe it is murder. You want it to be discussed as a personal moral action and not a personal healthcare decision. However, it’s undeniable that abortion procedures, which are administered by doctors and nurses, qualify as healthcare in the institutional sense.

Our morality shapes our views about what should and should not be considered healthcare in the personal sense and, by extension, the institutional sense. We judge whether a bodily procedure is moral or amoral before we even get close to deciding how the government should handle it.

Is it morally right or wrong to take an antiacid for indigestion? That probably seems like a strange question because you don’t think the act of taking an antiacid is a moral one. We tend to judge healthcare decisions by how well they work, not by how morally good or bad they are.

When something is moral (versus amoral), and especially when it is moral and wrong, we tend to oppose its characterization as medical. We don’t think it should be framed as a personal healthcare decision at all. Consequently, we oppose its institutionalization in the healthcare field.

Here’s an example to drive this home. Some people (not me) think that pedophiles are born cursed with a powerful sexual attraction to childlikeness. If sexual attraction is genetically determined, and pedophilia is a torturous sexual attraction, should the government allow mental health professionals to provide suffering pedophiles with cartoon child pornography to satisfy their sexual urges and reduce the risk that they violate real children? What if I told you a Scandinavian country has authorized the institutionalization of this procedure?

If you believe the personal act of watching cartoon child pornography is always moral (versus amoral) regardless of the context, and you think it’s always morally wrong, then you deny that it can ever qualify as personal healthcare. Since you believe it can’t be personal healthcare, you oppose institutionalizing medical health professionals’ prescription of such content. You probably want the Scandinavian government to de-institutionalize the procedure by criminalizing it.

However, if you believe the personal act of watching cartoon child pornography is amoral and medical in a therapeutic context, then you are open to framing it as personal healthcare. As a result, you are probably okay with the procedure’s institutionalization in the Scandinavian country’s healthcare field. (For the record, I have no idea if any country authorizes this.)

Healthcare is always political because what people believe should be considered healthcare in the first place is always influenced by their morality. People pass a bodily procedure through their moral-amoral filter before deciding whether or not it can count as healthcare in the personal sense. If it doesn’t count, then they believe it is wrong to institutionalize it in the healthcare field.

Accusing people who disagree with you about issues like abortion, COVID, or kids’ access to puberty blockers of “politicization” is hypocritical and pointless. Your take is no less political than theirs. The real debate is not about politicization, but morality.

Get used to it.

*****

PS:

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