The Washington Free Beacon is proud to co-publish this piece with our
friends at Common Sense, where it also appears today.

Thousands of pediatricians convened in Anaheim, Calif., in early October
for the American Academy of Pediatrics�s (AAP) annual conference. The
group, which boasts 67,000 members in the United States and around the
world describes itself as "dedicated to the health of all children."

So some audience members were shocked when Dr. Morissa Ladinsky, an
associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Alabama at
Birmingham, lauded a transgender teenager for committing suicide.

In an address about "standing up for gender-affirming care," Ladinsky
eulogized Leelah Alcorn, an Ohio 17-year-old who, in Ladinsky�s words,
"stepped boldly in front of a tractor trailer, ending her life," in 2014,
after leaving a suicide note that "went viral, literally around the
world."

Ladinsky�s remarks were captured on video by a horrified onlooker, Oregon
pediatrician Dr. Julia Mason, who expressed outrage on Twitter that
Ladinsky was "glorifying suicide," an act she described as "unprofessional
and dangerous."

That isn�t just Mason�s opinion. Technically speaking, it is also the
official stance of the AAP, whose website for parents,
healthychildren.org, explicitly warns that "glorifying suicide" can have a
"�contagious� effect" and inspire others to take their own lives.

Reached for comment, Ladinsky expressed "regret" about her choice of words
and said it was "never my intent" to glorify self-harm.

But how did this esteemed doctor wind up telling a group of physicians
that a teen had, as she put it, "boldly ended her life?"

In any large organization, some members are bound to hold fringe views.
But Ladinsky, who has devoted her career in part to facilitating the
gender transition of teenagers including by challenging state laws that
restrict the kinds of treatment physicians can provide to them, is hardly
an outlier at the AAP. And the AAP is an organization that matters a great
deal.

Founded in 1930 as an offshoot of the American Medical Association, the
AAP is first and foremost a standard-setting body. It outlines best
practices for the nation�s pediatricians, advises policy-makers on public
health issues, and, for many parents, is the premier authority on raising
healthy kids.

In recent years, it has also become a participant in America�s culture
wars. Judges have deferred to the group�s expertise in high-stakes court
cases about children with gender dysphoria, who the AAP says can start
socially transitioning at "any" age. During the height of Covid, schools
masked toddlers�including toddlers with speech delays�based on the
guidance of the AAP. Sports leagues and after-school programs mandated the
Covid vaccine after the AAP strongly recommended it, even as concerns
mounted about its association with myocarditis, or inflammation of the
heart muscle, in young males.

Though the organization�s guidelines are framed as the consensus position
of the AAP�s members, only a handful of physicians had a role in shaping
them. Instead, insiders say, the AAP is deferring to small, like-minded
teams of specialists ensconced in children�s hospitals, research centers,
and public health bureaucracies, rather than seeking the insights of
pediatricians who see a wide cross-section of America�s children.

They also say a longstanding left-wing bias�over two thirds of
pediatricians are registered Democrats�has accelerated, turning the
organization into a more overtly political body that now pronounces on
issues from climate change to immigration. As rates of gender dysphoria
exploded and the Covid-19 pandemic hit, that bias seeped into the
organization�s medical policy recommendations, unchecked by discussion or
debate.

This story is based on dozens of interviews with pediatricians, academics,
and current and former AAP members, including several with leadership
positions in the AAP. It shows how a small group of doctors with virtually
unaccountable power can exert tremendous influence over public policy,
especially when a new crisis�be it moral or virological�gives them an
emergency mandate. A mandate affecting the lives of millions of families.

Covid: �Political Science Over True Science�

In the last week of June 2020, with no end to the pandemic in sight, the
AAP took a strong stance against school closures.

"The importance of in-person learning is well-documented, and there is
already evidence of the negative impacts on children because of school
closures in the spring of 2020," the group said in a statement, which
listed a litany of maladies�learning loss, food insecurity, isolation,
depression, physical and sexual abuse, substance use, suicidal
ideation�that could result from prolonged shutdowns. "[A]ll policy
considerations for the coming school year should start with a goal of
having students physically present in school."

Then, on July 6, then President Donald Trump tweeted: "SCHOOLS MUST OPEN
IN THE FALL!!!"

Over the next week, administration officials from Vice President Mike
Pence to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos cited the AAP in the course of
pressuring local officials to reopen schools.

It didn�t take long for the AAP to buckle. By July 10, the organization
issued a follow-up statement�this one co-authored with the teachers
unions�suggesting that in-person schooling would be impossible without
"substantial new investments" from the federal government. Most European
children, meanwhile, returned to the classroom.

It was a microcosm of the AAP�s handling of the pandemic: From masking
toddlers to boosters for 12-year-olds, the group�s guidelines were
consistently out of sync with those of the rest of the world, but very
much in line with the demands of anti-Trump partisans.

"The AAP cared much more about political science than true science," one
pediatrician said.

When schools began to reopen, at first in red states, the group advised
that every child, including toddlers, should remain masked for the
duration of the day�despite the fact that the AAP had until then stressed
the importance of facial cues for early childhood development�even as most
other Western countries opted against masking young kids.

The organization didn�t just recommend masks; it lobbied politicians to
require them.

In an August 2021 email obtained by Common Sense and the Washington Free
Beacon, the Colorado chapter of the AAP, acting on the policy
recommendations adopted by the national organization, urged members to
contact the state�s governor expressing support for a mask mandate in
Colorado public schools. Three months later, the Iowa chapter submitted an
amicus brief challenging a state law that prohibited school mask mandates.

These moves prompted outrage from many rank-and-file pediatricians,
several of whom contacted AAP leaders with concerns about the group�s
Covid recommendations, emails obtained by Common Sense and the Free Beacon
show. Masks "really hinder speech and socialization for the child
care/preschool set," one pediatrician, who requested anonymity, wrote to
Lee Beers, the then-president of the AAP, in April 2021, noting that for
these reasons the World Health Organization advises against masking
children under six.

Beers forwarded the email to Heather Fitzpatrick, a member of the AAP�s
Covid-19 response team, who thanked the concerned pediatrician for sharing
the perspective but did not follow up on the substance. Other doctors
reported similar stonewalling.

As recently as August 2022, the AAP tweeted that "there is no evidence"
that masks can harm childhood language development.

But prior to the pandemic, the AAP itself had argued that seeing faces is
critical for early childhood development.

According to Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, a book published by
the AAP in 2018, visually impaired children "are slower to acquire
adjectives and verbs" than their sighted peers, and, at younger ages, are
less likely to smile because "smiling is learned by seeing others
smile"�findings that raise obvious concerns about masks in schools. In the
August 2022 tweet, however, the AAP asserted that "visually impaired
children develop speech and language at the same rate as their peers."

Another AAP publication, this one geared toward parents and available at
least since 2013, emphasized the link between "face time" and "emotional
health"�only for the document to disappear from the AAP�s website during
the pandemic. An AAP spokesperson attributed the disappearance to a "web
content migration" and said it had "nothing to do with AAP�s mask
guidance," telling Reuters that the document would be republished on a new
platform.

It never was: When Common Sense and the Free Beacon asked to be directed
to the document�s new home, a spokesperson for the AAP said it "was
removed because it was outdated."