At first blush, the right's new war on children's hospitals is most reminiscent of the tactics that have been used to harass abortion providers for decades. As Taylor Lorenz, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Peter Jamison reported over the weekend for the Washington Post, "Children's hospitals across the U.S. are facing growing threats of violence" from crazed right-wingers, like fans of the virulently queerphobic Twitter account Libs of TikTok, run by a woman named Chaya Raichik. Raichik keeps pointing her unhinged audience at various pediatric care facilities, resulting in "a flood of online harassment and phoned-in threats" at doctors and hospital staff.
Abortion providers and their allies will immediately see the connection to the throngs of anti-choice militants that gather around family planning clinics to bully patients. Like anti-choice activists, the people attacking children's hospitals are inserting themselves into the very personal decisions of total strangers. With anti-choicers, they're asserting that their religious beliefs about a woman's duty to breed trumps the right of bodily autonomy of patients. With those attacking children's hospitals, right-wingers are all wound up because they heard trans children are getting treatment, and they believe their opposition to trans identities should trump the child's right to gender-affirming care.
