A6761/S8352 cuts to a core goal of the medical services and products industry: it completely eliminates parents’ right to know what is being done to our children. Children of any age could be given drugs (including psychiatric drugs), vaccines, dental procedures, hospitalization, and surgery without parental knowledge or consent, and allows Medicaid funds to pay for anything that is done to the child. This is simply the worst children’s health bill ever.

TAKE ACTION

Please use the panel to the right to send a message to your Assemblymember and State Senator expressing your opposition to A6761/S8352.

Please call your Assemblymember and State Senator and politely let the staffer know you want your Assemblymember to oppose this radically dangerous bill. His or her name and telephone number should appear below. 

Info

Or look them up here:

https://nyassembly.gov/mem/search/

https://www.nysenate.gov/find-my-senator

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Get on the Phone

The following legislators, including, unfortunately, Assembly Health Committee Chair Amy Paulin, have co-sponsored A6761. Please call them and politely ask that they reconsider their support. 

Senator Rachel May, (518) 455-2838, (315) 478-8745 

Karines Reyes, Sponsor, (718) 931-2620, (518) 455-5102

Amy Paulin, Chair of the Assembly Health Committee, (914) 723-1115, (518) 455-4292

Linda Rosenthal, (212) 873-6368, (518) 455-5802

Andrew Hevesi, (718) 263-5595, (518) 455-4296

Several more Assemblymembers have sponsored the bill in the past few weeks:

Jeffrey Dinowitz, (518) 455-5965,  (718) 796-5345

Chris Burdick, (518) 455-5397, (914) 244-4450 

Harvey Epstein, (518) 455-4406, (212) 979-9696

The Official Description of A6761/S8352 is misleading

The official description of the bill, which is frequently all a legislator ever reads, says it, “allows homeless youth to give effective consent to certain medical, dental, health, and hospital services, provides for insurance coverage of such health care services consented to by such youth.“ This description leaves out that A6761/S8352 will cover ALL children not just homeless and runaway youth. New York law already allows physicians to treat runaway youth if the child’s health is in danger and a parent cannot be reached, New York Public Health Law, Paragraph 4.  In 2022, a law was passed that allows homeless and runaway youth to get medical care without parental knowledge or consent. 

A6761/S8352 Destroys parents’ right to make medical decisions for their minor children

A6761/S8352 is about allowing any medical procedure, including trans surgery, for ALL children, not just runaways and homeless minors, without parental consent, and getting the taxpayer to foot the bill. It gets all parents out of the way of a ravenous and rapacious medical industry.

The key language in the bill says, “Any person, including a minor, who comprehends the need for, the nature of and the reasonably foreseeable risks and benefits involved in any contemplated medical, dental, health and/or hospital services and any alternatives thereto, may give effective consent to such services for themselves, and the consent of no other person shall be necessary. The commissioner is authorized to promulgate rules and regulations necessary to effectuate the provisions of this subdivision.” 

Asm. Reyes acknowledges in the Memo she wrote for the bill saying it would allow “A minor who comprehends the need for, the nature of, and the reasonably foreseeable risks involved in a health services, as well as alternatives, may consent to the service on their own.” 

Similarly, the New York Civil Liberties Union in a statement supporting A6761/S8352, “A.6761 (Reyes) would fill the gaps in New York law by allowing decisionally-capable young people to consent to their own health care. The NYCLU strongly supports A.6761 and urges its immediate passage.” And, “In many cases, and in particular for sensitive care, young people will not seek health care if they are required to involve a parent or their confidentiality is compromised.”

If A6761 passes any time a child is at a school health clinic, a health fair, or any other place where they could interact with the medical services and procedures industry, things could be done to children that parents will never know about. 

Legislators need to consider these issues:

• How can the legislators agree that completely removing parental involvement in a child’s healthcare can possibly be a good thing?
• There is NO minimum age.  
• This bill is based on the presumption that parents are not to be trusted with their children’s healthcare and that the child knows better. 
• The decision of whether a child “comprehends the need for, the nature of and the reasonably foreseeable risks and benefits” of a medical procedure is left solely to the discretion of people who could have direct financial or professional interest in performing the procedure. 
• What happens if there are side effects or other adverse reactions, and the parent has no idea what has been done to their children? Parents will still be legally responsible for the care of the child, but they and medical professionals will not have the information necessary to provide potentially life-saving care.
• Do children know enough about their own personal and familial medical history to make life-altering medical decisions? 
• Nothing in the bill prevents children from “consenting” to participating in medical experiments.
• New York, like all states, already has a process for minors who no longer want to be under their parents’ direction. Any minor can apply for emancipation from their parents. This bill in effect partially emancipates all children without due process.
• There are no protections for developmentally disabled minors, especially those who are not visibly disabled.
• New York has a long and sordid history of targeting children in institutions and foster care for medical experiments. Nothing in A6761/S8532 prevents minors from being recruited for experimental procedures.

The minimum age for everything is being raised, but lowered for medical procedures and drugs

For more than a decade, New York legislators have been steadily raising the minimum age for minors to do everything from using tanning salons to buying tobacco to getting married.  Yet in the world view expressed in A6761, a 12-year-old is not mature enough to go to a tanning salon but he or she is old enough to decide to remove healthy organs. 

These are just some of the ways New York has raised minimum ages for minors:

2012, Age for using a tanning salon raised to 16.

2012, Minimum age for piercings and tattoos without parental consent set at 18

2016,  Age for tanning raised to 18

2017, Age of marriage raised from 14 to 17 with parental and judicial consent

2019, Minimum age a person can be prosecuted as an adult raised to 18

2019, Minimum age to buy tobacco and e-cigarettes raised from 18 to 21

2020, Legal age of marriage raised to 18

2021, Age to buy a semi-automatic rifle raised from 18 to 21

2022, Age to buy nitrous oxide cylinders raised to 21

2023, Juvenile delinquency prosecution of any child under 12 banned

2024, Minimum age to drive an All-Terrrain Vehicle (ATV) raised from 10 to 14.

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