Feds investigate hospitals over religious exemptions from gender-affirming care

Source: NPR

July 8, 2025 5:00 AM ET


The Trump administration has launched investigations into health systems in what legal experts say is an effort to allow providers to refuse care for transgender patients on religious or moral grounds.

One of the most recent actions by the Department of Health and Human Services, launched in mid-June, targets the University of Michigan Health system over a former employee's claims that she was fired for requesting a religious exemption from providing gender-affirming care.

An administration release announcing the probe says the Michigan case is the third investigation in "a larger effort to strengthen enforcement of laws protecting conscience and religious exercise" for medical providers, citing federal laws known as the Church Amendments.

The probes are the first time HHS is applying those amendments in a way that would "allow providers to refuse gender-affirming care or to misgender patients," said Elizabeth Sepper, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law who studies conscience laws. Those laws, Sepper said, primarily allow objections to performing abortions or sterilizations but "don't apply to gender-affirming care, by their very own text."

Read more: https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/07/08/nx-s1-5449163/hhs-investigate-michigan-hospital-religious-exemptions-gender-affirming-care-church-amendments