Leading Doctor Drugs Babies in the Womb to Prevent Lesbianism and Her Concept of 'Abnormal' Genitalia

The doctor wants to keep girls from having "wrong career preferences".

by Heidi Stevenson

30 June 2010

Dr. Maria New is a highly honored endocrinologist, within her field considered one of the very best. She routinely treats fetuses in the womb with a potent and dangerous drug, dexamethasone, to prevent so-called ambiguous genitalia in girls. The presumed ambiguity is a larger-than-normal clitoris. That is, she gives both mother and unborn child a drug known to carry severe risks for the purpose of preventing a condition that she considers abnormal, though it doesn't cause any defect in function or discomfort.

These children do suffer from a serious congenital condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), which causes lifelong problems that can include a variety of disorders, including heart arrhythmia, dehydration, vomiting, and electrolyte imbalances. However, Dr. New's treatment does not affect any of these serious problems, nor does it affect the typical life-long requirement for drug treatment to survive.

Also worrisome is that, in an article published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, New and her colleague, Saroj Nimkarn, wrote:

Gender-related behaviors, namely childhood play, peer association, career and leisure time preferences in adolescence and adulthood, maternalism, aggression, and sexual orientation become masculinized in 46,XX girls and women with 21OHD deficiency [CAH]. These abnormalities have been attributed to the effects of excessive prenatal androgen levels on the sexual differentiation of the brain and later on behavior...We anticipate that prenatal dexamethasone therapy will reduce the well-documented behavioral masculinization...

Dr. New is not only trying to prevent a condition that she has deemed to be "masculinization", but she is also presuming to determine acceptable behavior in girls, acceptable career choices for women, and acceptable sexuality for women. Dr. New seems to think that she has the right to force her views of the acceptable role women may play in life before they're even born!

Why doesn't she treat unborn boys with CAH this way? Their genitalia isn't normal. They have enlarged penises and abnormally small testes—and puberty starting at age 2 or 3. Why is it that only girls are considered abnormal?

Dexamethasone Risks

Dexamethasone (dex) has not been approved for this use. It does, in fact, carry label warnings, including the risk of hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis suppression and growth inhibition in children, has potential averse effects in nursing mothers, may be associated with cleft palates, and increases the risks of diabetes and osteoporosis in the elderly. Adverse effects are known to be massive, attacking all parts of the body.

Dex has been shown to cause birth defects in animals. Of course, those who support its prenatal use on girls state that it's never been shown to be the case in humans. That, of course, is the typical claim of modern medicine when it wants to use a treatment with potential risks—but the exact opposite is claimed when a presumably positive effect is shown in a trial on animals. The potential treatment is hailed as a breakthrough and ballyhooed in the news media. This twisting of priorities, of accepting positive results in animal studies, while ignoring negative ones, is one of the most egregious of modern medicine's approach to treatments.

Yet Maria New believes that she has the right to play god with these children. There has never been a trial for this treatment, and she routinely gives dex. She claims that there have been no adverse effects—but with only her word for it and a long list of known severe adverse effects, why should we believe her?

It's even worse than this, though. Seven out of eight babies Dr. New treats are not girls with the CAH disorder! Because the treatment must be started before tests can determine if the fetus is a girl with CAH, another seven are also subjected to dex until sex and CAH-status can be determined. (The one in eight who are girls with CAH continue to receive dex throughout gestation.)

Dr. Maria New's Laurels

Maria New is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, Past President of the Endocrine Society, considered to be one of the nation's leading pediatric endocrinologists, received the Endocrine Society's highest award in 2003, the Fred Conrad Koch Award, for "pioneering research in the area of congenital adrenal hyperplasia", and now is Professor of Pediatrics at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine.

Though many doctors disapprove of Maria New's methods, most of their complaints are not that she's doing it, but that she's doing it without the cover of a clinical trial. That is, they seem to believe that this sort of human experimentation to change the sexuality of a child before birth is okay as long as it's performed through a particular methodology—but they aren't looking at the inherent ethics or morality of the issue.

There are, of course, exceptions, but the fact that the medical world has not stopped New from performing her treatments speaks loudly. That she is able to report on it in medical journals, making statements that clarify her bias as if they were scientific facts, screams out that her actions are accepted by the vast majority in her profession.

One Little Girl Treated by Maria New

Jenny Westphal of Wisconsin took dex during pregnancy. She wasn't given information about the risks. Her little girl was born with CAH. However, she has had serious problems since birth, including feeding disorders—problems that are unrelated to CAH. Jenny started researching the drug online and discovered that there's controversy about dex. She said, "I was outraged, frustrated and confused. Confused, because no one had ever warned me about this. I wasn't given the chance to decide for myself, based on the risks and benefits, if I wanted the treatment or not."

Are Jenny Westphal's daughter's troubles caused by dex? No one can know for sure, but the list of side effects include gastric hypersecretory conditions, increased appetite, nervousness, diabetes, gastrointestinal hemorrhage, abdominal swelling, allergic reactions, acute pancreatitis, and esophageal ulcer—all conditions that could easily explain a feeding disorder in a small child.

Whatever Happened to Doing No Harm?

Hippocrates' Oath, to first do no harm, seems to have no meaning for modern medicine. While it can do wonderful things, such as returning sight to those afflicted with cataracts and perform amazing feats in care of severely injured people, modern medicine has lost sight of its legitimate purpose: to ease suffering. Instead, far too many doctors see non-medical insiders as little more than guinea pigs. There is one set of rules for them and another for the rest of humanity.

As for Maria New, her hubris and hypocrisy are on clear display. She presumes to determine what is proper genitalia in a girl, what is the proper play in a girl, what is the proper sexuality in a girl, and even what a woman's proper career choices are. It seem to me that there is one woman who has improperly gone into a traditionally male field, medicine—and that is Maria New. She's now using that career to play god with the lives of unborn girls.

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