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New Pediatricians Group Blasts AAP Endorsement of ‘Gay’ Parenting 6/4/2003 New group calls on Pediatrics Academy to consider the well-being of children
The American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) has called on a related association, the influential American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), to withdraw its policy statement that supports homosexual parenting.
ACPeds President Joseph Zanga, M.D., of Eastern Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, says the AAP's February 2002 policy statement on "Coparent or Second-Parent Adoption by Same-Sex Parents" was released over the objections of one-third of the members of the task force that drafted it.
Zanga told Culture & Family Report that the AAP proclamation was based on politics and bad science.
"The [AAP] statement didn't consider the role and responsibility of the other natural parent and didn't consider the wishes and feelings of extended family members," Dr. Zanga said.
The controversial AAP statement calls upon states to grant legal-parent status to same-sex partners and to "assur[e] legal status equivalent to marriage for gay and lesbian partners."
When some pediatricians opposed the statement, Dr. Zanga said the Academy commissioned a deeply flawed technical report derived from a seven-year-old paper that he described as "at best …weak science."
This move was the last straw. He and a group of pediatricians formed the ACPeds, which he described as a complementary organization, to counter the other group's politically correct positions.
"We are a group of pediatricians concerned that society is not paying attention as much as it should to the optimal health and well-being of children …," he said. "When there are conflicts between the wishes of adults and the needs of children, the decisions too often come down on the wishes of adults."
The ACPeds points to the Carnegie Report of the early 1990s, which states that children in other than male/female married families faced increased risks.
One goal of the American College of Pediatricians, based in Tennessee, is to support the traditional family. It has also endorsed the Centers for Disease Control's recommendation to incorporate HIV testing into standard prenatal care, pointing out that in 2001 an estimated 175 newborns contracted HIV from their mothers.
"This is a needless expansion of tragedy," reads the group's website.
The ACPeds plans to sponsor research as it grows, and to provide opinion pieces and scientific information to physicians and other medical professionals, to the media, and to state and national political leaders.
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