New Hampshire § 332-M-1 - Section 332-M:1 Purpose.

§ 332-M-1. Section 332-M:1 Purpose.

I. The legislature finds that the following facts and circumstances exist, which make the enactment of this statute necessary for the protection of minors and the furtherance of the public interest: (a) Physicians have an ethical and legal duty to obtain patients' informed consent before ordering testing and treatment. (b) Older children and adolescents should be asked to provide their assent for treatment in addition to their parents' permission. (c) A patient's informed consent requires adequate information, capacity to decide, and absence of coercion. (d) Best practices urge shared decision making between parent(s) and child and, in general, preferring alternatives that will not foreclose important future choices by the adolescent and the adult the patient will become. (e) Multivariate analyses of published studies between 2015 and 2022 showed no decrease in suicidality after gender affirming surgery, with some studies showing a significant increase in psychiatric hospitalizations and suicide after surgical transition. (f) There is a lack of high quality clinical trials which provide data on outcomes for adolescent genital gender reassignment surgeries or young adult genital gender reassignment surgeries, particularly after pubertal suppression and cross sex hormones. II. Adolescent genital gender reassignment surgery generally lacks both adequate information for informed consent and involves a high risk of coercion for parental consent when parents believe that they are faced with a choice between their child committing suicide or consenting to their child's genital gender reassignment surgeries. III. In the absence of high quality data to prove safety and efficacy, including long term outcomes, only people over the age of majority should receive genital gender reassignment surgery in the state of New Hampshire.