SALEM, Ore. — The back half of Oregon's 2023 legislative session was disrupted by a six-week walkout led by Senate Republicans, primarily aiming to block the passage the Democrat-backed House Bill 2002. The bill was intended to safeguard access to abortion and gender-affirming care in Oregon, prompted by the passage of anti-trans laws in other states and the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Republicans eventually relented and returned to the capitol after Democrats agreed to make changes to the bill, adding additional requirements in cases where children under 15 seek abortions. The amended version passed, but with multiple versions floating around and two different big topics tackled by the bill, there appear to be some questions about what the final version of the bill actually does.
Viewer B Holmboe emailed asking us to VERIFY the following claim:
Washington and Oregon passed legislation to give children 13 and up the right to see a doctor without parent consent regarding transgender treatment.
THE QUESTION
Did House Bill 2002 or any other recent Oregon legislation give children age 13 and up the right to receive gender-affirming care without parental consent?
THE SOURCES
THE ANSWER
No, House Bill 2002 did not give children age 13 and up the right to gender-affirming care without parental consent.
Longstanding Oregon law gives children age 15 and up the right to make their own decisions about a range of medical treatments, including gender-affirming care, but parental consent is required for children under 15. Those rules have not been changed by HB 2002 or any other recent legislation.
WHAT WE FOUND
The likely reason for the confusion is that House Bill 2002 does update the rules for children under the age of 15 who are seeking abortions in Oregon, making it possible for them to obtain abortions without their parents being notified under certain circumstances. But the bill does not make the same change for gender-affirming care.
Existing Oregon law allows children age 15 and up to consent to a range of medical and dental procedures on their own, without parental permission. That's not a recent development — the provision dates all the way back to 1971. It's also not that unusual — several states have laws giving minors control over their general medical care after a certain age, although the cutoff ages vary between states, and some states specify that the cutoff only applies for homeless or emancipated minors. Most states also have lower cutoff ages, or none at all, for STD diagnosis and treatment.
Oregon law also allows access to reproductive health care in general at any age, although the law was previously somewhat ambiguous about whether parental consent was required specifically for abortions in children under 15, leading to inconsistent answers from legal and medical experts.
One of the goals of HB 2002 was to clarify that issue, and the original version of the bill would have allowed a child of any age to consent to an abortion without parental permission. The revised version that ultimately passed allows children under 15 to receive abortions without parental notification only if their health care provider has reason to believe that involving the parents would be harmful to the child, such as if the parents are abusive or neglectful.
However, no version of HB 2002 made any changes to the age 15 cutoff for gender-affirming care. The bill makes no reference to patient ages in the sections about gender-affirming care, meaning those treatments still fall under Oregon's general rules that require parental consent for medical treatment up until age 15 and then allow teens to make their own decisions after that.
HB 2002's language about gender-affirming care is mainly focused on codifying requirements for insurance companies to cover a specific list of gender-affirming treatments if a health care provider finds them to be medically necessary for a patient. State regulators have previously directed insurance companies to cover those procedures, but the rule wasn't written into state law.
The bill also specifies that "reproductive health care" does not include voluntary sterilization of people under 15. In other words, although Oregon law allows children under 15 to access reproductive health care without parental consent, including abortion in some cases, it does not allow children under 15 to undergo sterilization procedures without parental consent.
What did Washington do?
The question asked about Washington as well as Oregon, but in Washington's case there have been multiple recent pieces of legislation that sparked discussion about parental involvement and teen access to gender-affirming care. The most recent legislation was Senate Bill 5599, which is aimed at protecting runaway youth who are seeking reproductive or gender-affirming health care.
Previous Washington law required licensed shelters for runaway teens to notify parents within three days of a child's arrival unless there was a "compelling reason" not to, such as abusive or neglectful parents, in which case they could instead notify the state's Department of Children, Youth and Families. SB 5599 expanded the "compelling reason" list to include cases where the runaway minor is seeking reproductive or gender-affirming care.
Some people online incorrectly claimed that the bill would allow the state to take minors seeking gender-affirming care away from their parents, prompting fact-checking pieces and stories from various outlets debunking the claims.
The other prominent piece of recent legislation was Senate Bill 5313 in 2021, which was a similar measure to Oregon's HB 2002, requiring insurers to cover gender-affirming treatment. According to Crosscut, there was debate in the legislature about whether to restrict insurers from covering procedures for people under 18, but the bill ultimately passed without any such language added.
Washington law does not list an age at which minors can give sole consent to general medical treatment; it only mentions more specific cases such as allowing minors age 13 and up to make their own decisions about mental health and substance use disorder treatment. This generally means that unemancipated minors must have a parent's consent for most medical procedures until they turn 18, according to a summary chart from the University of Washington.
However, the state also has an established Mature Minor doctrine, which allows health care providers to treat minors as adults for the purposes of making their own health care decisions if the minor demonstrates sufficiently mature judgment and decision-making capacity. For example, a Washington Department of Health flyer noted that minors could give their own consent to receive COVID-19 vaccines if the provider determined that they were a mature minor.
Gender-affirming treatments for teens generally start with puberty blockers and hormone treatments, although surgery is also an option. As reported by multiple media outlets including the Associated Press and The Washington Post, current medical guidelines do not recommend genital surgery before age 18. A 2021 article from the Washington Academy of Family Physicians also mentions that doctors and providers are "cautious about offering this option to minors" because it's riskier and more irreversible, and to avoid the need for repeat surgeries as a patient's body continues to grow through their teen years.
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