A Florida pediatric endocrinologist (a doctor specializing in hormones) has been treating expectant mothers with a controversial steroid called dexamethasone in an attempt to prevent their female children from becoming unduly “masculine” adults by altering the infants’ brain chemistry in the womb. Three ethicists writing in The Hastings Center Report, a bioethics journal, are accusing Dr. Maria New of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Florida International University, and her psychologist colleague Heino F. L. Meyer-Bahlburg of Columbia University, of not only trying to prevent female children from developing same-gender attractions later in life, but also from rejecting “traditional” housekeeping/child-rearing gender roles. In a kind of Phyllis Schlafly moment in 2001, Dr. New (who the ethicists say was one of the first women to enter the field of pediatric endocrinology) seems to suggest that the goal of her treatments is to transform unborn children into future housewives:

“The challenge here is . . . to see what could be done to restore this baby to the normal female appearance which would be compatible with her parents presenting her as a girl, with her eventually becoming somebody’s wife, and having normal sexual development, and becoming a mother. And she has all the machinery for motherhood, and therefore nothing should stop that, if we can repair her surgically and help her psychologically to continue to grow and develop as a girl.”