The Moral Inversion of Care

How Medicine Learned to Harm in the Name of Healing

Re-published with permission from Jason Lionheart.

“A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members.” — Mahatma Gandhi (Often misattributed; provenance uncertain.)

“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” — Nelson Mandela, May 8, 1995, launch of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund

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We live in an era where “care” has been surgically redefined. Acts that once would have triggered universal outrage are now framed as compassion, inclusion, and progress. In the language of depth psychology, this is moral inversion — a collective reprogramming of the moral code, where the natural human impulse to protect the vulnerable is twisted into its opposite.

It is not enough to say this is hypocrisy. Hypocrisy requires an acknowledged standard that is secretly violated. What we are witnessing today is more radical: the deliberate erasure and replacement of the standard itself. The medical profession now routinely labels as “care” acts that sever a child’s bodily integrity, suppress their fertility, or psychologically condition them to distrust their own nature. This is not “care” as humanity has known it for thousands of years — it is the scalpel-rush, driven by policy, profit, and ideology.

When the Healer Becomes the Harm

The Hippocratic Oath, derived from Epidemics I, commands physicians “to do good or to do no harm.” In modern medical ethics, this principle has been diluted to the point of parody. “Harm” has been redefined through the lens of ideological compliance. The harm that matters now is not the severing of healthy organs or the sterilization of children — it is the harm of “non-affirmation,” the harm of refusing to validate a narrative.

We smuggle in two claims: that a child fully grasps their human condition, and that they can know what the “right” body feels like. No one — least of all a child — can know that.

The gender-affirmation model has become the flagship case study in this inversion. A child presenting with distress around their body is given two paths: compliance with an affirmation protocol that funnels them toward hormones and surgery, or social and professional punishment for anyone who suggests alternatives. The full spectrum of psychological, developmental, and family-based interventions — once considered the responsible first step — is erased. This narrowing of options is sold as freedom, a sleight of hand that replaces exploration with predetermined outcomes.

What is presented as “support” is, in reality, a constriction of the child’s possible future. They are told that all of their pain and questions have only one source and only one cure. They are promised liberation through irreversible medical interventions — interventions that will define their body, identity, and psyche for the rest of their life, without the maturity to understand the permanence and impact of the choice.

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Planned Parenthood and the Politics of “Choice”

The same moral inversion can be seen in the language of “family planning.” Planned Parenthood has built its brand on the rhetoric of empowerment, but in practice, its most controversial activities — dismemberment of the unborn, limb from limb, and the subsequent monetization of tissue, fueled by an eager scalpel-rush — are shielded from moral scrutiny through the same rhetorical sleight-of-hand: this is care. The most vulnerable human life is reframed as disposable biological material, a necessary casualty in the pursuit of autonomy.

To speak these facts aloud is to be branded anti-choice, as if one must either endorse the entire apparatus or reject the notion of women’s autonomy altogether. This is the genius — and the violence — of moral inversion: it weaponizes language so that any critique sounds like heresy, any moral objection is pathologized, and any intrinsic, human moral code is overridden.

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The Silence of the Professionals

Within the mental health and medical professions, dissent is policed with increasing aggression and silent disdain. Practitioners who question the “affirmation-only” model risk professional censure, job loss, or public or private shaming. The silencing is not accidental; it is systemic. Institutions have aligned their policies and ethics not with the full body of scientific evidence and in line with morality, but with the ideological imperatives of advocacy groups, political lobbies, and corporate interests.

This alignment is not merely about keeping a unified front; it shields practitioners from confronting their moral shadow, which is precisely how the inversion sustains itself. Once the profession admits that some forms of “care” cause irreversible harm, the entire inverted edifice begins to crack. The fear is not only of lawsuits or public outrage but of undermining the moral authority of medicine itself. And the practitioner needs to sit with the atrocity of what they have done, in the name of care, and challenge the very psychological infrastructure that made them do this all against their own human moral code.

I say “human moral code” here, because even as a species, we have the empathetic nature to understand when we are doing harm; we feel it in our bodies, and it metastasizes if not addressed. This is not about religion, it is about our human internal mechanisms that support and evolve for the survival of our species, and rooted in anthropology and sociology.

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Children as the Test Subjects of Progress

From an anthropological perspective, the role of elders has always included the protection of the young from premature exposure to adult rites, knowledge, and risks. The conveyance and keepers of wisdom are rooted in history and experience of the wrongs we as humanity have endured and done. Modernity has inverted this, making children the vanguard of social experimentation. They are not initiated into their own biological reality and connected to their families to do so, which carries unique biological markers essential to lineage survival — yet instead of anchoring in this heritage, they are initiated into the state’s preferred identity narrative.

Depth psychology warns that such premature identity foreclosure interrupts the individuation process, the individual's maturation process, replacing the slow, organic unfolding of self with an externally imposed script. The archetype of the Wounded Child becomes not a stage to be healed but a permanent identity to be medicalized. The developmental milestones that once served to anchor a child’s sense of self are replaced with interventions that demand they commit to an adult identity before they are capable of understanding it. Forsaking any and all other opposing standards and information that would serve them.

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The Data Game: COVID and the Science of Manipulation

The COVID era revealed how easily public health messaging can manipulate risk perception through selective statistics. The same playbook is used in gender medicine. Relative risk reduction is highlighted, absolute risk is buried even in the marketing (and “Information”) that is provided to the public and youth, and inconvenient longitudinal data is excluded from the conversation. When you own the definitions of “success” and “harm,” you can make any intervention look benevolent. In both cases, the public is told to “trust the science” without being shown the full picture of how that science is framed, funded, and filtered. Funders buy the megaphone; dissent loses the mic — and anthropology, sociology, the mythopoetic, and history are ignored.

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Conversion Therapy: The Perfect Inversion

Perhaps the most chilling example is the redefinition of “conversion therapy.” Once used to describe coercive attempts to change sexual orientation, it now includes any therapeutic approach that explores a child’s gender distress without affirming a trans identity. In this inversion, the act of not steering a child toward medical transition is treated as abuse, while the act of sterilizing and mutilating them for life is reframed as salvation. The healer who dares to question the trajectory is cast as the villain; the practitioner who experiments and removes healthy organs is hailed as a hero.

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Naming the Monster

Carl Jung’s work reminds us: one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The darkness here is not hidden — it has been dressed in white coats and clinical jargon. We are told that “care” is whatever the prevailing ideology says it is. We are told that dissent equals harm. We are told that the most radical interventions are the most compassionate.

A species that treats its young as raw material for ideological and medical experimentation is not progressing — it is regressing into a state where the human moral code has been severed from its root. And when the redefinition of care becomes the law, the inversion cements itself into the moral architecture of society.

The question is not whether we will regret this. The question is whether we will even be able to recognize that regret when it comes — or whether our moral compass will have been inverted beyond repair.

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“The medical establishment has become a major threat to health.” — Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis (1974)
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive…” — C.S. Lewis, “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” Res Judicatae (1954)

You have an intrinsic moral code, as a human being, that erupts from your body.

Trust it.

This is not religious coding — it is human coding, embedded in the body of every human being. To resist it is to invite a fracture within the self, a fracture that often translates into mental anguish, cloaked beneath pills, addictions, and diagnostic labels.