Vatican interview: Puberty blockers sometimes okay

A member of the Pontifical Academy for Life has argued on the Vatican News website that it’s acceptable to give children a puberty-blocking hormone in “very restricted cases.” The Academy member, Laura Palazanni, said that Italy’s National Committee of Bioethics (NBC) – of which she is the vice president – had advised that the puberty blocker triptorelin should be used “only briefly” to create “a window of opportunity” for doctors to appropriately diagnose a child when he or she is at risk of self-harm, suicide, or self-medicating with puberty blockers bought over the internet.