The Alabama Attorney General’s Office will spend nearly $1 million on a legal defense of a 2022 law banning puberty blockers and hormones for transgender minors.

The Legislature’s Contract Review Committee Thursday approved contracts worth $975,000 for five attorneys with Cooper & Kirk PLLC out of Washington DC.

Multiple messages were left with the firm seeking comment.

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Brian W. Barnes, David H. Thompson, Howard N. Slugh, John D. Ramer, and Peter A. Patterson, have been awarded $195,000 each to provide “expert legal assistance in the defense of the State of Alabama’s Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act.”

The attorney general’s office said in a packet prepared for the Contract Review Committee meeting Thursday that “additional counsel with subject matter expertise is needed to represent the State of Alabama and state officials in complex litigation.”

The contracts are not new, but extensions that were brought back to the committee.

Messages seeking comment were left with the Attorney General on Tuesday.

SB 184, sponsored by Sen. Shay Shelnutt, R-Trussville and signed by Gov. Kay Ivey in April 2022, subjects physicians who prescribe puberty blockers or hormones to transgender youth under the age of 19 to a Class C felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

The law also bans physicians from performing genital and reconstructive surgeries, but those are not performed in Alabama.

U.S. District Judge Liles C. Burke last year issued an injunction against the provisions that barred doctors from providing puberty blockers or hormones.

Shelnutt and other supporters argued the medicines were experimental, but families of transgender youth and supporters said access to the medications was critical to their children’s well-being, and that withdrawing them could have serious consequences.

“These treatments are safe, they are effective,” said Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, in an interview on Tuesday “They allow these young people to lead healthy, happy lives, to go and have normal childhoods. Being deprived of that necessary care is devastating, devastating for young people, devastating for their parents.”

The federal case is currently in the discovery phase. A trial is anticipated next March.

“We want a final judgment permanently invalidating the law so that these kinds can receive medical care that they need just like other kids who receive medical care for other conditions,” Minter said. “It is really shocking to think that a state would ban medically necessary care for a group of children.”