Sue Careless
The Interim
With reports from the Surrey/North
Delta News Leader
Planned Parenthood has been banned by the Surrey Board of Education as a resource for its sexuality program.
The ban began January 25, when board vice-chair, Robert Pickering, submitted a motion to ban Planned Parenthood as a resource in the school district. The motion passed 3-1.
Two trustees, Jim Chisholm and Laurae McNally, were absent when the motion was passed. They asked the board to rescind its decision. The board had four opportunities on February 8th to give Planned Parenthood a second look but each request ended in a 3-3 tie, keeping the ban intact.
Trustee Pickering linked Planned Parenthood to an explicit 18-page how-to sex pamphlet called Great Sex Tonight distributed to students at Living School Health Conference run by School Health (DASH) held in Victoria in the fall of 1995. Planned Parenthood was one of the sponsors for the conference and the pamphlet in question was handed out by a B.C. Ministry of Health official.
A lawyer for Planned Parenthood sent a letter to the Surrey board denying any links to the pamphlet. However when the board questioned Planned Parenthood officials on their definition of abstinence it became clear that PP, while not the producers of the pamphlet, held a similar philosophy of sexuality.
At the February 8th meeting trustees grilled Dr. Dorothy Shaw, President of Planned Parenthood of B.C., and executive director Marcena Stewart Croy for more than an hour. Trustee Pickering questioned the group’s definition of abstinence, saying it promotes oral sex.
Shaw said Planned Parenthood avoids defining abstinence because some see it as refraining vaginal intercourse while other define it as no touching or kissing.
“Abstinence will depend on the individual’s values and their own state of development,” Shaw said. Stewart Croy said that “What’s abstinence in one culture is different from another,” she said. ”It’s not our role to say what’s right or wrong.”
Pickering says he supports the ban because Planned Parenthood (PP) misleads parents and pushes the boundaries of common decency.
“They, under the definition of abstinence, teach outercourse. Their definition is not what most people think,” he said. “Outercourse” would include most sexual activity except the sex act itself, he said. “It’s naive to think you could encourage [certain acts] and think you’re going to decrease STDs, AIDS or the HIV rate.”
The Surrey/North Delta News Leader reported that one parent at the meeting covered his young daughter’s ears during the debate.
On CKNW radio in October 1994, Jim Foulds Ph.D., president of Planned Parenthood foundation admitted to talk show host Bill Good that Planned Parenthood doesn’t encourage abstinence, only outercourse. “I don’t think it [abstinence] needs to be encouraged. I would never want to put that pressure of total abstinence on the teenager that that’s the only thing you can do. I’m sorry. Abstinence. It’s just too much of a denial of the biology and it’s too much of a denial of what we see.”
The Surrey Teachers Association filed a grievance against the school board February 9th. Until now teachers could invite PP speakers under the mandate of CAPP (Career and Personal Planning Curriculum- similar to the old family life program).
Roberta Braddock teaches the family life component to grade 8 and 11 students at Guildford Park Secondary. Braddock used to invite PP Speakers to discuss birth control with her students but according to the Surrey/North Delta News Leaders, after 1991 her school could no longer afford the honorarium PP requests for its visits.
Trustee Ken Hoffmann, who had voted for the original ban, was considering changing his vote. Then he received 73 telephone calls in four days. “I was going to vote to rescind the motion so that Planned Parenthood could still work in Surrey, “he said “but the calls showed that Surrey doesn’t appreciate Planned parenthood.”
“I believe the board should have the guts to stand up to having this advocacy group having access to the classroom and the children,” Pickering said before the final vote.
And the Surrey Board of Education had the guts. Their ban should encourage other school boards across the country to reevaluate the worth of Planned Parenthood.
