Birth Control Services in Public Schools:

• Condoning promiscuity?
• Conspiring against parents?
• Evading school law?
• Racist?

You’ve been hearing a lot about “children having children.”

You’ve seen TV spots of sad, pregnant little girls. If you’re like most people, you agree strongly that teen births must be discouraged.

“Family planning professionals” say the solution is to let them put their clinics inside junior and senior high schools.

Some communities already have such “school-based clinics” (SBCs). There are proposals to open them in as many schools as possible. The pioneer SBC program in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1973. Supporters claim it has dramatically reduced the student fertility rate. They call it a model program.

Let’s Examine the arguments for SBCs and their performance record.

Q. Is there an epidemic of “children having children”?

A. Teen births are lower today than 20 years ago. The National Center for Health Statistics reports:

• Births to teens peaked in 1957. By 1981, their birth rate had dropped by 46% and the decline continues.
• In 1962, 63% of teen births were to mothers 18 and 19 years old- not high school girls, but young adults, outside the scope of SBCs.
• More than half of the 1982 teen births were to married mothers, and thus were not a problem demanding government intervention.
• The actual birth rate for girls under 15 was just over one in 1000 in 1983- a lower rate than in 1970.
• Unmarried girls 15-17 were the only population group to show a decline in births between 1983 and 1984. Just over two in 100 babies. Total births to girls in that group were not “more than one million,” but just  172 673 in 1983.

Q. Do you mean there is no teen pregnancy epidemic?

A. Births to teenagers have declined because almost half the pregnancies, are ended by abortions. But pregnancy should not be called an epidemic. That word suggests disease. Pregnancy is never a disease. It’s a healthy, natural condition resulting from sexual intercourse. Unmarried teens don’t have to fear untimely pregnancy if they say “No” to sexual intercourse.

Q. Still, doesn’t it make sense that, if girls knew about contraceptives, and could get them, there’d be fewer pregnancies. Wouldn’t that prevent abortions?

A. That’s what the headlines seem to promise. But statistics show that awareness and use of contraception does not prevent abortions. Minnesota Department of Health reports for 1983 show that almost half  (48.4%) of girls 15 to 17 who had abortions in 1983 did know about contraception and used it sometimes. Another 10% (9.7) were using contraceptives when they became pregnant.

“The contraceptive failure rate for teens who always use contraceptives is about 10%. This is not much different from the out-of-wedlock pregnancy rate for the population as a whole. Therefore, hypothetically, if sexual activity among teens reached 100% and the constant use of contraceptives reached 100%, we would still have a pregnancy rate of about 10%.” (Teen Pregnancy, report from U.S. House Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families, December, 1985, P.385.)

The fact is that SBCs have not proved they can reduce teen pregnancies. What they have done is to reduce the birth rate (fertility rate), which is not the same thing. In the pioneer St. Paul Ramsey Medical Center program, the number of pregnancies isn’t even recorded.

The St. Paul program has never published a scientifically valid study of results. The only study every published included no control group for comparison, so there was no proof that declines in the student fertility (birth) rate were a result of the SBC contraceptive program.

Births did decline, but the decline was not attributable just to successful contraceptive use. Part of it was due to changes in student population which dropped 22% from 1975 to 1980. Part was due to abortions. SBC proponents all over the country nevertheless point to the St. Paul program as a success. Undocumented claims ranging from 23 % to 66% declines in student fertility rates have been published.

But Asta Kenney, of Planned Parenthood’s Alan Guttmacher Institute, admitted: “Whether the decline was due to the number of pregnancies or to an increase in reliance on abortion cannot be ascertained.”

Students with positive pregnancy tests are referred to St. Paul Ramsey Medical Centre “to initiate prenatal care” or for pregnancy counseling. They are class by the SBC as “lost to follow-up” so nobody knows how many are aborted as St. Paul Ramsey, where mid-term abortions are performed routinely.

Researchers Stanley Weed and Joseph Olsen, in studies twice sustained by peer review and widely reported established that government sponsored birth control programs for teenagers, between 1971 and 1981, produced increases of 50-120 pregnancies per 1000 clients. Yet births declined by about 30 per 1000 clients-a decline achieved by an enormous increase in abortions.

Q. But birth control is just one minor element in a comprehensive medical and counseling program, isn’t it?

A.  The term “family planning services” is mentioned far down on the list of clinic services so many people-even parents-don’t realize that birth control is what SBCs are all about. But in the literature of the SBC movement, it’s very clear: birth control is central.

At first, the St. Paul Ramsey services program was exclusively a “family planning” clinic. Other services were added only because students wouldn’t come in; they didn’t want to be labeled as “sexually active.”

Every student who comes to the clinic for any reason is asked whether she(or he) is sexually active, or plans to be. If so, she’s instructed in birth control, and “urged to choose a method.”

Clinic supporters say SBCs are ideal birth control centers:

• Because they’re operated by outside agencies so they can evade school law, which prohibits school nurses from dispensing even aspiring without parental permission.
• Parental consent is obtained with a “blanket consent form,” in effect transferring medical control to the clinic, so parents need not be told about specific visits, treatment or referral. During testimony on Sen. Berglin’s bill, one senator revealed that his daughter’s high school SBC solicited “parental consent: with a “negative consent form,” i.e., consent was assumed unless the parent refused permission in writing. Such a system is inadequate for actual legal notice because, for various reasons, the form might have never reached the parent.
• Students using birth control can be followed right into their classrooms if they fail to keep their appointments—“follow-up” so relentless as to recall the Chinese fertility commissioners who track the menstrual cycles of women to ensure that no unauthorized pregnancy escapes the abortionist.
• The SBC staff doesn’t have to call students at home, where their parents might find out that the clinic gave them contraceptives. SBC advocate Richard Weatherly concedes that proponents exaggerate benefits, with claims “reminiscent  of those made for the patent medicine nostrums of the 19^th century.” He says they have to, “secure political and material support.”

For example, SBC proponents claims that parents strongly support school sex education, including contraceptive information, implying that parents also support SBC birth control activities.

That’s an exaggeration. Many parents may support sex education which is always presented to the public as a way to discourage premarital sexual activity.’    Many parents welcome the “free medical care” offered as bait. Some may not object to the birth control services, assuming they’re meant on for the delinquent and incorrigible—other people’s children.

But they do not want contraceptive given their own children without their consent.

Enablers and Co-Abusers

It’s ironic that counseling for chemical dependency is offered in the same clinics where sexual misconduct is condoned. A cardinal principle of accepted chemical dependency counseling is that improvement cannot come until the abuser changes behaviour. Those who try to protect abusers from the worst consequences of their misbehaviour are called “enablers” or “co-abusers.”

To give young people contraceptive or abortions instead of guiding them toward them toward health self-control is to act as an “enabler” of promiscuity.

Moreover, by providing contraceptives to underage girls whose boyfriends are over the age of consent, school districts are aiding and abetting thousands of felony statutory rapes.

School and government officials are supposed to protect the children placed in their care, not help them victims of sex crimes.

Comprehensive Services?

The SBC staff is headed by a nurse, with the same training as a regular school nurse except for extra instruction in birth control.

The SBC staff includes no counselor with the professional qualifications of a clinical psychologist.

Most of the “comprehensive medical services” at the SBC consist merely of preliminary screening, with referral elsewhere for professional care if needed.

The essential difference between SBCs and traditional school nurse and counseling services is the unprecedented role SBCs assume in the formation-or deformation- of students’ sexual attitudes and values.

Q. Is it fair to say that SBCs encourage teens to be sexually active? They don’t tell them what to do, but let them decided for themselves. Aren’t SBCs just “value neutral”?

A. There’s no such thing as “value neutrality” between appropriate use of sexuality and its abuse. To say nothing about how sex ought to be used, while “sympathetically” equipping children to abuse it, is not “value neutral.” The message children receive is that sex is not something precious, but something cheap. That the only problem about sexual activity is pregnancy. That sex is nothing, and babies are bad. That’s not “value neutral.”

Most SBC advocates say they wish teens were not sexually active. Dr. Erck Hakanson, co-founder of the St. Paul SBC, claims “we’re not in favour of 15 year olds” fornicating. (He used a cruder synonym.) He and others tell the press and the public and the parents that they don’t think its good for teens to be sexually active. But they don’t tell the students.

Why not?

There’s no constitutional requirement that they be silent on moral issues. It’s not a sectarian religious doctrine that sex is meant for marriage. All major religions and civilizations have held that principle. Even secular ethics, with no religious base, can recognize that sexual activity is bad for children. We have setting an age of consent because sexual activity is bad for children.

Why not tell the children so?

Defenders of SBC say most students are already sexually active when they come for contraceptives, so it’s too late. That argument suggests that sex is irreversibly addictive: one try and there’s not turning back.

But many young people DO stop. Of the 15-17 year olds described as “sexually active” in a 1976 study, almost 20% (19.9%) had intercourse only once. The decision is so common that it has a name: secondary virginity.

Even married people must sometimes defer sexual activity. Sex is not a need like food and water, but an appetite.

Properly used, it’s not only a means for bringing new persons into being, but also a means for bonding husband and wife in exclusive intimacy. Abstinence, when appropriate, protects it as valuable.

Sex is not a compulsion that must be satisfied at any cost. Those who use their sexuality promiscuously abuse and make ugly and make ugly something that should be beautiful.

Adolescence is a time when appropriate emotions and physical drives must be integrated into the personality, brought under the control of the mind and will. Young people today as in the past need help in the task first of all from their parents, if they’re to grow into strong and secure adults.

Admirers of SBCs describe their staffs as “surrogate parents” and “best adult friends” to their student clients. Do they deserve those names? What kind of “best friend” collaborates in hiding illicit and dangerous conduct from parents?

If they were your children, would you settle for “they’re going to do it anyway?”

A Sordid Future

High school boys are not guided toward mature and protective masculinity by those who give them free condoms and a pat on the head for “being responsible.” Instead they’re reinforced in a view of girls as disposable sex objects.

Girls are tragically victimized when “treatment” against their natural fertility makes them feel unable to say “No” for fear they’ll lose their boyfriends. And then, their later boyfriends.

Even with contraceptives, they risk untimely pregnancy and a brutal choice between unwed motherhood and abortion.

They also risk sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Gonorrhea doubled among teens between 1971 and 1980; as with chlamydia, now the commonest STD, the Pill makes them more susceptible. Chalamydia causes dangerous ectopic pregnancies and even sterility. AIDS is increasing even faster among homosexual men. Today’s fastest growing STD is the papilloma virus, cause of a fatal cervical cancer, most common in young women who begin sexual activity early and have multiple partners.

That’s a sordid future to offer a “best friend.”

The Pill itself is dangerous for teens. The eminent British gynecologist, Dr. Margaret White, says, ‘If you give girls the Pill before they are totally physically mature, they risk, first, interference with their normal growth; second they are more likely to develop diabetes; third, they may never develop regular periods. They may get depression. It should never be given to anyone under 17. Never!”

Q. I don’t have any children in a school with an SBCs. Are they any of my business?

A. SBCs are everybody’s business. They’re your business because your taxes support them.

They’re your business because our nation’s children are our future. Those with stunted or corrupted sexual ethics will share that future with your own children. As a citizen you have an obligation to participate in policy debate affecting tomorrow’s society.

SBCs are your business because, when you call God “Father,” you become responsible for all your sister and brothers, especially the most vulnerable.

Q. What can be done about illicit teen sexual activity, pregnancy and abortion?

The most dramatic decline in teen pregnancies in many years followed passage of the 1981 Minnesota law requiring parental notification of teen abortions. Between 1980 and 1983, pregnancies decline by 32%, births by 23.4% and abortions by 40% among 15 to 17 year olds. That law was overturned in a suit brought by “family planning professionals.”

Calling parents into action seems to help more than anything else. It would seem wise, then, to pursue the course that has demonstrated success: require, parental consent when minors are given contraceptives.

Q. How can I help stop SBCs?

A.  (1) Pray for the defeat of SBCs and for the return of decency to our nation.

(2) Join a local parents’ pro-life or church group that’s fighting SBCs.

(3) Learn more about SBCs and related issues.

(4) Attend school board, PTA, city council and legal meetings where SBCs are discussed. Make your opposition known. Demand the  adoption and pro-chastity classroom programs.

(5) Take part in rallies, picketing, letter writing campaigns and petition drives against SBCs.

(6) Find a lawyer who’ll file lawsuits against school board members and other officials who support SBCs, on the grounds that they’re aiding and abetting the felony statutory rapes of the female children entrusted to their care.

(7) Support H.L.I. Canada to learn more about school base clinics and related issues.

What SBC Proponents Say to Each Other

“Opponents of comprehensive programs were concerned primarily about abortions, sex education and contraception…The most common strategy adopted to avoid opposition was to maintain a low profile—generally by keeping programs out of sight…and by giving names to programs that obscure their functions. Cyesis, Teen Awareness, Access…are some examples.”

(Richard Weatherly, et al., “Comprehensive Programs for Pregnant Teenagers and Teenage Parents: How successful Have They Been?” Family Planning Perspectives, 3-86)

“The right of low-income, welfare dependent teenagers to choose abortion as an answer is just as inviolate as the right of an affluent older woman to make that same choice.”

(Barbara Blum, President Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, at Minneapolic Colloquium on Adolescent Pregnancy, 3-6 85)

“Until recently teenage pregnancy was treated primarily as a medical problem…with a healthy baby as the prime objective. Teenagers…usually produce very healthy babies…The baby is the problem.”

(Martha Burt, Urban Institute at Minneapolis Colloquium on Adolescent Pregnancy, 2-20-85)

“I do feel compelled to comment on the St. Paul Clinic. If you will review the figures, it was not a 50% reduction in the pregnancy rate… it was a 50%  reduction in the fertility rate, which did not take into consideration the of course the large number of abortions being performed on the students.”

(Jane Hodgson, M.D. quoted in “Abortionists Discuss the Eighties,” Life and Family News, 9-80)

“Most of the school-based clinics provide pregnancy tests, and they generally offer pregnancy counseling and referrals to other agencies for maternity care or abortion… One problem cited by clinic personnel is the lack of public funding for abortion in most states.”

“One advantage of school-based clinics, then is that because they are run by an outside agency, their medical practice is not covered by school law.”

(Joy Dryfoos, Director, Center for Population Options, “School based Health Clinics: A New Approach to Preventing Adolescent Pregnancy? Family planning Perspectives, 3-85)

Sr. Lucille Durocher, C.S.J.

Human Life International

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