A 1986 edition of Concerned Women for America’s (CWA) monthly magazine, Family Voice, listed the following prayer request in its prayer bulletin:
- That people across the country would see the danger of school-based “health” clinics and know how to take effective action against them.
Forty years later, CWA is still committed to fighting School-Based Health Centers (SBHCs) that are wreaking havoc on American children. Created with the intention to address teen pregnancy and provide students with “contraceptives and family planning” on school grounds, SBHCs are an enduring relic of the late twentieth century’s sexual revolution. From 1967 to today, SBHCs exploded from one clinic to almost 4,500.
Pulled from editions of the Family Voice, the following excerpts detail CWA’s decades-long opposition to SBHCs in communities across the country.
September 1986: Are School “Health Clinics” Being Effective?
“School-based Health Clinics are supposedly the antidote for the teenage pregnancy problem. None of the studies to date, however, sufficiently indicate that these clinics have curbed the number of pregnancies; only the number of live births has decreased! It is interesting to note who are some of the primary promoters of this concept: Planned Parenthood, the Alan Guttmacher Institute (an arm of Planned Parenthood), Center for Population Options, and many “health services” and individual abortion clinics … schools nearby give them a golden opportunity.”
May 1987: Legislation in Congress
CWA opposed federal legislation to fund SBHCs because “The clinics are being pushed by Planned Parenthood and others and would dispense contraceptives and refer for abortions, most often without parental consent.”
January 1990: School-Based Clinics Falsely Claim to be the Answer to Teen Pregnancy
“Planned Parenthood’s influence becomes more conspicuous in our public schools every year. Sex education was its “foot in the door” two decades ago, but it soon realized that classroom assaults were not enough to totally ‘reform’ the values and beliefs of our nation’s youngsters. Now this degenerate organization and its allies are crusading to ‘set up shop’ in every school district in the nation.”
“Clinic employees and advocates would prefer to concentrate public scrutiny on the services that do not engender as much controversy as family planning. But behind closed doors, the focus is on reproductive (dis)services … a tour of a Baltimore, Maryland, clinic revealed a preoccupation with pushing birth control on youth. Posters advocating the use of contraceptives were plastered throughout the clinic. One poster read, ‘Active sportswear for the active man’ and pictured a condom … Displayed on a clinic table was the infamous The New Our Bodies, Ourselves book with sections on ‘defining orgasm’ and ‘learning to masturbate.’ The book Changing Bodies, Changing Lives was also available. A hasty review of this text revealed one section on ‘exploring sex with someone of the same sex.’
“Most clinics require parental permission for student participation—some do not. Typically, when parents sign the consent form, their child can receive any of the services. Few clinics allow parents to opt their youngsters out of the family planning programs and maintain the remainder of the services … many states currently possess laws that would allow confidential administration of family planning services. Parents should also be aware that notification and consent laws often go unenforced.”
“Does Planned Parenthood have the right to tamper with our children’s values? Does a nurse practitioner have the right to give birth control or counsel on abortion without parental consent? It is time that parents let their visibility in the school setting answer these questions for those educators who act as if the ‘benevolent’ state owns America’s youngsters.”
March 1993: Baltimore Brings Norplant to School-Based Sex Clinics
“Baltimore currently faces one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country, despite its active school-based sex clinics that already provide condoms and birth-control pills. Since dispersing these types of contraceptives hasn’t done the job, Baltimore is now offering a new type of birth control to high school students—Norplant … It is worth noting that under Maryland state law, students can get contraceptives without parental permission. That means that a high school girl could conceivably have Norplant implanted in her arm (minor surgery) without her parents even knowing.”
March/April 2001: Not in my school: Parents are fighting back against school “sex clinics”
“Clinics circumvent parental authority by referring students to an outside agency that provides abortion services or referrals. Some clinics distribute vague forms that simply ask for the parents’ ‘consent’ to all services during their child’s enrollment period. In many cases, the clinic staff assumes parental consent unless parents say otherwise … for them [SBCs], parental ignorance is bliss.”
“CWA also emphasized concerns from black pro-life leaders that ‘SBCs are heavily located exclusively in poor, urban, black neighborhoods. This reminds concerned blacks of the “Negro Project” of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger … It should come as no surprise that Planned Parenthood strongly advocates for SBCs.’”
CWA’s historical record suggests that secrecy, parental deception, and sexual degeneracy are a feature, not a bug, of SBHCs. What started as birth control and abortions without parental consent is now an institutional school-to-sterilization pipeline—students in many states can get free cross sex hormones, name changes, and chest binders without consulting their parents within the walls of their own schools.
SBHCs’ assault on parental rights and children’s innocence must come to an end.
