If you’re a student at Wooster High School in Ohio (which educates kids from grades 8-12), this is what you learned a few weeks ago when a representative from the Pregnancy Care Center of Wayne County spoke to your Family and Consumer Science class:
1) If a girl gets pregnant because of rape or incest, her only option is adoption of the baby.
2) Marriage prevents sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).
3) Students shouldn’t have children until they are married.
And then they learned how to tighten their chastity belts…
Look:
1) Emergency contraception is an option, too. So is abortion (which I hear is still legal in Ohio). Adoption is fine if that’s what you want to do, but it’s by no means your only option.
2) No it doesn’t. Standing at the altar doesn’t magically wipe your body clean, and being married doesn’t mean you won’t acquire an infection. Having unprotected sex with multiple partners will certainly increase the likelihood of getting an STD, yes, but marriage alone won’t fix that.
3) Having stability is good for a child, but that doesn’t require marriage. Cohabitating parents, single parents, and gay and lesbian parents (who weren’t allowed to get married everywhere until last year) can also be great for children. And I can point you to plenty of married parents who never should have reproduced…
Given that Ohio has a problem with teen pregnancy, you would hope that students would get better information than this at school. Unfortunately, it’s lessons like these that lead to bad decision-making.
The parent of an 8th-grader at the school found out what was being taught and called an administrator a couple of days later. After being told that this was an annual event, the parent soon requested that someone from the Wooster Health Center (a Planned Parenthood-affiliated clinic that teaches scientific information) speak to the kids. The parent even arranged a time and date for that to happen. But no dice.
That’s when American Atheists stepped in and wrote a letter:
American Atheists Legal Center, the parent, and the student demand that the school provide an equal amount of time before the end of 2015 in all classes that were instructed by representatives from the Pregnancy Care Center of Wayne County to a non-faith-based health care provider to provide the students with factually accurate and evidence-based information about STD prevention, pregnancy prevention, and all the legal means of preventing or ending an unwanted pregnancy. The school district introduced the topic; it is the school district’s responsibility to ensure students receive accurate information.
Additionally, we demand that the school district cease allowing Pregnancy Care Center of Wayne County to present to students as part of any official school class or program because of the inaccurate and religiously motivated curriculum…
For the sake of the students, let’s hope the administration corrects the misinformation they’re guilty of spreading.
(Image via Shutterstock)
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