This week’s sign of the apocalypse comes from Portland, Maine, where the school board just voted to allow a middle school to give birth control pills to students without notifying their parents.
Middle-schoolers are generally 11-13 years old.
Portland’s King Middle School has an independently operated health clinic that provides services like immunizations and check-ups to students. The center has been handing out condoms to these pre-teens since 2000. Now, the kids can just walk in, get a quick check-up and walk out with birth-control pills. And if parents have signed a consent form allowing their children to use any of the health center’s services, there’s nothing they can do about it.
In fact, they may never even know. It’s left to the sound reasoning skills of an 11-year-old to decide if she wants to put these life-altering medicines in her body. She also gets to decide whether her parents should know.
There’s a word for this: It’s “madness.”
The same health cops who’ve decided kids can’t drink a can of Coke (high-fructose corn syrup — horrors!) at school or eat a Twinkie (the yellow cakes of death!) think it’s just fine for a 12-year-old to take a pill that alters the normal hormonal balance of her body. And the parents? What do they matter? It takes a village to raise a child and if parents get in the way of the village’s social engineering policies, well, just keep them out of the loop.
Here’s a message for the members of the Portland school board and their like-minded colleagues: These are NOT YOUR CHILDREN! Your responsibility is to educate them — period. Providing them with a moral framework for their lives — including whether and when they will use birth control — is the parents’ job.
And if some parents do not perform their child-rearing function to your satisfaction … TOO BAD! It’s still not your place to usurp their authority over their own children.
What will it take to pound this idea into the heads of these people?
