One of the least reported, but most blatantly repugnant expenditures contained in the Senate version of the health care reform bill is the allocation of $75,000,000 to Planned Parenthood and its cohorts for the express purpose of initiating the “Personal Responsibility Education for Adulthood Training” programs.
What could such a program be about, you might ask? Well, let’s examine the facts according to the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, better known as SIECUS. They are reporting the following:
[T]he Senate Finance Committee approved an amendment offered by Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) to fund a comprehensive sex education funding stream, The Personal Responsibility Education for Adulthood Training. The amendment provides $75 million for states; $50 million of which would be geared to evidence-based, medically accurate, age-appropriate programs to educate adolescents about both abstinence and contraception in order to prevent unintended teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, including HIV/AIDS. The remaining funds would be for innovative programs as well as research and evaluation….
SIECUS continues,
“We would like to thank Chairman Baucus and his staff for their strong support of a comprehensive approach to sex education, ensuring that all young people have access to information so that they can make responsible decisions and lead healthy and safe lives,” said William Smith, vice president for public policy at the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS). “The Baucus Amendment creates a new comprehensive sex education program for the states and can be easily reconciled with a similar measure, the Healthy Teen Initiative, on the House side. This is a huge step in putting evidence and common sense over hyper morality and will get states the money they need to support good programming.”
For those who are uncertain about what “hypermorality” might be, it is a word created by the proponents of fornication to segregate into a highly specialized segment of society those who do not approve of what Planned Parenthood, SIECUS and others would like to do by way of brainwashing youngsters.
Proof of this is contained in the same SIECUS press release,which denounces any funding for abstinence-only education as being a “giant step backward.” The agenda of these conniving educators is obvious. So one has to wonder why this contemptible program is not mentioned by nearly all of those organizations that consider themselves to be part of the pro-life, pro-family movement.
Let me be clear, before moving ahead, that American Life League does not favor any sort of sexuality education in the classroom, regardless of what it is called. Whether it is “Personal Responsibility Education for Adulthood Training” or a “Healthy Teen Initiative” or “Abstinence Only,” the problem that is inherent in such programs remains the same: A usurpation of parental rights to teach children about matters of human sexuality within the context of the parent/child relationship. Parents are the primary educators of their children, not school teachers, not Planned Parenthood videos and not any other component of the culture that leads children down the path to debauchery.
As American Life League’s Michael Hichborn pointed out in his analysis of the Senate Healthcare Reform Bill, in Section 1803, pages 491-508, the bill stipulates grants of at least $250,000 for each state.
In order for states to receive money for such programs, they must provide the following: current statistics on the pregnancy and birth rates of children age 10–19; goals for reducing pregnancy and birth rates for said children; and a description of how such funds will be used to reach these goals, especially for “youth populations that are the most high-risk or vulnerable for pregnancies or otherwise have special circumstances, including youth in foster care, homeless youth, youth with HIV/AIDS, pregnant youth who are under 21 years of age, mothers who are under 21 years of age, and youth residing in areas with high birth rates for youth.”
Further, Hichborn and others make it perfectly clear that the “most dangerous aspect of this entire section is the creation of a ‘National Teen Pregnancy Prevention Resource Center’ through Subsection (C) on page 503”:
The Secretary shall award a grant to a nationally recognized, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that meets the requirements described in clause (ii) to establish and operate a national teen pregnancy prevention resource center (in this subparagraph referred to as the ‘Resource Center’) to carry out the purpose and activities described in clause (iii). (emphasis added)
According to the requirements set forth in clause (ii),
The organization has demonstrated experience working with and providing assistance to a broad range of individuals and entities to reduce teen pregnancy. The organization is research-based and has comprehensive knowledge and data about teen pregnancy prevention strategies.
As Hichborn accurately explains,
[T]here is no organization that better fits this description than Planned Parenthood. The language in this clause even includes PP’s preferred adjective for its explicit, promiscuity-promoting sex education: "comprehensive." If this provision is allowed to remain in America’s Healthy Future Act, PP will assume the position of a quasi-government agency with quasi-governmental powers to engage the nation’s youth on matters of sex, birth control and abortion.
So, I am forced to ask why so few of our allies in this battle have made note of this draconian aspect of the Senate and House health care reform proposals. Since organizations of a Catholic bent, such as the Knights of Columbus and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, know all too well, based on the empirical data, that sex education provides a springboard for adolescent promiscuity that leads to all manner of sexually transmitted diseases and to abortion, shouldn’t they be exposing this dreadful aspect of the health care reform proposals? Why is it that they insist on keeping the focus exclusively on the question of taxpayer support for some abortions? Why is taxpayer-mandated sex education, as part of alleged health care reform, moving ahead unchallenged by these respectable Catholic organizations?
What are the Knights of Columbus and the Catholic bishops thinking?
None other than esteemed academic, Fellowship of Catholic Scholars board member and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education Kenneth Whitehead has connected the dots in a most convincing way. Whitehead questions why sex education continues to be so popular in view of what the results teach us about its failures.
Our teenage pregnancy and out-of-wedlock birth rates are at unprecedented levels. In 1940 only 4 percent of births in the United States were to unmarried women, compared with 11 percent in 1970, and 31 percent in 1993—that amounts to nearly a third of all births out of wedlock at the present time. By 1988 52 percent of teenage women in the United States were having premarital intercourse, compared with 29 percent in 1970. 56
The teenage abortion rates have gone up proportionately; around 40 percent of teenage pregnancies currently end in abortion, compared to about 25 percent, or 1 in 4, of all pregnancies.57 All of these high rates have come about during exactly the same time period that sex education too was being institutionalized in the schools. Of course the contemporary increase in sexual permissiveness and the decline in traditional sexual morality must surely be attributed to a multiplicity of causes; but it has certainly not helped much to have presented under the authority of the school indoctrination in the acceptability of today’s various deviant “lifestyles” as well as in the use of the supposed modern means of avoiding pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases while in fact engaging in a kind of permissive sexual activity that is now too often taken for granted.
And Whitehead is not the only one who has exposed the flawed philosophy of classroom sex education. When Pope Benedict XVI addressed Catholic educators at the Catholic University of America in April of last year, he made it a point to discuss why American education was failing: “We witness an assumption that every experience is of equal worth and a reluctance to admit imperfection and mistakes. And particularly disturbing, is the reduction of the precious and delicate area of education in sexuality to management of ‘risk,’ bereft of any reference to the beauty of conjugal love.”
Colin Mason of Population Research Institute, who covered Pope Benedict XVI’s address for LifeSiteNews.com, opined, “While these words were primarily intended for Catholic educators across the country, they hold a special meaning for the pro-life movement. They describe, in a beautifully succinct way, what we fight against every day: a sexual culture of lies, misrepresentations and illusions that results in an epidemic of contraception, sterilization, and abortion.”
Clearly there is cause for concern. There is no defense for incorporating failed sex-instruction courses in so-called health care reform. The two terms are in fact contradictory when used in the same sentence.
So why are so many organizations and leaders remaining silent?
It is not my place to answer for the Knights of Columbus or the bishop's conference, or any of the other groups that have thus far ignored this subject, but it is my place to remind the reader that this example of how our tax dollars might be put to work, along with the other life-threatening, life-altering aspects of so-called health care reform legislation, provide each of us with reasons aplenty to just say no to health care reform.