Teacher Suspended in Florida for Showing Students Abortion Video

State   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Oct 27, 2006   |   9:00AM   |   WASHINGTON, DC

Teacher Suspended in Florida for Showing Students Abortion Video Email this article
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by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
October 27
, 2006

Ft. Lauderdale, FL (LifeNews.com) — A Florida public school teacher has been suspended after he showed his students a video on abortion that featured graphic pictures. The incident comes after a private school in Pennsylvania took a group of high school students to a local Planned Parenthood abortion facility and defended its actions.

Marc Greenblum is an art teacher at the Downtown Academy of Technology and Arts, a charter school run by the Broward County School Board.

Greenblum made a homemade video to show his 10 and 11 year-old students that taught them about good and evil. It contained abortion photos but also scenes of the Holocaust, 9/11, and the Ku Klux Klan.

The video also apparently featured the picture of baby Samuel Armas reaching up from his mother’s stomach to touch the hand of a doctor performing a fetal surger on him.

Some students and parents complained to school officials about the video but Greenblum says he has no regrets in showing it.

"I don’t have any regrets for having shown it and presented it," Greenblum told CBS 4-TV in Ft. Lauderdale.

“I regret maybe showing it a little prematurely,” Greenblum said, “but having done it, no, and having shown it and educating them and maybe it will change their lives, and they’ll say ‘hey, I saw that’ and they’ll talk with someone why may be considering it, and then they can actually touch other lives that way, no, how could you say I would regret that, no.”

But parent Joan Daniel told the television station the video was "just so graphic, and I broke down in tears."

She complained that the school took two weeks to show her the video, did not tell other parents about it, and let Greenblum continue to teach classes afterwards.

"Someone that’s an educator should know that this is not acceptable, should already know what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable, and this is way over the line," Daniel told CBS 4.

The school knew Greenblum was making the video, which features an interview with the school principal, but officials say they did not know about the contents of the final product and had not authorized Greenblum to show it.

“He should not have shown this,” principal Jim DiSebastian, who suspended Greenblum Thursday, told CBS4.

“There are consequences,” said DiSebastian, “and he didn’t think, and it can’t ever happen again.”

CBS 4 reported that not all parents were upset with the video.

“Instead of keeping them in the dark,” one parent told the television station, “Might as well they be exposed to everything. That’s my opinion. I have no regret.”

The incident comes after a private Pennsylvania school became the subject of intense criticism for taking its students on a field trip to a local Planned Parenthood abortion business.

More than a dozen teenagers from the Solebury School were bused to an abortion center in Warminster on Friday, September 29.

Jason Gordon, a social science teacher, took the teens to the abortion business as part of a class on "activism," but the were denied access to a pro-life facility to hear the other side of the abortion debate.

In an interview with Bucks County Courier Times columnist J.D. Mullane, Solebury School Headmaster John Brown defended the trip and denying the students information about the pro-life perspective.