Planned Parenthood Report Pushing Sex, Abortion for Children Draws More Fire
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
February 9, 2010
New York, NY (LifeNews.com) — A recent Planned Parenthood report pushing sex and abortion for children is drawing more fire from pro-life advocates. Now, Catholic League president Bill Donohue is attacking the document because he says it rips Catholicism and promotes "sexual engineering" by "smearing religious conservatives, especially Catholics."
The new report, titled Stand and Deliver," sees the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) demanding that governments, religious institutions and society at large provide "comprehensive sexuality education" for children as young as ten years old.
According to IPPF, as "young people are sexual beings," it should be self-evident that "sexuality education promotes individual well-being and the advancement of broader societal and public health goals."
Naturally, once children are enabled to have sexual relations, they will eventually need the contraception, birth control and abortions that Planned Parenthood sells.
“IPPF uses the terms young people, youth and adolescents interchangeably to refer to people who are between 10 and 24," Donohue notes in a statement sent to LifeNews.com today. "In other words, 5th graders should be treated the same way graduate students are when it comes to their ‘sexual and reproductive health and rights.’"
Donohue says the entire program is based on a faulty assumption.
IPPF says that “The taboo on youth sexuality is one of the key forces driving the AIDS epidemic and high rates of teenage pregnancy and maternal mortality.”
The Catholic League president calls that "nonsense" and says: "In the 1950s, there was no sex education in the schools, the pill was not commercially available and AIDS didn’t exist. Yet the out-of-wedlock birth rate was comparatively miniscule and sexually transmitted diseases were relatively rare. All because of taboos."
Donohue also criticizes the IPPF report’s language saying, “Fundamentalist and other religious groups—the Catholic Church and madrasas (Islamic schools) for example—have imposed tremendous barriers that prevent young people, particularly, from obtaining information and services related to sex and reproduction.”
According to IPPF, religious institutions – like the Catholic Church and Islamic schools – need to be "pragmatic" to accommodate young people as "sexual beings" and amend their teachings to "find a way of explaining and providing guidance on issues of sex and sexual relationships among young people, which supports rather than denies their experiences and needs."
He responds: "So the kids in Sister Mary’s class who learn about responsible sex are analogous to Imam Mohammad’s kids who are either denied sex education or are told that homosexuality is punishable by death."
Ultimately, the pro-life advocate says Planned Parenthood is putting children at risk.
"Why is it that public school students, who know so much more about sex than those dunces in the parochial schools, are precisely the ones walking around with the highest rates of illegitimacy, abortion and herpes?" he asks.
Related web sites:
Catholic League – https://catholicleague.org
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