New York City schools have given out more than 12,000 of the Plan B morning after pill drug to students without parental permission, according to a new report from the New York Post.
The newspaper indicates the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg is pushing the drug hard, according to records obtained by The Post. As the newspaper reports:
Last September, the city revealed it had started giving out Plan B and other birth control in the nurses’ offices of 13 high schools. At the time, officials said 567 girls had gotten Plan B.
But the birth-control blitz was much bigger than the city had acknowledged. About 40 separate “school-based health centers” doled out 12,721 doses of Plan B in 2011-12, up from 10,720 in 2010-11 and 5,039 in 2009-10, according to the newly released data.
About 22,400 students sought reproductive care from January 2009 through last school year, records show. Under state law, minors don’t need parental OKs to get contraceptives.
The revelations stunned Mona Davids, president of the NYC Parents Union, whose 14-year-old attends a Manhattan high school.
“I’m in shock,” she said. “What gives the mayor the right to decide, without adequate notice, to give our children drugs that will impact their bodies and their psyches? He has purposely kept the public and parents in the dark with his agenda.”
Davids, who is black, noted that most school-based health centers are in poor neighborhoods.
“This was population control on blacks and Latinos without our knowledge,” she said.
Last September, LifeNews reported that a poll found 53 percent of New York City parents oppose the controversial new CATCH programrecently instated in 13 NYC public schools. CATCH, which stands for Connecting Adolescents to Comprehensive Healthcare, is a pilot program established by the city’s Department of Education (DOE) and aimed at curtailing teen pregnancy by making emergency contraceptives, such as Plan B, available to students without parental consent. Public schools already have free condoms available to students.
“High school students are very sexually active and getting pregnant so we don’t have that luxury to think that they are too young to be engaged in conversations about contraception and sexual education,” City Council Speaker Christine Quinn has stated.
However, the poll, commissioned by the Chiaroscuro Foundation and conducted by Smith Johnson Research, has found that a majority of NYC parents are not on board with the new measure. “This kind of social experiment has no place in the education of our children,” said State Senator Ruben Diaz, Sr. “NYC parents agree that the DOE is out of bounds on this issue.”
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The Chiaroscuro Foundation has released the entire poll, including the cross-tabs for the sample of 600 New Yorkers surveyed and the cross-tabs for the oversampled under-55 demographic, which totaled 400 of the 600 people polled. Greg Pfundstein, executive director of the foundation, states, “There should be no question about the soundness of the methodology.”
Support for abstinence education programs with focus on teaching healthy relationship skills was especially high. Seventy-five percent of all respondents expressed support for such a program and 83 percent of African American respondents said they would support that potential program. Additionally, 71 percent of all respondents and 73 percent of African Americans respondents expressed support for an abstinence program that teaches the facts about contraception while promoting delaying sex as the best choice for teenagers.
News about the program giving out morning after pills to girls as young as 12 came to the surface last September.
