Why It’s Wrong to Inject Contraceptives Into Students Without Parental Consent

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Why It’s Wrong to Inject Contraceptives Into Students Without Parental Consent

Is this coming to a junior high school near you—or has it already?

If your 13-year-old daughter was having sex, would you want to know about it? Would you need to know about it?

How angry would you be to find out that school officials knew she was having sex with boys and they withheld that knowledge from you? What about if a federal law actually banned teachers and administrators from notifying you?

How much more angry would you be to find out that school “health” officials implanted chemical-releasing contraceptives beneath your 13-year-old’s skin so that she could have sex without having to worry about pregnancy, and again, no one told you?

If there wasn’t something fundamentally wrong with their minds, most parents would be furious.

Yet this is exactly what is happening in Britain, according to the Daily Mail. Last year, 1,700 13- and 14-year-old girls were given subdermal implants and 800 were given hormone injections to temporarily prevent pregnancy. Another 3,200 15-year-olds were also implanted with hormone-releasing contraceptives.

But prevailing “patient confidentiality” laws strictly forbid school authorities seeking permission from or even notifying parents.

Are we out of our minds?

Parents are raising teens who are growing up in an increasingly sex-crazed and depraved environment. Then politicians step in and take away the most fundamental parental tool, knowing the truth, at a frightening juncture in their child’s life!

Forget about teaching children to have the morality and character to lead a stable life. Forget about reinforcing and deferring to the relationships between parents and children. Forget about doing what’s right. This policy isn’t even doing—even in the short term—what works.

Yes, hormone contraceptives may reduce pregnancy rates. That is the premise on which this whole misguided fiasco is based. But what do they do to heal the emotional and psychological damage in the mind of a child who has succumbed to the pressure and engaged in casual sex? What do they do to prevent sexually transmitted diseases? Did you know that these types of contraceptives harm people by increasing their chances of catching diseases like syphilis and gonorrhea?

Forget about the fact that this entire plot is better suited to a horror story than it is to modern real-life Britain. Forget that the state has already damaged/harmed/killed dozens or hundreds or thousands of family relationships, just last year. Can we just ask some fundamental, black-and-white, yes-or-no questions here?

Is the state even concerned about protecting children from sexually transmitted diseases? Is it concerned about potential long-term damages from injecting chemicals into young growing bodies? Does it have an injection to fix the debilitating trauma and depression when the boy in sixth-hour Algebra class gets tired of your daughter and moves on to the next girl? Does it have an implant that will release remedial doses of the confidence and character and hope and love that gets obliterated when a 13-year-old child has sex with another 14-year-old child?

What a sick world.

In a subdermal contraceptive implant, the 1.5-inch plastic tube remains under the skin for three years. Some research reported by the Daily Mail now suggests that the hormones this tube releases raise the risk of breast cancer. They also cause weight gain, acne, irregular periods, as well as depression. The chemical jabs, meanwhile, are linked to bone-thinning. But is there any hope that this scientific evidence will sway the powers that be against this policy, when so far it’s patently obvious evil hasn’t?

What makes all this societal carnage worth it? Do you want to look me in the eye and tell me that my daughter’s innocence and future is worth the price so that you can preserve her freedom to have sex with boys and not worry about getting pregnant?

Guess which side the courts come down on? They say that school teachers and administrators cannot tell parents their daughter is sleeping around, but they can conspire to send home a girl who is unhappy, unhealthy, hormonally imbalanced and estranged from the two people she should be closest to, loved by and protected by.

What an upside-down world.

In spite of policies like this and a glut of sex education, teenage pregnancy rates—the one thing we all seem to be willing to agree is a bad thing—are still sky-high. The Daily Mail reports that teen pregnancy among British girls is twice as common as among French and German girls, and five times the rate in the Netherlands. But as bad as it is in Britain, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the developed world is in the United States. And in 2008, one quarter of American teenage girls had at least one sexually transmitted disease. Many had (or have) more than one. Half of all U.S. states allow minors to be given birth control without parental consent. The federal government even pays for it through organizations such as Planned Parenthood. In the other half, there are many blogs and “family planning” websites that will help a teen circumvent consent requirements and get contraceptives or even abortions.

What about the American government’s response? To empower families? To strengthen parents? To emphasize the consequences of contracting stds? To promote abstinence? To seek out any of the real causes of these crises?

No. Just more treating of the symptoms: Rename stds “sexually transmitted infections” so no one’s feelings get hurt—and push for more hormone contraceptives.

Politicians justify their actions by saying this: Teenage children are going to have sex with each other anyway. That causes teenage pregnancies. So something must be done to bring down the rate of accidental teenage pregnancies. Something like making a half-inch incision in a teenage child and pushing a plastic tube full of chemicals in.

But that premise is a big lie. Yes, there have always been some youth who will have sex out of marriage. But they used to be the exception! At one point, they were the tiny minority. And children were more hopeful, more confident, safer and happier.

It’s time to realize that we have crossed a threshold. We now live in a world in which the collective state has taken responsibility for parenting away from parents. There is no other way to describe a system that helps teenagers circumvent their parents and promotes promiscuity. When teenage pregnancies predictably boom, the government again steps in with generous welfare packages for single moms. In many cases, a single mother will have more babies for the purpose of qualifying for more welfare (especially in Britain and Canada). These programs make it not only possible, but appealing for teenagers to abandon the family home and the family rules. All indirectly on behalf of—and directly funded by—voters and taxpayers.

In the past, it was the family’s responsibility to provide for family members. How have we gotten to the point where we need to argue that parents should know the truth about their children, that schools shouldn’t undermine families, that government shouldn’t fight parents?

If Britain—or America, or France or Germany for that matter—truly wants to fix its teenage pregnancy rate, it needs to fix its families. Whether you draw the line at immorality, suffering families, heartbreak, promiscuity, stds, or teenage pregnancies, none of this evil will stop until we do.