New York City’s health department has launched a smartphone app that offers teens advice on sex, pregnancy, birth control, abortion, and homosexual relationships, among other “sexual health” issues. Predictably, the app sidesteps all parental involvement, assuring youth who download the resource that they “have the right to sexual health services without getting permission from parents, girlfriends/boyfriends, or anyone else.”
New York City Health Commissioner Thomas Farley insisted that most parents his agency consulted with are on board with the app. “The Teens in NYC mobile app provides information in ways that are familiar to teens so they have can access to these services,” Farley said. “Teenagers are often embarrassed to talk to people about sex, especially their parents.”
CBS News noted that the app, which is available for both iPhones and Google Android devices, “features sex education videos, including one about a girl who is confused about her sexual orientation. Users can also use it to locate places to get free condoms, a pregnancy test, or counseling.”
Focus on the Family’s CitizenLink pro-family activist website reported that the app includes videos such as “Samantha’s Story,” which features a girl discussing the five-month sexual relationship she has had with her boyfriend, along with the same-sex attraction she feels toward her best friend. The “Samantha” video “also mentions a trip to an ‘LGBT-friendly’ center where a counselor says her same-sex attractions are ‘totally normal,’” reports CitizenLink.
In another video featured on the app, a teenage girl reflects on how she had originally wanted to save sex for marriage, until she gave in to her boyfriend. “I didn’t want to freak out Lewis and make him think that I regretted it, because I didn’t,” she says. “But by the end of the day I was really panicking. I don’t want to get pregnant right now. There’s too much else I want to do.”
The teen girl is shown visiting a local clinic, where she is given “morning after” pills. “I was so relieved,” she says. “I took the two pills right then. Then I met with a social worker and she said if I wanted to keep having sex I needed to use a condom, plus another kind of birth control that works with your hormones.”
Chad Hills, a policy analyst for Focus on the Family, said that New York City’s policies “represent a blatant disregard and disrespect for parents and minors, specifically, as state policy relates to ‘sexual health services.” He added that “teaching children to avoid and deceive their parents — in exchange for questionable ‘health’ advice and ‘services’ — endangers and exploits children, while eroding core family principles in the areas of parent-child communication, connectedness, and child well-being.”
Farley, however, justified the app and the way it sidesteps parental involvement to facilitate teen sex. “The idea that we are going to shield kids from that information is long since history,” he declared, claiming that teens are “often not informed and we wanted to speak the language of teens. And teens use mobile phones these days for information so it was the best way to reach the people we want to reach.”
The app, which is available through the NYC health department’s teen website, lists services and resources available to teens without the permission of parents, such as free condoms and other contraceptives, testing for pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, and access to abortion.
Not surprisingly, New York City has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the nation, with the city’s health department statistics indicating that one in 15 teen girls got pregnant and and gave birth to some 17,000 babies in 2011. More shocking is the revelation that 40 percent of all pregnancies in New York City end in abortion. In one borough, the Bronx, nearly half of all pregnancies end in abortion, according to NYC health department statistics.
“The abortion industry in New York City continues to prey on lower-income black women, as almost 58 percent of abortions end in abortion for black women and children,” reported LifeNews.com. “The ratio of abortions for African-American women remained demographically highest in the city in 2011 while Asian and Pacific Island women had the lowest ratio at 18.2%.”
The pro-life news site added that “of the 203,514 viable pregnancies in New York City in 2011, 80,485 were terminated by abortion” — with 2,085 (2.59 percent) of those abortions being performed at 21 weeks of pregnancy or later.
