Planned Parenthood, the leading abortion provider in the United States, is set to open up 50 new clinics at Los Angeles-area high schools. Set to open within the next three years, the new clinics were announced on Wednesday and will be operated in cooperation with the Los Angeles Unified School District and the Los Angeles County Department of Health.
At least five of the new clinics are already opened at schools in Los Angeles.
Funded by an initial investment of $10 million from Los Angeles County and $6 million from Planned Parenthood, the clinics will offer birth-control options, testing and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, and pregnancy counseling. At least for the time being, abortions will not be offered at the school clinics.
California law allows minors to consent to some medical services, such as receiving birth control and mental health counseling, without a parent’s consent or knowledge. School personnel will not have access to any health records the clinic keeps.
The clinics will reportedly be staffed by two public health officials who are trained by Planned Parenthood to give counseling and, likely, abortion referrals. A Planned Parenthood nurse practitioner will be on the premises once per week.
The 50 schools were selected because they are largely in low-income neighborhoods that lack similar facilities — so, literally, the most vulnerable population Planned Parenthood could find.
According to Barbara Ferrer, the director of the L.A. County Department of Health and a former high-school principal, the new school-based clinics grew from conversations about how to stem the area’s alarming rise in sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhea and chlamydia in the high-school population.
Sue Dunlap, the president of Planned Parenthood Los Angeles, expects protests about the clinics from pro-lifers in the community but she seems confident she is ready for them.
“I do anticipate, as this becomes public, we will have very normal and healthy debate around sexuality and schools and what it is to be engaged in family communication around a healthy adolescence,” Dunlap said.
Per Planned Parenthood’s usual modus operandi, the clinics will be named in an innocuous way as to hide their inner workings. The new clinics will be called “wellness centers,” since they will, allegedly, provide more than routine medical services. “We want to support their general well-being, the ups and downs of being a teen.”
But pro-life advocates believe that the new clinics are simply a way to catch more vulnerable youth and compound bad decisions on their part with another bad decision — to have an abortion.
“Planned Parenthood has been targeting younger and younger girls, through their version of sex education, beginning as early as elementary school, which encourages people to make bad choices, partly because Planned Parenthood profits from crisis and from selling abortions to those same students,” said Kristan Hawkins, the President of Students for Life.
“This is a marketing ploy by the nation’s number one abortion vendor,” Hawkins said. “There is a conflict of interest in allowing Planned Parenthood into schools in any form to market their deadly business, knowing that they will make millions from the students who won’t know until it’s too late that Planned Parenthood does not care about women. They care about money.”
It’s probably no coincidence that Planned Parenthood picked a California district to unveil this new program. In addition to being one of the most leftist states in the union, the state also mandated last October that public colleges must offer students abortion medication. That law is set to take effect in 2023. It’ll be convenient for the universities if the Los Angleles schools pilot program expands to the public colleges by then.
2019 has been a year of mixed blessings in the decades-long war over abortion in the United States. While Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Missouri have all passed laws with serious restrictions on abortions, other states such as New York and Vermont have passed bills removing pretty much any restriction on the practice up until the time of birth. The news that California is allowing Planned Parenthood into high schools is a reminder that pro-abortion forces are not simply going to go away without a fight.
As for California, one wonders if organizations offering alternatives to abortion will also be allowed in these 50 schools. If it’s a matter of “choice,” after all, shouldn’t a choice be offered to those vulnerable students?
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James Murphy is a freelance journalist who writes on a variety of subjects with a primary focus on the ongoing anthropogenic climate-change hoax and cultural issues. He can be reached at [email protected].
