I hope this starts an investigation into Planned Parenthood, all over the country.
There's a big to-do started here with them too. Seems they did a presentation at one of the public schools without the teacher sending home parental permission slips.
An 8th grade girl (she is Catholic) was very upset by what was presented, and told her mom. Who was mad....then became furious. The mom went onto the web site that was provided to the kids for further information. Apparently, from the site provided to the children...were links to bestiality, sodomy, homosexuality.
The justifiably upset mother not only went to the school and the school board....she went to the media. It's been in the paper, and on the local news channels.
Last week, there was a meeting at our church - open to the public - to discuss Planned Parenthood being allowed into the schools to give presentations. (I forgot about it, until I saw it on the 11pm news that night
).
The Superintendent of Schools said it was "an unfortunate incident that proper protocol was not followed in notifying the parents"....huh?
What about reviewing the material that is being presented BEFORE it's presented?!!
M and I got in a big discussion about this last Sunday after Mass...as I had talked to one of the women, after Mass, who had been interviewed on tv after the meeting.
Some kids have parents who will teach them at home - some give too much info at too young and age, and some give too much info, regardless of age. Then there are some kids who don't get any, they learn only from other kids or by experimenting themselves,
I do think there should be sex education in school. It should not be a graded subject. But I do think it should be done with groups of girls only and boys only. They should be taught in separate classrooms. That way it remains a serious subject, and kids are more likely to be more open in their questions - which should be answered honestly with no hidden agenda. It should be done with parental permission only, without signed permission...the child should be sent to study hall. It should also be open to parents being allowed to attend the classes.
When I was in 5th or 6th grade, after school one day, all the girls in that grade - along with their mothers, had a meeting where we watched a film about "becoming women". The mothers, the teachers (who were all women) and the school nurse, were there with us. We learned about how our bodies were going to change. Pretty scary and yukky to us girls, but it was well done and quite serious...no joking around. I don't know about other girls, but it started my mom on having "discussions" with me. Now days, it would probably need to be done in much lower grades, just because of commercials on tv, ads in magazines, tv programs, and girls starting their periods as young as 8 or 9 now.
I'm sure the boys had something similar.
Kids are not going to stop having sex, or experimenting with how far they can go without going "all the way". It is unrealistic to think that they are. All most parents have to do, is to think back to how old they were when they first started to experiment. Particularly the fathers! But kids DO need to know how to
prevent pregnancy and transmission of disease. Teaching it in school is not necessarily a bad thing...it's HOW it's taught and WHO is doing the teaching that should be the primary issues. It should not be taught by any entity that is going to profit financially from whatever information they give to the children.
