This article was originally published by The Washington Examiner. Author: Monica Cline September 05, 2019 12:00 AM
As a former Title X training manager and sex educator for 10 years, I got a close-up view into the world of Planned Parenthood and sex education.
On one hand, Title X is a program that serves women and families by helping them access family planning medical services. On the other hand, it’s also the perfect vehicle for Planned Parenthood to promote social change by utilizing its well-meaning prevention education to proselytize youth toward sexual promiscuity and abortion. It’s the perfect business plan for a lifelong customer, and it's being backed by trusted government programs for Title X and HIV prevention.
According to the Office of Population Affairs, Title X “is intended to assist primary care providers to offer family planning services that help persons and couples achieve their desired number and spacing of children and increase the likelihood that those children are born healthy.” It’s not intended for the termination of pregnancies, nor to encourage high-risk sexual behavior under the guise of “sexual freedom,” “sexual rights,” or “empowerment of women.”
So, how did we get from planning for a family and healthy births to risky sexual behavior and abortion? Through sex education.
Title X recognizes that many people are sexually active outside of marriage and with multiple partners, so the need to educate about the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases and HIV is important. It’s also particularly important among adolescents and young adults, who together make up only 27% of the U.S. population but account for 50% of the new sexually transmitted infections in our country each year. But the approach used by Planned Parenthood and other like-minded organizations takes sex education to the next level. Their added spice to education transforms our youth from naturally curious to sexually explicit.
The first lesson I learned in my sex education training is to assume that adolescents have done anything and everything when it comes to sex and that if they haven’t, they will.
It was 1997, and I was a new HIV prevention educator at a local gay organization. Planned Parenthood was across the street, and the director of sex education welcomed me in for a personalized training on how to reach and teach adolescents about sex. She told me several horror stories about young girls coming into the clinic with injuries, objects, and pregnancy. Some were as young as 10 years old. I sat there disturbed by what I heard, and I wanted to do my part to help these girls. I said, “You’ve convinced me. Teach me how to teach girls not to have sex.”
“No, dear!” she patted me on the knee, “We’re not going to teach them not to have sex. We’re going to teach them how to do it safer. We meet them where they’re at and teach them to do it safer.”
I argued that they were too young to be having sex and that what was happening was wrong and not safe. She insisted that we could teach them to have sex in safer ways and that anything else, i.e. not having sex, was judging them for their choice. I trusted her because she was the “expert.”
This is what I taught. Remember the first lesson? View your audience as if they have done it all and then teach them how to do it safer. Since most adolescents are nervous to speak about sex, we begin the lesson with an icebreaker, which is geared to reduce the children’s natural inhibitions to prepare them for the sex education lessons. The educator asks the kids to shout out or go to the board and write all the slang terms for reproductive body parts or sexual activities. You can imagine how crass this becomes.
At first, they nervously say a few worlds, but when they notice the educator is encouraging them, they fully participate. The quiet ones in the group get used to it too. By the end of this activity, there is a collage of illicit sexual terms and activities written all over the board. The kids begin to believe that this is part of healthy sex education. The terms are dehumanizing, and the activity serves to restructure their thoughts about their bodies, others' bodies, and the act of sex. Sexual intimacy is redefined from being special, for marriage or for having babies, to being crass, seeking pleasure over meaningful relationships, accepting STDs as a way of life, and terminating the lives of babies so we can worship our sexual rights without hindrance.
What’s next? Now that the foundation has been laid out and sexual activity has been reduced to a recreational activity, it’s time to talk about vaginal sex, oral sex, anal sex, and all the bodily fluids that put them at risk of contracting an STI. All forms of sexual activity are normalized.
Parents are purposely left out. Parents are powerful, possessing a natural instinct to protect their children, and Planned Parenthood wants to undermine that. That is why they say, “Parents are a barrier to service.” The only good parent to Planned Parenthood is the parent who agrees with their ideology. The rest of us need to be made irrelevant, and the organization has great counseling skills to help make us irrelevant in the eyes of our children.
I know, because I witnessed it.
This type of sex education does not protect our youth. It only serves to encourage them to explore all sexual activities and places a burden on them that they are not prepared to bear. Will Planned Parenthood continue to educate our youth about sex? Of course, they’ll try. Planned Parenthood and other like-minded organizations have been collaborating for years to establish illicit sex education in our schools and communities. Remember, it’s big money for them.
Want to know the fix? Reclaim parenthood. Don’t check out on your kids. Engage with them and take the lead in their lives. Parents are the sole authority over our children, and our children are waiting for us to lead. And let’s not let our taxpayer money fund organizations like Planned Parenthood. Meet the people running for office, ask them questions, research their voting records, and vote. Parents are the most hopeful people I know. We want the best for our children. Our goal is for our kids to turn out better than ourselves.
Organizations like Planned Parenthood do not aspire for more in our children’s lives. Their answer to happiness and empowerment is to have sex, use a condom, get tested, treated, and have an abortion.
If you have fallen victim to this ideology, I’m right there with you. Don’t feel bad. I used to live this way too. But when I rejected Planned Parenthood, I found a new way that is full of hope, empowerment, and one that puts me in line with the best interest of my child. All children deserve this kind of hope as well.
Monica Cline is a speaker, parent educator, and founder of It Takes A Family. She was trained by and collaborated with Planned Parenthood for 10 years.