The Young & the Hot-Wired
Planned Parenthood Teaches Teenagers Perversity’s Best Techniques
by Dawn Eden
Readers are warned that this report includes quite graphic
language from
Planned Parenthood’s website.
In January of this year, when a 16-year-old boy had been charged with a felony for killing his girlfriend’s unborn child by striking her stomach with a baseball bat, Planned Parenthood acknowledged that a tragedy had occurred. But the organization’s definition of tragedy was far different from that of prosecutors.
For Planned Parenthood, the tragedy was not that the unborn child was killed. It was that the abortion was done outside a doctor’s office, with all the legal and medical protections that such an environment provides. According to The Detroit News,
Lori Lamerand, vice president of the Planned Parenthood Mid-Michigan Alliance, said pregnant teens have safer options available than terminating a pregnancy without a doctor. “It’s always tragic when people resort to such drastic measures, when there are appropriate, safe medical measures available,” Lamerand said.
That is how Planned Parenthood deals with uncomfortable moral issues, especially as they relate to teenagers and abortion: paradigm shifts. It aims to redirect people’s natural sense of right and wrong, so that they will have a sense of moral justification as they condemn what is good and uphold what is evil. How better to shift the moral paradigm of a generation than by instilling a new set of values in its young?
An article in the Madera (California) Tribune on that city’s Planned Parenthood clinic included, amid the usual description of the site’s offerings, an aside from the facility’s manager: “Our community outreach program includes providing books for the children of our clients to encourage their love of reading.”
Since its inception, Planned Parenthood has been keenly interested in providing reading material to children—and doing so in a surreptitious fashion that belies the organization’s true intent. In 1916, its founder, Margaret Sanger, published the sex-ed pamphlet What Every Mother Should Know, or, How Six Little Children Were Taught the Truth, explaining her method in its introduction: “The idea is that the child be taught the process of reproduction and absorb such knowledge without realizing he has received any ‘sex’ instruction.”
Over the years, Planned Parenthood has melded Sanger’s teachings with those of Dr. Alfred Kinsey and the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS, which received its first major grant money from Playboy magazine). The result, which has been revised many times over, is one of the organization’s most widely distributed publications, available on its website: Human Sexuality—What Children Need to Know and When They Need to Know It.
Sex education used to be given entirely by children’s parents, free from the influence of government or other outside organizations. It was based upon personal responsibility and self-control. Even when parents erred by instilling undue shame, the lesson—that sex should be reserved for marriage—gave children moral strength to resist allowing themselves to use others or be used as a means to an end.
The Kinsey/SIECUS/Planned Parenthood paradigm, as expressed in Human Sexuality, is likewise all about personal responsibility and self-control. But the responsibility has shifted to the responsibility to make one’s own “choices”—and self-control is reduced to having the presence of mind to use a condom.
Controlling Impulses
Dawn Eden is a freelance writer covering faith and politics. She maintains an online presence with The Dawn Patrol (www.dawneden.com/blogger.html).
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