Un-Planned Parenthood
On any given day, herds of fat, fuzzy rabbits hop lazily through the Global Connections High School campus in SeaTac’s Highline School District. “Someone ditched their pets in our parking lot and all they do is breed, well, like you-know-what,” explains the school receptionist with a shrug. The rabbits—cute as they are—stand as a weird totem to a similar problem: the school district’s 25 pregnancies per 1,000 students, the second-highest teen pregnancy rate in King County, according to Public Health-Seattle & King County.
To address that problem, the school has teamed up with Planned Parenthood—an iconic target for GOP attacks against reproductive freedom—to host federally funded sex talks for teenagers on school grounds. On October 19, national Planned Parenthood Federation president Cecile Richards visited from Washington, DC, to sit in a circle with 16 of these teenagers in a Global Connections classroom. They freely admit that some of them are sexually active, and need to learn about proper condom and birth control use, and how to prevent sexually transmitted diseases. But as Richards points out, the program is more than just a sex talk: They meet once a week to discuss communication, self-esteem, and relationships with friends and family.
But if congressional Republicans who control the House get their way, Planned Parenthood’s Teen Outreach Program (TOP) won’t make it through the school year. Their 2012 spending bill, introduced in the House Labor, Health, and Human Services appropriations subcommittee, eliminates federal funding for TOP—and all Planned Parenthood clinics—unless the organization agrees to stop providing abortions. In furthering their ideological agenda, the GOP also declares in their bill that TOP funds must be reserved for abstinence-only programs.