Several weeks ago, John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight” took a deep dive into “crisis pregnancy centers.” These controversial facilities often open near family planning clinics to attract pregnant women with free pregnancy tests and ultrasounds and then try to dissuade them from considering abortion. Many CPCs operate mobile clinics-on-wheels, which are permitted to park near abortion clinics in an attempt to intercept pregnant women to talk them out of their decision.
In the segment, Oliver ran through the types of false information that CPCs are legally permitted to tell their “patients”: that contraception doesn’t work, that abortion leads to breast cancer and infertility, that women who get abortions are at increased risk of suicide.
To demonstrate how easy it is to open a CPC ― how few qualifications you need and how little oversight there is ― Oliver opened a mobile crisis pregnancy center of his own: He called it “Vanned Parenthood.” “In this van we are allowed to tell women whatever dubious information comes into our heads,” he said on his HBO show. The segment brought national attention to this issue, but it left out one extremely important aspect. In addition to providing inaccurate health information to pregnant women, CPCs are teaching sex education in our children’s public schools.
These centers have been teaching sex education in schools since the 1980s, instructing students that the only effective way to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections is to abstain from sex until marriage. Condoms? Birth control? CPCs frequently say that they are ineffective and often fail. They’re going into classrooms and telling students the very same thing. Many centers falsely warn students that sex before marriage leads to psychological damage and even death. Yes, death.
We are both parents. Jaime Winfree is a former educator, and Andrea Swartzendruber is a reproductive health epidemiologist. We were not surprised that “Last Week Tonight” didn’t cover crisis pregnancy centers’ influence on middle school and high school students. Many parents aren’t aware, either.
Tamara Ashley, a parent in Lilburn, Georgia, learned only last summer that the local CPC was giving her daughter false information about sex and contraception in her public school health class. “I was horrified,” Ashley said, when asked to describe her reaction to the center’s methods. “She was taught that birth control doesn’t work… that if she had sex before marriage, she would regret it for the rest of her life and would no longer have the same value to a future spouse. No one would want her.”
In one exercise to which Ashley’s daughter’s class was subjected, the instructor gave each student a piece of individually wrapped candy and told them to suck on it and place it back in the wrapper. She then collected all of the candy and asked who wanted one, likening the spit-out candy to a girl who has had sex with multiple partners. “If you think that’s gross, imagine it’s someone’s vagina,” quipped the instructor.
These outrageous messages are most often focused on female students, but they are dangerous for all students. They can be especially harmful to sexually experienced students, who are told that those who have sex before marriage are used up, dirty and unworthy of future love. They’re harmful to survivors of sexual trauma, too: The centers’ presentation and curricula only serve to reinforce the shame that so many survivors feel, which creates obstacles to their healing. Due to the centers’ strict ideology, instructors completely neglect the needs of LGTBQ students and stigmatize same-sex relationships as deviant, leaving those students vulnerable to adverse mental and sexual health consequences.
Read the full story at The Huffington Post
