The Patriot Post® · Birth Control Tyranny Imposed on Children

One of the more repugnant manifestations of progressive ideology is being perpetrated in middle schools and high schools around Seattle. At least 13 clinics in the area are offering taxpayer-funded long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs), including intrauterine devices (IUDs) and hormonal implants, to students in sixth through twelfth grades — without parental consent.

One public high school, Chief Sealth International, began offering the devices in 2010, and is now in the business of implanting them. The effort is made possible by a Medicaid program called Take Charge and a non-profit called Neighborcare. CNS News asked Take Charge if it were possible for a sixth grader — meaning girls whose average age is eleven — to get an IUD implanted without parental consent. The answer? “We encourage all Take Charge providers to offer long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) in their clinics. A young person does not need parental consent to obtain a LARC or any other contraceptive method. … If the young person is not choosing abstinence, she would be able to select a LARC and have it inserted without parental consent.”

As the Washington state Medicaid website reveals, health centers at four middle schools and nine high schools in the Seattle area participate in the Take Charge program. Additional Take Charge centers are also located near schools. “Because we’re at the school, which is so wonderful, we have access to the students, and they have access to us, pretty much any time,” gushed Katie Acker, a health “educator” at two high school clinics run by Neighborcare, which also participates in the Take Charge program. Acker further described a scene where members of a girls gymnastics team crowded around one of their teammates in an exam room while she was fitted with an IUD.

“It’s absolutely amazing and crazy,” Acker continued. “The birth control culture, for lack of a better term, and the conversations have just changed so much. Even for me, starting in September of 2013 to now, seeing the change — conversations are just happening so openly and so excitedly. There’s so much pride around, ‘I’ve got this method, I’ve got this method.’ It’s not a hush-hush thing anymore.”

Utterly twisted, especially when one becomes aware of the risks associated with this self-aggrandizing “birth control culture,” including a British Journal of Pharmacology study showing that taking birth control pills doubles the risk of brain tumors or that newer oral contraceptives increase the possibility of blood clots. LARCs are also associated with long-term side effects such as pain and heavy bleeding, and bleeding between periods. Health risks include perforation of the uterine walls; Pelvic Inflammatory Disease (PID) that could cause scarring in the reproductive organs making it harder to become pregnant; and higher incidents of “ectopic pregnancies” defined as the implantation of an embryo outside the uterus.

All of this insanity is made possible by a Washington state law declaring that “every individual possesses a fundamental right of privacy with respect to personal reproductive decisions.” Yet the wording used in the law’s subheading refers to the right of a “woman” to choose or refuse an abortion and the fact that the state cannot interfere with a “woman’s” fundamental right to do so.

Is there is any other law related to reproductive health, or any surgical procedures with all risks that attend abortion or the insertion of IUDs, where a girl as young as 11 is deemed capable of making such decisions, not only without parental permission, but without notification? Is there any other aspect of law in general where an 11-year-old is considered an adult, capable of making adult decisions? Indeed, the same school system has banned soda and junk food — presumably because students are incapable of making such health choices for themselves.

Make no mistake: This outrage is quite simply the imposition of government-sanctioned pro-birth control, pro-abortion ideology on parents who have been rendered powerless to make informed health choices or shape the moral destiny of their own children. It comes courtesy of the same American Left that has tirelessly endeavored to remove anything that smacks of organized religion from those same schools because they are fully aware the moral precepts that form the foundation of religion would threaten their state-oriented ideological hegemony. Their success in removing religion from public schools has given the Left the opportunity to present their own set of “values” to children, absent any rebuttal. Add in the equally successful effort of removing parents from the equation and there is only one word that aptly describes such a system of “education”: indoctrination.

Two days ago, we Americans celebrated our liberation from tyrannical government. Yet what could be more tyrannical than a third party with a self-aggrandizing sense of “superior” wisdom imposing that wisdom on children absent parental knowledge or consent — backed by the full force and power of the state?

“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted,” Vladimir Lenin once stated. The man called the father of Russian communism would undoubtedly be welcomed as a teacher, principal or school superintendent in Seattle.