After the legislative disaster that marred this year’s March for Life, it’s reassuring to see that Congress can still do something right. The Huffington Post reports:
House Republicans attached language to a major education bill Wednesday night that would financially penalize school districts that allow school-based health centers to provide information about abortion to pregnant high school students.
The amendment to the Student Success Act, a GOP overhaul of No Child Left Behind, would withhold federal funding from school districts that contract with health centers unless the center certifies that it will not provide abortions or give students any information about abortion, including directions to the nearest abortion provider. (School-based health centers already do not provide abortion services.)
And of course, pro-aborts are hopping mad about it:
“This amendment is a cowardly attack on young people’s access to the full range of information about their reproductive health care,” said Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. “This provision ties the hands of health care professionals in schools, and would deny teens access to important and basic information about their health care options.”
On top of the small matter of “reproductive health care” being a euphemism for killing a harmless child, Richards doesn’t want you to know that the “full range care ” she’s talking about is full enough to include a product that, despite how loudly Richards’ acolytes may howl their denials, inflicts on young people heightened odds of breast cancer, future preterm births, future miscarriages, and psychological turmoil up to and including suicide.
Or that her organization—the primary beneficiary of the funding in question—actively encourages those teens to be sexually promiscuous, including sex training for elementary students and withholding life-threatening diseases from sex partners, despite casual sex’s profound emotional and medical fallout, which none of the “health care options” she’s peddling can fully guard against.
So really, the sensible question isn’t “why not give these people taxpayers’ money?” but rather “why do we let these people get within 500 feet of minors?” What a difference a little information makes.
The pro-abortion movement is highly skilled at pushing its agenda through the strings they attach to federal tax dollars. Especially with the courts stymieing so many direct legislative action against abortion, it’s high time pro-lifers start giving them a taste of their own medicine.
Unfortunately, the Student Success Act is unlikely to be a viable vehicle to cleaning Planned Parenthood out of our schools—aspects unrelated to abortion have earned opposition on both sides, with Obama threatening to veto the bill and the House GOP withdrawing it.
But considering NCLB technically expired way back in 2007, Congress will presumably have to come up with something to replace or renew it sooner or later. Whatever form the next major piece of education legislation takes, Congress must not waver from making the abortion lobby’s expulsion a non-negotiable condition of passage.
