In the latest damning indictment of modern education and culture, BuzzFeed approvingly reports on a pair of teenage girls who “totally stole” the fashion show at Ethical Culture Fieldston School, a New York private school that “emphasize[s their] students’ moral development and guide[s] them towards service and social justice,” with a stunt that was anything but moral or ethical.
ECFS holds an annual student fashion show in which students wear handmade designs that cannot use fabric. But while this was surely a fun tradition and a good creative outlet in years past, Karolina Montes (17) and Zoe Balestri (16), with the help of art teacher Nancy Fried, decided to put a happy face on mass killings this year with their entries — dresses made entirely out of Planned Parenthood stickers and condom wrappers:
In April, President Donald Trump signed a law targeting domestic funding for Planned Parenthood, a women’s health service provider whose offerings include abortion services. In January, the president restored the Mexico City Policy, known by critics as the “global gag rule,” which imposes abortion-related restrictions on US foreign aid. The international arm of Planned Parenthood has said that rule will cost the organization $100 million in funding, or about 25% of its budget.
Montes said, “it just seems like such an important part of our culture, that we need to have safer methods [of family planning] and we need to educate. That’s the main the point, is to educate people.”
“It just seems” is about the level of understanding to be expected from the average teenager being indoctrinated by a self-described “progressive” school and the surrounding culture of a pro-abortion state. It’s no surprise that ECFS’ stated mission of molding kids into “passionate learners, critical thinkers, and ethical individuals who aim to make the world more humane and just” utterly failed to imprint on these young ladies any comprehension that an organization that violently kills innocent children — and privately admits that’s exactly what they’re doing — might not be the most laudable thing to celebrate.
Nor is it surprising that their idea of social consciousness doesn’t mean being well-informed enough to know that this heroic provider of women’s health care has been increasing its abortions, but decreasing its contraception services, prenatal care, and cancer screenings — despite both its taxpayer funding and private donations going up over the same time period. Yet privatizing Planned Parenthood’s income would endanger women? There’s no other way to possibly provide women’s health care? Apparently ECFS doesn’t teach elementary logic.
Belastri made the top of her dress out of condoms. “They said, ‘Don’t eff with us, don’t eff without us.’ I thought that was really funny,” she said.
No, what’s really funny is that even when framing this stand in high-minded talk about women’s health, she can’t help but demonstrate that even Planned Parenthood’s supporters instinctively know what its primary business really is: promoting sexual promiscuity, even among minors.
“They’re trying to shut down Planned Parenthoods and make abortion illegal, and that really frightens and saddens me, because it’s such an amazing thing that is provided to women,” Belastri said. “I have friends who use Planned Parenthood services. It’s been there for people in high school, in college, in adulthood, for people who can’t afford to have a child, or for other circumstances. It’s necessary.”
It’s unclear if Belastri meant to say Planned Parenthood is amazing or abortion itself is amazing (here’s what abortion is), but either way, it’s sick. Oh, and how does the mindset that women are incapable of figuring out how to avoid pregnancy without Planned Parenthood, or how to succeed in life with a child, square with ECFS’s mission of “challenging students to reach their highest potential in body, mind, and spirit”?
However, while it’s tempting to lament the ignorance and moral backwardness on display here and call it a day, what pro-lifers really need to take away from this incident is how much influence the culture of death has over American education, molding millions of young minds with far too little countervailing influence.
Planned Parenthood boasts that their own sex “education” efforts corrupt almost a million middle- and high-school students every year, and the political affiliation of the teaching profession leans heavily in abortion’s favor. Pro-lifers need to not only keep a close eye on their own school districts to ensure Planned Parenthood is neither allowed in the doors nor endorsed as a legitimate resource, but also make it a state-level legislative priority to add proper fetal-development education to school science curricula.
If the simple, incontrovertible facts of embryology are taught in a clear and simple way, many will make the logical connection to what Planned Parenthood really is all on their own.
Granted, there’s not much we can do directly about a leftist private school like Fieldston in a pro-abortion state like New York, but we can do much more to increase the odds that properly-educated young people outnumber the indoctrinated.
Editor’s Note: All op-eds are the opinion of the writer, and not necessarily the official position of Live Action.
