Do Parents Have The Right To Know That The School Is Giving Their Children Drugs ?

The New York Post posted an article on Saturday (updated today) about a program in the New York City schools that provides high school girls with birth control pills–including Plan B (the morning-after pill).

The article reports:

Last September, the city revealed it had started giving out Plan B and other birth control in the nurses’ offices of 13 high schools. At the time, officials said 567 girls had gotten Plan B.

But the birth-control blitz was much bigger than the city had acknowledged. About 40 separate “school-based health centers” doled out 12,721 doses of Plan B in 2011-12, up from 10,720 in 2010-11 and 5,039 in 2009-10, according to the newly released data.

 About 22,400 students sought reproductive care from January 2009 through last school year, records show. Under state law, minors don’t need parental OKs to get contraceptives.

The article further reports:

The city says about 6,300 NYC girls under age 17 had unplanned pregnancies last year, and more than half had abortions. Of those who give birth, the city says, about 70 percent drop out of school, making their futures bleak.

Just for the record, the age of consent for sex in New York is seventeen. That means that the schools are giving out birth control to children who are not legally supposed to be having sex. So let me get this straight. There won’t be salt on my table at a restaurant in New York City because Mayor Bloomberg says it is bad for me. No restaurant can use transfat to fry food in New York City, and ‘big gulp’ sodas are illegal in New York City because Mayor Bloomberg says they are bad for me, but my daughter can obtain birth control or the morning after pill without my consent our without consulting me about any medical conditions that she may have.

The world has truly turned upside down.

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What Is The Value Of A Person’s Conscience To Society ?

Unfortunately that is not currently a hypothetical question. KEPR-TV reported on Wednesday that a Federal Judge will consider if Washington state can require pharmacies to stock and sell Plan B or other emergency contraceptives, even in the face of religious objections by druggists who believe they destroy human life.

The article reports:

U.S. District Judge Ronald Leighton heard closing arguments Wednesday in a lawsuit that claims state rules violate the constitutional rights of pharmacists by requiring them to dispense such medicine. The state requires them to dispense any medication for which there is a community need and to stock a representative assortment of drugs needed by their patients.

When did emergency contraception (read ‘morning-after pill’) become a community need?

The article further reports:

The pharmacists argued they can easily and quickly refer customers to nearby pharmacies willing to sell the drug. Individual pharmacists are allowed to pass a prescription to another druggist in the same store, provided the patient’s order was filled without delay. But that leaves no option for a lone pharmacist, or for the owner of a pharmacy who also has religious objections to a particular drug.

The pharmacists “can violate their core religious beliefs and participate in the taking of a human life, or they can lose their license,” lawyer Kristen Waggoner said during her closing argument.

Before you decide this case has nothing to do with you for various reasons, let’s walk down the road a bit and see where it goes. Every person has a slightly different conscience. That is because we are all different and have different life experiences. However, when we begin to violate other peoples’ consciences because we share a different belief, we lose some of the reins that keep society from spinning out of control. I am sure that there were people in Germany who were offended when the government began killing the disabled and the infirm. I am sure their feelings were ignored. By the time Hitler got around to killing the Jews, the idea of a conscience was erased. There were too few people left with an idea that something was wrong to stop what was going on. Do we want to go there? Violating a person’s conscience and claiming it is part of the law is a very dangerous thing for a society to do.

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