Thanks to Pro-Life Teen's Firm Stand, Abstinence Educ. Now on NJ Campus
by Jim Brown
February 10, 2005
(AgapePress) - The efforts of a New Jersey teenager to get abstinence education into her public high school are starting to pay off.As reported in December, junior Claire Moore wants Manasquan High School to dump a required freshman sex-education course that includes a two-day presentation by Planned Parenthood on contraceptives and sexually transmitted diseases. Having gone through the course herself, she said she was appalled to hear pro-abortion comments from presenters.
Last month, Moore asked district officials to either kick Planned Parenthood off campus or allow a pro-life group or abstinence educator to conduct a similar two-day seminar. The young woman explains why she feels such a message is needed.
"Being a teenager in today's society, there's pressures coming from the media, from other students, from TV, from celebrities, [from] everyone -- and we're given reasons why it's acceptable and cool to be having sex or sexual relations," Moore shares. "But we're never given reasons why it's okay and it's cool not to be [doing that] and to wait until marriage for that."
She says going public with her concerns has "opened a lot of eyes." In fact, the health and physical education supervisor for Manasquan schools has since notified faculty members that they are required to give equal class time to guest speakers who promote abstinence, and to have lesson plans that give equal time to abstinence education. Obviously, that was not always the case.
"Many people believed there was always an abstinence education [program] at school and that it was effective," the teen activist says. "Many parents just had no idea what was really going on in the schools. They just accepted it."
Instead, Moore says, Manasquan High School had been ignoring the issue of teen sexual abstinence, while at the same time encouraging teens to seek an abortion when contraception failed. In delivering that message during the freshman sex ed course, Planned Parenthood was "shoving lies down our throats," the teen says -- and that she just got "sick and tired of it."
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
