School Control
According to Joanna Kuebler of the National Assembly on School-Based Health Care, about 40% of school-based health centers in the United States are allowed by their school districts to dispense contraception. The majority of these schools do not inform the parents. Is the decision of birth control in the hands of the parents or the schools? Birth control should not be distributed in schools because it is the parents’ job to decide; schools are not doctor’s offices. About 1,300 U.S. public schools with adolescent students - less than 2 percent of the total - have health centers staffed by a doctor or nurse practitioner who can write prescriptions, according to spokeswoman Divya Mohan of the National Assembly of School-Based Health Care. Thus, the schools are clueless to the facts about birth control. Their one and only goal is to decrease the teen pregnancy rate.
If you were to look up school in the dictionary it would say that a school is an institution for educating children. Nowhere in that statement does it ever say that it is the school’s job to make parental decisions. Schools who distribute birth control are crossing the fine line between life choices and education. “In December 2004, the U.S. House of Representative's Committee on Government Reform led by Rep. Henry A. Waxman released a report showing that 80 percent of the most popular federally funded abstinence-only education programs use curricula that distort information about the effectiveness of contraceptives, misrepresent the risks of abortion, blur religion and science, treat stereotypes about girls and boys as scientific fact, and contain basic scientific errors” (U.S. House Representatives). Schools are glittering over the cold hard facts about birth control. The schools sex education classes should go into detail about everything that comes with sex; abstinence, effects that come with birth control and things that can go wrong with a condom. Informing the students of only how they can prevent pregnancy and the diseases you can get from having sex is not good enough. “Distributing condoms and providing prescriptions for the pill can send a confusing message to teens, who are being told to postpone sex and at the same time they are provided the means to have safer sex” (Freeman). Schools need to provide the education about sex, not just the “goodies” to prevent it.
Girls as young as eleven, who are taking the pill, can have side effects occur. “Birth control side effects can include headaches, change in menstrual flow, breast tenderness, and slightly increased risk of heart disease, high blood pressure and blood clots” (Gibson). Is decreasing the pregnancy rate really worth the risk? Parents are not even acknowledged with the medical care that comes with birth control because of the fact that not all parents are capable of taking care of their children. This makes schools capable of having more control over the children than their parents. Birth control is being handed out like candy and the schools that hand the birth control out do not even have
