Parents Beware

A Warning to Local Parents About School-Based Clinics

School-based clinics (SBCs) provide many medical services, such as basic physicals for low-income students.  However, they have always been surrounded by controversy.  This is because the primary reason SBCs exist is to provide reproductive health care.  This includes birth control, abortion pills and abortion referrals.  The objective of SBCs is to make contraceptives and abortion available to all teenagers, regardless of their religious or cultural beliefs.  The reason school-based clinics offer a number of other services is to obscure their real purpose.   

Since Illinois has no parental consent law, what has happened at SBCs in other states could happen here.  For instance, one Washington State mom was horrified to discover that the school had put her daughter in a cab and sent her offsite to get an abortion—without the mother’s knowledge or consent.  Even if SBC proponents emphasize that abortion referrals will not be done by the clinic, this restriction is easily overcome by referring girls to agencies that do not themselves do abortions, but which immediately give a second referral to one that does.

SBCs typically write parental consent forms in such a way that any forms not returned to the clinic are automatically interpreted as parental notification and consent.  Also, these forms are usually not itemized, meaning that parents who want their children to receive a sports physical may be giving permission for any other service (such as birth control pills) without parental knowledge or consent.  Most school-based clinic proponents use how-to instruction manuals issued by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS).  Founded by the former medical director of Planned Parenthood, SIECUS is at the forefront of a national legislative strategy to eliminate federal funding for abstinence programs, calling them “harmful.”

The first step in pushing for a local SBC is to create an impression of need by claiming that interviews and focus groups reveal unanimous agreement about it.  But what advocates don’t tell you is that the only people they confer with are ones already known to agree with them.  Advocates make connections with public officials and community groups—but they don’t reveal to the public that their blue ribbon committee is deliberately packed with clinic supporters.  Activists ignore conservative and pro-family groups.  They claim widespread support by parents, but only parents who agree with them are included in the focus groups.

If opposition surfaces against birth control and abortions, the activists’ strategy is to install the clinic without them and then add these features after the clinic is established and the controversy dies down.

Lake Country Right to Life urges all local parents to be alert about the stealthy tactics and motives surrounding school-based health centers. Round Lake School District 116 has approved starting the planning process for a school based clinic, that initially would target older students.