Planned Parenthood’s Formula for Sex Education

Feb 12, 2015 | 0 comments

Warning: linked content is not suitable for children.

Thousands of young people – starting as early as age 6 – are taught sex-ed by Planned Parenthood every year.¹ This education could be summed up by the following:

Porn x (50 Shades of Grey + Abortion) = Sex-Ed by Planned Parenthood

Breaking down this formula:

Pornography: Planned Parenthood has no problem telling 9-year-olds to view porn. Instead of telling kids to play tee-ball together they encourage viewing erotic magazines, books and movies. Even porn producers have praised their efforts.

(It’s ironic that recently Planned Parenthood blasted Pennsylvania state officials for hundreds of porn images found on their computers. Apparently it’s not okay for elected officials but good for 4th graders.)

50 Shades of Grey: Planned Parenthood tells teens that “anything within the sexual world is normal as long as it’s consensual.” Instead of sharing why the risky and violent behavior shown in 50 Shades of Grey encourages men to be sexual predators and disables safeguards for women, Planned Parenthood runs teacher conferences on how to encourage this behavior. They have videos targeting young people too (see parts of video below).

Abortion: Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion provider in the country; killing five babies every eight minutes. Add this to the risky sexual behaviors they push in thousands of classrooms every year and Planned Parenthood has an effective business model for bringing in patients for abortions (cash, check or credit card accepted).

I wonder if any Planned Parenthood classes show students an abortion procedure? Or show how a suction machine works – something that haunts former Planned Parenthood nurses to this day.

Now, you might say at this point come on, surely Planned Parenthood talks more than porn, violent sex and abortion. Well one thing their sex-ed surely doesn’t talk much about is abstinence. Planned Parenthood treats abstinence as an afterthought versus an encouraged goal. They despise “abstinence education” compared to “comprehensive sex education,” saying no such program has a proven successful evaluation (guess they didn’t look here, or here, or even here). They claim these “moral purity activists”² accomplish nothing by “teaching young people that premarital sex is a moral failure.”³

First, one should find it hard to take Planned Parenthood talking morality when their founder Margaret Sanger viewed birth control as a “means to a cleaner race” and who saw the most urgent problem in society as the “over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.”

Teaching on premarital sex should point to standards for sexual integrity with positive outcomes far beyond simply reducing unplanned pregnancies. Amy Scheuring is an abstinence educator from Pittsburgh who has seen countless young people come through her medical clinic Women’s Choice Network. “Authentic abstinence education encourages students to abstain from all risky behavior and to set high standards and boundaries,” she says.

Scheuring sees first-hand the results of thinking birth control is the answer. Seventy-percent of the pregnant women her clinics serve were using birth control when they got pregnant. And many don’t realize the result of sexual behavior can include testing positive for STDs.

States like Pennsylvania run a variety of sex education programs, with the decision on what program to use left to local school districts. The debate over what’s best to use will continue but one thing is for certain – most parents would agree that porn should not have anything to do with classroom curriculum. Nor should encouraging violent sexual behavior. And organizations that promote such things – especially those that profit directly from students’ sexual behavior like Planned Parenthood – should have nothing to do with children’s sex education.


 ¹ ‘ ² – Sex Education in the United States – Planned Parenthood Federation of America Issue Brief.
³ – “Reducing Teenage Pregnancy,” Planned Parenthood Federation of America, February 2000.