Featured is the logo outside a Planned Parenthood facility. (Photo credit: SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
An organization called Advocates for Youth (AFY), which appears to act as the youth arm of Planned Parenthood, recently sent a mass email with this in the subject line: “Know anyone ages 11-15 to join this study?”
The email, sent by AFY’s Free the Pill Youth Campaign Manager Becca Thimmesch, links three times to the study. The study page suggests that young girls can obtain birth control pills without a prescription and potentially without their parent’s consent. Both the email and site say girls who participate in the study can earn $75.
This is wrong on so many levels. While the study does not actually pay 11-year-olds directly to have sex, it holds out a $75 carrot to very young girls that could entice them to make a decision to become sexually active.
In every U.S. state, children ages 11-15 cannot legally consent to sex, and in many parts of the U.S., 11-year-old children cannot legally obtain contraceptives without parental permission.
Despite this, the study asks, “who will find out?” and then answers, “it’s your decision if you want to tell anyone. This study is fully confidential.” In other words, a study doctor will prescribe contraceptives to an eleven-year-old girl without parental knowledge or consent.
One has to wonder if the qualifying child candidates who are given hormonal contraceptives are also provided with information about the potential side effects—some very serious. They include increased risk of breast cancer, cervical cancer, inflammatory bowel disease, lupus, depression and suicide, multiple sclerosis, bone fractures, diabetes, and more.
As Dr. Meg Meeker, a pediatrician and author of the book “Epidemic: How Teen Sex is Killing Our Kids” has noted, “birth control is not disease control.” She notes that in 1960, there were two sexually transmitted diseases. Now, there are more than 30 known STDs.
She further notes that teenagers make up one-third of the U.S. population, but carry 50 percent of the STDs and 25 percent of teens have an STD.
What is truly scary is that over 80 percent of those infections have no symptoms and can go undetected, which is dangerous for the teen, their future sexual partners, and their future children.
Dr. Meeker’s book is the stuff of nightmares. In it, she explains how she has had to tell kids still with braces on their teeth that they were HIV positive, and teenage girls they have cervical cancer from the human papillomavirus because of their sexual behavior. Dr. Meeker warns:
“As STD rates have soared, so have depression rates in teens. In 2015, an estimated 3 million adolescents age 12 to 17 in the U.S. had at least one major depressive episode in the past year. From 1999-2014, the suicide rate in girls age 10 to 14 tripled. About 20% of teens will experience depression before they reach adulthood.
This is no coincidence. Sex is a major event for any person, but a teen does not have the emotional tools to deal with such an event. This is why I see so many sexually active teens battling depression.”
Alarmingly, the AFY study’s goal seems to be to eliminate any existing requirements for any girl of any age to first obtain a prescription from a doctor in order to receive birth control. Planned Parenthood clinics would no longer need to have a doctor on staff when dispensing birth control pills to minors.
Advocates for Youth is also a managing partner of Amaze, along with international partner International Planned Parenthood, which creates animated videos on topics about sexuality for teens and “tweens” and encourages sex ed starting in kindergarten. The videos are explicit. Titles include “What is an Abortion?,” “Coming Out,” “Gender Identity: Being Female, Male, Transgender or Fluid,” and “Are You Ready to Have Sex?”
Perhaps it is not surprising that an organization obsessed with promoting the sexualization of youth would be promoting a campaign that pays young girls to seek birth control.
So what is likely the true study end goal? Encouraging young girls to be sexually active at an early age leads to more teen pregnancies, which leads to new teen (and potential pre-teen) abortion and thus more customers to frequent Planned Parenthood’s many abortion clinics.
This is unconscionable.
Eleven-year-old girls should be playing with Barbie dolls and weaving friendship bracelets—not worrying about birth control pills. Planned Parenthood, Advocates for Youth, and their ilk have a singular goal to sexualize children. And the earlier, the better.
But this is a new low. Even for them.
Sharon Slater is the president of Family Watch International, an organization in consultative status with the United Nations which seeks to the protect the family as the fundamental unit of society. She is also the author of the book “Stand for the Family,” has directed multiple documentaries and including “The War on Children: The Comprehensive Sexuality Education Agenda.” Sharon is the mother of seven children – three of whom she and her husband Greg adopted from Mozambique after their parents died of AIDS.
