Tuesday, 07 August 2012
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Tell Me Tuesday: School Forcing Pregnancy Tests on Girls
How would you feel if your teenage daughter was forced by school administrators, to take a pregnancy test all based on suspicion? Well it's happening in Louisiana. At Delhi Charter School, if a school administrator suspects a girl is pregnant, she either takes a pregnancy test or has to see a school-approved physician. A positive test result or failure to see the physician is grounds for basically being kicked out of the school and given the chance to continue her education through home-study.
Here's a piece on this from ACLU.
So how would you feel if your daughter were forced to take a pregnancy test?
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Comments (50)
Oh, Dear. I would find the best seedy lawyer I could buy...(oh wait it's a charter school, let me hold in my laughter at how I feel about those). I love equal rights. It's Ok for boys to get a girl pregnant, but the girl will get punished for it. Nice.
i wouldn't allow that to happen and i feel that kids shouldn't be having sex until they are out of high school but hey that's a whole different thing i don't want to get into.
& i'm sure these girls can take a pregnancy test all on their own??? why would a school think it is their responsibility? it isn't at all.
What?! I don't think a girl's sexuality and/or pregnancies are the school's concern!
@blowingmoney@xanga - I agree, kids should wait until they're older and more responsible before participating in intercourse. I think the school wants to know sooner rather than later about the pregnant students to get rid of them sooner to uphold their reputation. BUT, I can't really criticize the school until I know their position on sex education.
I'd be irate. It's none of the school's damn business. Plus, if a teenage girl is sexually active and it's one, maybe two days after she should have gotten her period, she probably already has gotten her answer.
I'm going to "have to" home school my kids anyway. Too much b.s., and that's coming from someone who mostly enjoyed school.
And what kind of tests do they have for boys?
That's...not right. Why does a girl being pregnant matter to the school? It's not illegal, so it doesn't even have the vague justification as drug testing and breathalyzers and locker/car searches for drugs/booze.
I think it would be nice for pregnancy tests to be available at the nurse, why not. But I see absolutely no justification or reason to force a girl to take a pregnancy test at school or bar her from finishing school because she is pregnant. I hope this shit is stopped. ASAP. It encourages abortions, if anything else. The possibility of getting kicked out of school should not be part of the decision on whether to keep a pregnancy or not.
It's a public school. That's terrible. I might even say it's F-ed up big time.
Wow, I have so many problems with this.... 1) Can the school even legally force a student to take a pregnancy test and then kick them out of school if the test is positive or force the girls to be examined by a doctor of their choosing? 2) Making a girl leave to, and I'm assuming here, maintain a certain reputation makes me think the faculty must not care about their students. 3) What about the boys? Last I checked, it takes two to tango, so what kind of consequences would the dads be facing? Probably none...
I can understand wanting to make pregnancy tests available to students at school. Girls who are scared to death about what their parents are going to say might feel more comfortable testing themselves at school and talking to a counselor or some other trusted adult before going to their parents. However, the testing shouldn't be mandatory. Why don't they just ship the girls off to a convent and claim they're taking care of a sick relative for 9 months? Oh, wait, it's no longer 1950.....
I truly feel the sex education programs in the US need to be changed. Most promote abstinence only, but let's face it, teens are still getting pregnant. Isn't the teen pregnancy rate a good indication of how the sex ed programs are failing miserably? A big part of me wonders how much the percentage would drop if more schools included methods of contraception in their curriculum....
I think this is something that most people can agree is fucked.
@WaitingToShrug@xanga - Charter schools are privately funded, so they are technically private schools.
@Saridactyl@xanga - According to the ACLU article, it is a public charter school. Which, I believe is accurate because charter schools can be either private or public.
http://www.publiccharters.org/About-Charter-Schools/What-are-Charter-Schools003F.aspx
Have we just lost 100 years of progress? What next, pre-marriage virginity tests? Are we bringing back dowries and shotgun weddings now? Grrrrr....
I don't see why this is a big deal. Despite the privacy invasion, it's still free testing. If I had such a slut of a daughter who would be having unprotected sex in high school, I'd definitely support this to humiliate her
are 14 year old running around with babies of their own better than this? seriously, what the fuck. test them ALL, not just based on suspicious though. I agree, an underage girl who thinks she can screw around w/o consequences DESERVES this. don't give me BS about rights. she has no RIGHT to be consenting to sex. If this prevented MY teen daughter from having an unwatned child, STRAP her down and do it for all i care.
i know a girl (and i live in Louisiana) who got pregnant at 14, gave birth at 15. by the time she worked up the courage to tell her family it was TOO LATE to abort. this kind of thing could have really saved her high school career.
Instead of doing stuff like this, we should have proper sexual education classes that teaches about safe sex, condoms, and birth control. It's unrealistic to expect the average teenager to not have sex and our current approach of "Tell them to not do it at all" has failed miserably for the last two decades. The teenage pregnancy age average has steadily dropped for the last two and half decades! You know what would be more effective and less invasive than mandatory pregnancy tests? Providing proper education and help. We don't do that.
@boneshakerbabyyy@xanga - @nepenthium@xanga - Do you guys understand what this actually means? This is sexual inequality - males can't get pregnant so they CAN'T get expelled under this rule. This would also be damaging to the image of girls who are NOT sexually active, but are thought to be just because of whatever biases their teachers may have. Imagine if your daughter was a freaking saint, but out of the fly the teacher forced her to get a pregnancy test. Who would you believe? Would you force her to do it? How would she feel about her teacher, you, and whoever else involved? If you're willing to use this testing as punishment for your daughters, it's akin to publicly spanking your kids and tying them to a tree; think of the psychological damage.
God damn this makes me angry }:(
@blowingmoney@xanga - I think kids need to wait too.
I attended a private school in England, and if you got pregnant, you were "asked to leave" - ie. expelled, but it didn't go on your record as an expulsion, giving you a chance to go to a state school to carry on with your education. In the eleven years I was there, nobody got pregnant. I'm not advocating forced pregnancy tests based on "suspicion", but maybe if there were more consequences to teen pregnancy, people would think twice about having unprotected sex while they're still in high school.
Home study is almost always much superior to public school if the parents are up to it.
BLAH. Ok.. First of all, I would be friggin pissed. If they asked me to give her a pregnancy test or something, fine. But forcing them to take one and then suspending them if it's positive?? It is most definitely fucked up. However, I can totally see the school's point of view. Schools have gone from giving sex ed, to handing out condoms, to even having a daycare in some schools, but the fact of the matter is, kids will not stop getting pregnant. Nothing the school's have done so far is working, and they see that parents can't stop it either, so they're trying out some tough love.
So I don't know. I have always been against schools interfering where their jurisdiction ends (my school used to suspend kids for fights they got outside of school, long after the day had ended), but in this case I almost feel like they're trying to make up for where some parents are lacking. It's kind of like they don't know what to do so they're taking the punishment route. It's not necessarily wrong, it's desperation.
@SexyKhoiFish@xanga - We had a great sex ed class. We watched 10 scary birthing videos (where they showed everything, which at the time elicited a lot of screams of fear), put condoms on bananas, talked about all the forms of birth control, etc, and I had 4 pregnant girls in my graduating class. Most schools get as in detail as possible without like having sex right in front of you. Trust me- more sex ed or more elaborate sex ed is not going to help matters. Teen's are still having sex, and they're going to be stupid about it until something happens. That's what happens when, "pregnancy just can't happen to me! It happens to other people, but not to me."
And like I said above, schools have been passing out condoms, working with kids to get their diplomas through the pregnancy, there are schools specifically for teen moms, some schools have installed daycares, and most will provide pregnancy tests and counselling if you want it. Most school's have been incredibly patient and teen pregnancies have only risen so obviously being their buddy isn't working, either.
This is really simple. Have these folks not contacted the ACLU? The kids are minors, therefore, need parental consent for a medical procedure, and you could actually call it this in court. Personally, I wouldn't give a rat's ass if someone wanted to do that to my kid, back in the day. Might have shaken her up a little. Got pregnant at 17, planned an adoption, miscarried shortly after. And mother, me, took responsibility for getting her to the doctor for birth control shots after that. Looking back, I should have started that when she was 14.
@Pollypinks@xanga - Seeing as the link to the story is from the ACLU, yes, I'm guessing someone contacted them.
@Saridactyl@xanga - The article said, "a public school in Louisiana".
There is more info and a petition about this at CHANGE.ORG if you are interested: http://www.change.org/petitions/delhi-charter-school-stop-discriminating-against-pregnant-students?utm_source=action_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=8907&alert_id=GGHiQcfWiv_HZgmmklviJ
If testing her meant that they would help her get some care and guidance following a positive result, and they kept those results private from everyone else, then I would have no problem with it. If it's just a way for them to weed out the promiscuous, though, then I fully disagree. It makes no difference if you're sexually active or not, every child still deserves a chance at an education.
This is awkward...poor girls! It must feel really embarrassing to get asked to do something like this. And we all know how fast the gossip can spread during high school. -_-
If this is a public school, then I would be outraged. If it wasa private school, I'd probably be subject to their standards.