It is not a school’s responsibility to tell students what they should believe about abortion.
It is not a school’s responsibility to tell students what they should believe about abortion.
T here was a time when schoolteachers — even if they broached controversial topics in class — kept their opinions private. It was a badge of honor for teachers who could lead a classroom debate and keep their students guessing as to their instructor’s opinion on the matter. Was the teacher a skilled enough rhetorician to defend a view contrary to the one that they held for the sake of their students’ intellectual growth?
Well, that time is no more. Last year, gender or critical race theory seemed like the height of advocacy in the classroom. Now, even abortion is becoming less of a taboo.
In a recent issue, the influential education magazine Rethinking Schools, whose books sell upwards of 200,000 copies and make it onto college reading lists, declared that educators must begin teaching about the benefits of abortion. The Dobbs decision, it claimed, warrants an “all-hands-on-deck response to ensure abortion for those who want and need it.” Namely, a teacher’s “most critical role is to combat the silence, shame, and misinformation around abortion” through instruction. Topics worthy of coverage include the right to an abortion, abortion stories from the advocacy group Shout Your Abortion, and literature that addresses “sex, sexual violence, pregnancy, forced pregnancy, sterilization, abortion, and miscarriage.”
But this magazine is not alone in advocating for the inclusion of pro-abortion messaging in schools. At Inside Higher Ed, a professor argues that we should allow no more discussion on this topic than we would “child labor laws or women’s suffrage.” It’s a settled issue to teach, not a controversy to debate. After the Dobbs decision, an advocacy arm of the National Education Association took to the streets in protest, arguing that it was imperative to help students do the same.
Unfortunately, some localities and curricula are following this call for the inclusion of abortion-related instruction in the classroom. The Wauwatosa School District in Wisconsin approved a curriculum that would have eighth-grade teachers “tell students that abortion is a valid response to a pregnancy.” The curriculum, which was accompanied by an explicitly pro-abortion video, openly nudged teachers to “encourage students to return back to the statement that the person who is pregnant gets to make the choice because it is their body.”
Meanwhile, in California, state lawmakers recently announced a bill package on “reproductive justice and abortion rights,” which is designed to turn the state into a refuge for women seeking abortions. The package includes A.B. 598, which would require “school districts to participate in the California Healthy Kids Survey (CHKS) and include a module on sexual and reproductive health care as one of the core survey modules.” While it is unknown what exactly this module would look like, it is reasonable to believe that California could use it as a mechanism for abortion advocacy. Likewise, it’s doubtful that Margaret Sanger’s eugenic intentions or the unique DNA of every fetus would get a mention.
Abortion education is being pushed on a global scale as well. Ipas, a North Carolina–based nonprofit that pushes for an abortion-positive “comprehensive sex education,” encourages young people to “make fully informed choices, and to exercise their right to legal, accessible abortion.” Ipas offers programming in more than 30 countries, including the United States, and justifies its intensely political toolkit as a necessary public-health measure. Its success stories include a Mexico City–based initiative that provided abortion education to marginalized students.
While CRT and gender ideology are seemingly ubiquitous in American schools, thankfully, districts and curricula that push abortion are comparatively rare. That being said, limited, fringe progressive fads can quickly become mandatory opinions that sweep the nation. Especially under the guise of sex education, it’s not unlikely that abortion in the classroom will become a new front in the culture war over our schools.
It is not a school’s responsibility to tell students what they should believe about abortion. The science is not settled, and neither is the morality. If issues of public import are going to be discussed in schools (though there are very good reasons why they shouldn’t be), they should be addressed with the solemnity and impartiality they deserve. Wealthy nonprofits and brazenly left-wing curricula in no way serve that end.
Garion Frankel is an incoming Ph.D. student in PK–12 education administration at Texas A&M University and a Young Voices contributor. Daniel Buck is a middle-school English teacher, a senior visiting fellow at the Fordham Institute, and the author of What Is Wrong with Our Schools?