The Public Policy/Clinic Wars

...We don't broadcast," one clinic official said in 1980...

...The Boards of Education and Health, the public library, United Way, the League of Women Voters, the Minnesota Council of Churches, academicians, business leaders, and the media all pledged cooperation...

...births to girls of high school age in 1984 were not "more than one million," as frequently claimed, but 166,744, and the decline continues...

...School clinics offer a way to reclaim that endangered consumer market, and even expand it where it has been weak: among the unsuitably fertile minorities...

...AIDS, too, will soon spread among young Indians and blacks, he predicts...

...The clinics, understandably, appeal 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987 to "family planning professionals" as places where they can provide school-wide sex education, free physicals and immunizations, and—because, technically, they are not school agencies, inhibited by standard laws regarding school services—prescribe free contraceptives and make abortion referrals without the parents' knowledge or permission...

...Earlier ventures, however, strove for a low public profile...

...Across the Mississippi in St...

...Minnesota's politically powerful pro-life movement has entered the field as evidence accumulates that school-based clinics reduce births rather than pregnancies...

...Speakers from the national birth control establishment were invited to stir enthusiasm and offer advice...

...Paul clinic program, for example, records neither pregnancies nor abortions, only live births...

...Clinic advocateshide that failure behind inadequate record keeping...

...Unfortunately, they probably will not bear the full weight of their mistakes themselves...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987 29 teaching of social values," is part of the problem, Carter said...

...Minneapolis followed with the North High clinic in 1978...

...A recent survey, circulated jointly by CPO and the abortion lobby Catholics for a Free Choice, warned that support for abortion is dwindling among high school students...

...Endalia Reyes Smith, assistant director of Centro Cultural Chicano, spokeof "the need for better information regarding teen parenthood" among Chicanos, where "adolescent pregnancy is considered shameful, and the pressure upon the young couple to marry is very strong...

...In their wake has come the first effort to put a school birth control clinic into an affluent neighborhood...

...Start-up funding, reportedly $600,000, is expected from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation...

...The pioneer program universally cited as a model was established in St...

...Families could meet most infants' needs in the past, said Dr...

...At the University of Minnesota, interviews with Michael Resnick, a "medical sociologist," provided copy for the Daily...

...T n public manner a modest, soft-1 spoken, Pat Paulsen of a politician, Fraser, a former congressman, has usually exerted his influence behind the scenes, but zeal has lately pushed him out of character...

...the number could double next year...

...Reinforcement of this value begins at a very early age, 6 and 7, as the girl receives praise and strokes for the way she parents [sic] her brothers and sisters...

...But what he wants is birth control for junior and senior high students, sponsored by government, and concealed from parents...

...It is not contraception but abortion—about 400,000 a year—that has brought the teen birthrate down...

...No matter how good a job the schools and social service agencies do, little progress in preventing teen pregnancy will occur" unless parents can be enlightened about "the ways their children learn sex roles...

...The first, headlined, "Campaign will cry out concern for pregnant teen-agers," featured a seventeen-year-old black mother from North High, one of three city schools already equipped with birth control clinics...

...By 1984, the rate was down more than 50 percent, to 46.7 per 1000...

...see the situation as a problem of intolerable dimensions, but they deny that it will be solved by birth control entrepreneurs who defend "confidential" abortion as an essential and acceptable component of "family planning" programs for children...

...Working out of the Mayor's office, they organized a four-session "Colloquium on Adolescent Pregnancy and Parenting," held early in 1985...

...Some prominent blacks see racial contempt in the drive by clinic proponents to institutionalize non-reproductive recreational sex among those "high risk" groups...

...Mayor Don Fraser and his fellow troupers are on a collision course with reality...

...Teen pregnancy, on the other hand, is a graver problem than it was in the fertile 1950s...

...On the other half-page, a story quoted the Center for Population Options on the high cost of supporting single mothers on welfare...

...On cue, members said they worried most about teen pregnancy...

...When school staff was asked when there would be a meeting for parent input, the reply was that such a meeting would be 'inappropriate' until the funds were assured...

...She had made a mistake, she admitted, when she "had sex without using birth control" (emphasis added), and she urged other school girls to take advantage of clinic services...

...People who oppose abortion Donna Steichen is a free-lance writer living in St...

...organization, is the national center for the movement to put birth control clinics in public schools...

...Critics call the campaign a socially elitist, inherently racist scam designed to serve the marketing interests of fertility-control professionals, for there is, in fact, no epidemic of teen-age childbearing...

...Cloud, Minnesota, and former president of the Minnesota Chapter of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights...

...At one recent meeting, representatives from the Colonial Church of upper-class Edina, from the black northside Hospitality House, from evangelical social service organizations, Lutheran congregations and the Catholic Archdiocese mingled with doctors, lawyers, housewives, and country-clubbers...

...Paul Pioneer Press and Dispatch, or the University of Minnesota Daily...

...Sex in that culture is very private and not openly discussed...

...The primary targets of sex clinic operators are black schools," economist Walter Williams observed...

...Instead, readers waded through a flood of news reports about epidemic teen pregnancy, feature stories about the splendid work of school birth control clinics, and editorial comment reproaching Pope John Paul II and any other laggards unpersuaded of the wisdom of such measures...

...S uch clinics are not new to Min- k, nesota...

...And here in Minnesota, where the teen birth rate is the nation's second lowest, Minneapolis Mayor Don Fraser is leading the procession...

...Paul, the Pioneer Press and Dispatch ran a multi-part series on "Children Having Children," in June 1986...

...Indian mothers, according to Pence, see that clinicians who give their fourteenyear-old daughters the Pill are "justpimping for them...

...Typically, they are established in inner-city neighborhoods with large low-income black and Hispanic populations...

...Almost two-thirds of today's teen mothers are legally adult...

...In February 1984, Mayor Fraser appointed a "Coordinating Council for Youth," to advise him on the gravest concerns of young people...

...Apparently, a so-called 'Adolescent Health Advisory Committee' made up of four students, two parents and some school staff members have made all the decisions in, this matter," she said...

...Mayor Fraser by contrast has flamboyantly sought publicity, apparently convinced that the general public shares his goals...

...The decline in adolescent fertility has, since the early 1970s, been achieved almost entirely by abortion: among pregnant girls under 15, abortions outnumber births, and some 40 percent of all teen pregnancies end in abortion...

...He may be mistaken...

...Some families, she complained, stubbornly reject that solution...

...Birth control information is badly needed" among Hmong immigrants' "traditionally male-dominated families," said Phoue Thao of the Minneapolis Health Department...

...Once that sum was spent, taxpayers would be responsible for the bills...

...More than seventy school clinic programs were operating in the United States during the 1986-87 school year...

...Geraldine Carter, director of the Survival Skills Institute, but today the therapeutic state must take over much of the burden of raising children...

...The acclaimed St...

...And he wants it especially for the dark-skinned and the poor...

...Given the new sexual norm, spokesmen argue, realistic social policies to protect the young, and to cut welfare costs, must include supervising school children in "diligent contraceptive use' at school—while keeping abortion available as a backup, whether or not parents approve of either measure...

...It may be the specter of pandemic AIDS that finally puts an end to permissive adolescent sex programs...

...Only his previous liberal 'credentials have so far shielded him from charges of elitism and racism, and that shield is beginning to drop...

...A new parent constituency, less susceptible to bureaucratic intimidation, has entered the debate, and the resulting confrontation may threaten the mayor's program...

...Paul in 1973...

...If a teenager becomes pregnant, she and the male are expected to marry...

...Carter called the practice "culturally specific behavior that contributes to early pregnancies...

...In an all-out offensive against childbearing among the lower classes, the nation's birth control lobby aims to persuade the public that sexual abstinence among teenagers is as obsolete as the quilting bee...

...Recently incorporated as the "Minnesota Coalition for Adolescent Health," they are putting together a formidable network...

...Unanimously, participants identified race and poverty as sources of The Problem, which, several said, even extended to by Donna Steichen married adult members of ethnic subcultures whose attitudes toward sex and childbearing are insufficiently progressive...

...If abortion is the right solution, they observe, the teen pregnancy problem is already solved...

...School busing for racial balance has recently brought Hmong and black inner-city students to Minneapolis's upper-middle class South West High School...

...The CPO, a tax-exempt Washington, D.C...

...Syndicated columnist William Raspberry compared school-based clinics to "student seminars in how-not-to-get-caughtshoplifting...

...It will fall, instead, on the young, the poor, and the non-white...

...As an example of how dangerous sex roles are formed, she cited "the strong emphasis placed in the black community on a young girl's ability to mother...

...President Katherine Hubbell fumes that clinic planners applied for a grant, arranged for clinic affiliation with Minneapolis's Children's Medical Center, selected and measured space for the projected school clinic, yet parents were never formally notified that it was under consideration...

...T he local newspapers have been es- 1 pecially accommodating to the mayor's cause: last year, when State Senator Linda Berglin's bill to permit birth control clinics in all state schools was debated, amended to prohibit abortion, and then withdrawn by the disappointed author, no word of it appeared in the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, the St...

...The arrogance of clinic proponents keeps everybody's adrenalin level high...

...During the unreported legislative hearings on Senator Berglin's bill, one issue of the Tribune carried two stories about Fraser's project...

...0 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987 31...

...Under the headline, "Most unwed mothers Indian or black," a half-page article in May 1986 focused on Sara, seventeen and black, who considers abortion murder and plans to live on welfare after her baby is born, and Suzanne, sixteen and Indian, who plans to move in "with friends" after the birth of her baby, because her parents are "really strict" and she wants "more freedom...

...Blacks and poor people are frequently used as stalking horses . . . People wishing to lace public schools with sex have discovered a new use for blacks...

...That will really cut down the minority population...

...Studies by independent researchers Stan Weed and Joseph Olsen, reported in the Wall Street Journal last October, showed that federally funded teen birth control programs have, since 1971, very slightly reduced birth rates among their clients while their pregnancy rates rose as much as 120 per 1000...

...In the United States, that phenomenon peaked in 1957, at 96 births per 1000 (when 85 percent of the mothers were married...

...M ember David Pence, M.D., a long-time civil rights advocate and an outspoken critic of lax public health measures against AIDS, sees the anti-clinic coalition as a glorious opportunity to "take back our city" from sex-program ideologues, radical feminists, and homosexual rights advocates...

...Among girls under 15, the birth rate is about one in 1000, lower than it was in 1970...

...In case any reader had missed the message, her photograph, with another young black mother, illustrated the second story: "High school mothers ignored birth control...

...Family-centered subcultures are afflicted by an unrecognized need for contraception, other speakers indicated...

...Nevertheless, a coalition of interested parties—population control philanthropists like the Ford, Mott, Rockefeller, and Hewlett Foundations, contraceptive manufacturer Johnson and Johnson (through its Robert Wood Johnson Foundation), public relations operatives of the family planning establishment, assorted true believers, and collaborators in the press—have turned several dubious pieces of research into a propaganda parade...

...No publicity, no problems...

...The damage will be permanent, Pence says, because "a lot of them will get PID—pelvic inflammatory disease—and a lot of them are going to be sterile...

...If the mayor wanted to avert out-of-wedlock pregnancies by chaperoning young people or by persuading them to embrace continence, most citizens would applaud...

...Even the percentage of girls who admit to being "sexually active" has declined modestly in the past couple of years...

...Pence, who served his internship at the Minneapolis Indian Health Board, thinks the high pressure birth control campaign will die of racism and sexually transmitted disease—and he views the two as viciously related...

...I think this is going to be part of a renewed civil rights battle...