Delaware County school district to re-evaluate pregnancy center role
A 17-year-old jolted the Wallingford-Swarthmore School District last month when she told the school board that a faith-based crisis pregnancy center had been invited to her health class, saying it offered medically inaccurate information, exaggerated the dangers of sex, and offered a Bible to a girl who stayed after class.
The allegations by Strath Haven High School senior Abby McElroy against the Drexel Hillbased Amnion Pregnancy Center shot through the 3,500-student Delaware County district, causing more than 500 people to sign a Change.org petition against the center’s future participation and superintendent Lisa Palmer to issue a public statement that “we will thoroughly investigate.”
School board members “were horrified — none of them had any idea that this was going on,” said Ms. McElroy, who showed up at their July meeting with a poster board copied from Amnion’s presentation, titled “The Steep Slope of Arousal.”
The poster showed two stick figures holding hands at the edge of cliff, part of Amnion’s RealEd “relationship education” program that contends that even hand-holding, hugging and kissing can cause teens to fall into an abyss and crash on the rocks of sexual activity.
Ms. McElroy told the school board the presentation had encouraged abstinence not just from sex but any touching in order to conserve oxytocin, a hormone that is released during sex and activities such as cuddling.
The claim that too much youthful activity depletes oxytocin and thus makes it harder for a person to eventually bond with a future spouse has been challenged by scientists, who say it’s based on research with prairie voles, not humans.
Amnion executive director Melanie Parks said the RealEd program is not faith-based. She said it encourages young people to think critically about sex and relationship choices, that the discussion of oxytocin was taken out of context by the student, and that the information in the program “was presented accurately.”
She denied that a student was given a Bible.
The controversy over the role of Amnion — which quotes the Bible on its website, accepts grant money from the socially conservative Christian Focus on the Family, and has a stated goal of ending abortion in the Philadelphia suburbs — highlights the ongoing ambiguity over how sex education is taught in Pennsylvania public schools. The state has no standards for teaching comprehensive sex education, and efforts to establish them in recent years have failed.
However, students are required to learn about preventing sexually transmitted diseases and abstinence is encouraged.
Wallingford-Swarthmore school board president Marilyn Huff said the district was investigating and promised that “we will make changes.”
Amnion was invited to the school by a health teacher, according to parents and students. Ms. McElroy said that after sitting through the one-day program during her sophomore year, she’d complained to the Strath Haven principal and had been reassured Amnion would not be invited back. But it was. That principal has since left the district.
Amnion has worked at Strath Haven for three years and goes to 25 public and private middle and high schools in the Philadelphia suburbs annually, said Ms. Parks, adding that it doesn’t receive state or federal funding and that all of its programs are free.