Abby McElroy, a 17-year-old rising senior at Strath Haven High School in the Philadelphia suburb of Wallingford, Pennsylvania, is also a rising activist (and why wouldn't she be, she's step-daughter to our own Adam Bonin). She rocked her district's school board last month when she informed them that a local faith-based crisis pregnancy center, Amnion Pregnancy Center, had been invited into her health class to "teach" a sex ed segment.
You can imagine what they were teaching: hand-holding, hugging, and kissing were all forms of touching that release the hormone oxytocin, and "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." The presentation was given with the prop of a poster—entitled "The Steep Slope of Arousal"—showing two stick figures, holding hands at the edge of the cliff, ready to topple "into the abyss and crash on the rocks of sexual activity." Another prop they like to use is sticky tape. McElroy says that teens were told "if you have sex with too many people it becomes less sticky—and you can't make healthy relationships." All this "science" apparently has something to do with a study of oxytocin in voles, the small rodents. The presenter also allegedly gave one of the students with questions a Bible.
The school board members, McElroy reports, "were horrified—none of them had any idea that this was going on." Marilyn Huff, Wallingford-Swarthmore school board president, said the district is investigating the class and also promised that "we will make changes," although the change is as of yet unspecified. No public funding, supposedly, went to Amnion for the class. The center is definitely faith-based, and definitely on the fringes of that faith. It "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." It is presenting this anti-sex, anti-health, anti-science bullshit in 25 schools in the area.
The controversy—created by McElroy's courage in standing up for her peers at the school board—highlights a larger problem in the state, which is that it has set no standards for comprehensive sex education. Charlatans like Amnion can be invited in, in this case by their health teacher, to spout their nonsense in the guise of education. When McElroy was exposed to it as a sophomore, she complained to the school principal, who told her that Amnion would not be invited back. When she found out that Amnion was back the next year, she decided she had to take larger action. Who knows, that action could conceivably end up in the state finally establishing real, science- and health-based sex education curriculum.
As it is, here's Amnion creating their future client base, because abstinence education is the most surefire way for young women to not know how not to get pregnant. They're ensuring they'll stay in business by keeping kids misinformed, and ensure that they'll continue to have pregnant young women to use in their fight against legal abortion. Just because they "teach" absolutely ridiculous nonsense doesn't mean they're stupid or they don't know exactly what they're doing.
All the kudos to Abby McElroy for doing something about it. You can watch her in action starting at about 20:20 in this video.
