Planned Parenthood announced Wednesday that it will move forward with a plan to open new sexual and reproductive health centers at 50 Los Angeles County high schools.
Over the next three years, the nation’s largest abortion provider will launch dozens of school health centers serving a total of 75,000 teenage students in the county, funded by a $10 million grant from Los Angeles County and another $6 million from Planned Parenthood.
The “Wellbeing Centers,” at least five of which have already opened, will not provide surgical abortions but will offer emergency contraception, STI testing and treatment, birth control options, mental health support, and pregnancy counseling. It will also train teens to be “peer advocates” on sexual health and relationships for other teens.
School officials will not have access to the clinics’s medical records on students. California law allows minors 13 and older to receive birth control without parental consent.
“I do anticipate, as this becomes public, we will have very normal and healthy debate around sexuality and schools and what it is to be engaged in family communication around a healthy adolescence,” said Planned Parenthood Los Angeles president Sue Dunlap.
Pro-life advocates slammed the project, saying it is simply a way for Planned Parenthood to promote and sell abortions to vulnerable teenage girls.
“Planned Parenthood has been targeting younger and younger girls, through their version of sex education, beginning as early as elementary school, which encourages people to make bad choices, partly because Planned Parenthood profits from crisis and from selling abortions to those same students,” Students for Life President Kristan Hawkins said in a statement to National Review.
“This is a marketing ploy by the nation’s number one abortion vendor,” Hawkins added. “There is a conflict of interest in allowing Planned Parenthood into schools in any form to market their deadly business, knowing that they will make millions from the students who won’t know until it’s too late that Planned Parenthood does not care about women. They care about money.”
California in October also became the first state to mandate that public colleges offer students abortion medication.