Sex-Ed, Abortion Counseling and Catholic Awareness Day
March 7th, 2008 by Peter
The increasingly resource-strapped Hartford Courant still fields an impressive team of reporters to cover the state Capitol–and yet, not a single one of them could be bothered to cover yesterday’s Catholic Awareness Day events. The paper’s print edition could not even be bothered to run the AP story covering the biggest annual legislative event by the state’s biggest religious denomination.
They did find space for it on their web site, though:
Peter Wolfgang, executive director of the Family Institute of Connecticut, said he hopes the bill [raising the age at which girls must be counseled before obtaining abortions from 15 to 17] could be amended later in the legislative process with language prohibiting anyone at the abortion clinic from providing the counseling.
“That’s an inherent conflict right there, because it’s the abortion provider who benefits financially from providing that service,” he said. “Ideally, we would like to see a bill that at least requires that the counseling comes from someone who is not connected to the abortion provider.”
Just to clarify: As I said in my testimony to the Children’s Committee (and to the AP reporter) FIC Action does support the bill in its present form. Like the Church, though, it is an issue we would like to revisit next year.
I was also interviewed about the two Planned Parenthood-backed sex-ed bills that the Church and FIC Action are opposing:
Planned Parenthood is at odds with the Catholic Church and the Family Institute over another proposal this session to fund sex education in public schools. Yolen said a coalition came up with the idea of providing $1 million worth of grants to school boards so they can hire or train sex education teachers if they want.
Wolfgang said he believes the bill is an opportunity for Planned Parenthood to get into the school systems.
“Even if they’re not talking about abortion in the public schools, Planned Parenthood develops that relationship with the kids, the kids go down to the clinics for contraception and that’s where it become obvious to them that when the contraception fails, abortion is available there as a backup,” he said.
