Leftist educators indoctrinating our youth in progressive thought is unfortunately a “dog bites man” story these days. Conservatives, however, still have a tendency to underestimate the power of this indoctrination. My latest at The Federalist takes a look at the deceptive rhetoric used in the curriculum at a nearby public school district:
Consider what teachers are instructed by the curriculum to tell students regarding pregnancy:
Say to the students, ‘Once a person confirms they are pregnant, they need to decide whether they are going to have the baby and become a parent, have the baby and let someone adopt it, or end the pregnancy (at its earliest stage). The second two options are available for a number of reasons, including that the pregnant person may not feel they would be able to take care of a baby because of their age or life circumstances.’
The statement doesn’t explicitly argue in favor of abortion. The word itself doesn’t even show up anywhere in the lesson. One might even claim it’s neutral in that it offers both abortion and adoption as choices. Nevertheless, it frames the issue in a way that brings the entire pro-abortion mindset in through the backdoor—without argument, without evidence, and without even the acknowledgment that any controversy on the subject exists.
To say that a “pregnant person” (we’ll get to that in a moment) has to decide whether “to have the baby and become a parent” presumes that an expectant mother is not already a parent, and that she does not already have a baby. It’s a rhetorical sleight of hand meant to obscure the reality that abortion is a grisly decision mothers make regarding the baby they already have.
The second deception is that the curriculum frames the lifecycle of a pregnancy as though abortion were just one of the natural outcomes. Entirely missing are any of the factual details on exactly how abortion ends a pregnancy—by deliberately killing a helpless and innocent human being. It’s like teaching that death is just a natural part of life when you’re talking about assassination.
Sure, like pregnancy, human lives “end,” but glossing over the moral weight that comes with deliberately choosing to end lives is fundamentally dishonest. Presenting the existence of another human being as some kind of innocuous consumer choice—“You can click ‘okay’ to proceed or ‘cancel’ to end your pregnancy”—is reprehensible. But then, while the teacher might have excluded her own views, Advocates for Youth are happy to force their radical ideas on vulnerable students at taxpayer expense.
Read the rest here.
