It’s going to be so much fun for them. “Hi, little girl. Piss in this cup for me.”
Although they never seem to get around to catering to my fantasies. “Hey, mature and intelligent woman, the law says you have to play with my squid.” Maybe if they did, more people would sit up and question the invasion of privacy.
Dammit! Pregnancy must be girl-to-girl contagious again, like it was when I was in high school 50 years ago! And here I thought Modern Science had figured out some other causative agent for that dreaded ailment!
Any student? Male or female?
Regardless of the implementation, how it legal for a charter (read: government-funded) school to ban pregnant students?
I did notice that they don’t kick out the boy for get the girl pregnant.
I see that the school is 54 percent male and 46 percent female. Is there a test to see if the boys see screwing?
Holytape, I was just about to ask that. Are they kicking out the boys who DO the impregnating?
LOL of course not! Those Slutty McWhores should have just given blowjobs! no, I mean, abstained!
… is that what they call it now?
This seems to violate everything about HIPAA?
{cough cough, tries to fake MRA’s deep manly man’s voice.}
You see this just shows that male privilege is just a myth. If a boy skips school he gets in trouble. But all a girl has to do is get knocked up and the school is just begging her to stay at home and play Madden’12. It’s just not fair.
Well you know, boyswillbeboys, girlsarethegatekeepersofsex, itsherfauultfornotsayingno, blahblahblah.
I find it hard to believe that a school with standards THIS skewed against sexually active women would bring themselves to kick out a male TEACHER who got her pregnant.
But then that’s just me, being pessimistic.
Since these are minors, I would think so.
There are people in Louisiana who have a fetish about being judgmental, invading privacy, and punishing girls for daring to have sex? Wow. It’s almost like there are Republicans in every state!
I even had to turn in a permission slip when the school wanted to weigh my kid in gym class, and was free to turn it in marked “do not do this” (which I did). I can’t imagine this would survive any sort of legal challenge.
what strikes me about this is how utterly hopeless and ineffective it is in preventing sexual activity in teenagers. None of the sex is bad only for marriage thinking and all the rules imposed to try and preserve the purity of children do anything toward that end.
Then they blame everyone else!?
uncle frogy
Ooo, I like this comment there from someone named Dianna:
This seems to violate everything about HIPAA?
And likely FERPA as well.
unclefrogy:
I don’t think it’s about preventing sexual activity nearly as much as it is about blaming women.
As if we needed any more proof for why charter schools are a horrible idea.
They aren’t even consistent. If they were serious they should also do paternity tests for all the boys and kick out the fathers.
When they think nothing of forcing grown women to undergo unnecessary, invasive medical procedures or jump through hoops designed to humiliate and shame them in order to have access to medical procedures they determine they require, it’s not surprising that they feel just as free to ignore the personal autonomy of minor girls.
Not only are they setting themselves up to police what girls choose to do with their bodies, not only are they invading their privacy and autonomy by forced pregnancy tests, but they even “reserve the right” to tell the girls what doctor to see. It’s crazy and evil.
The fact that this school has any students at all is disgusting. All those parents must be *condoning* this policy. Ah, patriarchy, where women and children are mere chattel, we’re not over you yet.
This raises the question, how can you reserve the right to do something you don’t have the right to do in the first place?
Well, reading this has ruined my day.
That explains so much about my invertebrate biology course. One of the TAs didn’t look right the day we were dissecting squid.
According to a former student from Oral Roberts Nonuniversity, this is what they don’t do.
Girls who get pregnant and are unmarried are kicked out.
Boys who get girls pregnant are allowed to finish their degrees.
We used to call this a “double standard”. Now we just call it typical fundie xian malevolence.
I’m sure the only reason they don’t demand paternity tests for the boys is because they’re more expensive than pregnancy tests. Right? It’s just fiscal responsibility!
Hmm. Can the girls be reinstated if they miscarry? Probably not; wouldn’t do to encourage abortion, after all…
(Just barely resisting the temptation to post an ASCII facepalm.)
Ah you all beat me to “what about the boys”. But really…. what about the sperm part of the sperm + egg?
Does the teacher or administrator suspecting that a girl is pregnant have to point out any obvious signs of pregnancy in order to justify calling a parent-teacher conference and a pregnancy test? Probably not…
Won’t somebody pleeeeeeaaaase think of THE CHILDREN!?
That commenter is horrible. She expresses no concern elsewhere in the thread that the lack of a high school degree will make life even harder for the pregnant girl.
Let’s not get carried away. It’s not like they’re talking about people, now, is it? They’re not even male!
If they’re pregnant, they’re not girls – they’re sluts. And everyone knows, a slut has no right to complain about her privacy, rights, or body, being violated.
[Sarcasm disengaged:] Eurgh, it makes me want to rinse my brain just from pretending to be them.
Another commenter on Slate: “I just read the school’s policies. Any parent who objects to corporal punishment for their child is instructed to find another school. Dark ages, anyone?”
Wow no kidding…. corporeal punishment starts on page 108:
http://www.delhicharterschool.org/www/dcscharter/site/hosting/Delhi_Charter_School_Policy_Manual.html
CORPORAL sorry…
What if a boy gets a girl who doesn’t attend the school pregnant?
IANAL, but I used to work in health care. I’m not sure HIPAA applies here as it doesn’t concern insurance or bills or really health care at all, and I’m not sure a charter school’s administrative office would be considered a covered agency. There may be other privacy laws that apply, though. Or at least, there ought to be, dammit.
@Zinc – they probably don’t care…. he’s still a BOY! Not a nasty pre-wimmen.
I’m guessing it will be twice a semester line up in the locker room during gym every
bodygirl does it testing.Paid for by funds that were siphoned off somehow legally from the stupid government grants that go to charter schools.
Zinc, what about adult men who get the girls pregnant? Which happens quite a bit, and which is statutory rape (unless the two were within a few years of age)?
Same odious commenter discussed above:
conservative theists *only* want to control women. so if a 16 year old is married, and pregnant, she’s kicked out, just better for her husband to control her. IF she’s kicked out, better for society to shame her and blame her. So much for the “pro-life” lies again.
any decent parent would never send their child to such a vile institution.
Thank FSM I live far from the s**thole that is Louisiana. (I live in a state with its own s**tty problems.)
Erülóra Maikalambe,
That’s also my understanding. Summary of HIPAA (see “Who is covered by the privacy rule”). A school administrator isn’t covered by HIPAA laws, but I’m not sure about a school nurse who might be used to assist with testing.
@hexidecima – unfortunately, some conservatives reproduce and probably think that this place is a GREAT idea…
Do charter schools charge “tuition”? They could just force the girl herself to pay for it, a la Alaska’a rape kits.
This school is putting its pregnant students at risk for abuse by exposing them. And I highly doubt its administration cares about properly educating students about effective ways to prevent pregnancy (abstinence-only education does not equal “effective”).
With teen pregnancy clinging onto the Bible Belt like a leech, long after it’s been virtually immunized against everywhere else in the country, I’m not surprised to see Louisiana reacting in this way. Not that it’s a good reaction.
I don’t even know what you’re mimicking. The situation is absurd enough without sarcastic straw men, folks.
Kyle, if that school really wanted to eliminate teen pregnancy, it’d offer comprehensive, fact-based sex ed, along with birth control.
As for “sarcastic straw men,” sorry to break it to you, but, no, right-wingers actually do not consider women or girls fully human.
@ Carli
Do like that comment, thanks for finding it!
You know, every time I think I’m jaded and cynical, and that nothing can surprise me, I’m forcibly reminded that yes, Virginia, there is a Jesus Claws.
It’s not even remotely a strawperson.
They really, truly devoutly believe that females are not fully human. It starts with their magic book in the first chapter. Eve is made from a rib of Adam. And it goes way downhill from there.
Some xian sects don’t allow women to speak in church, become ministers, or even vote on operational issues. Michele Bachmann’s church the WELS is one such.
From the article’s quote of the school policy:
End-run around HIPAA?
@Kyle
Sarcastic? Yes. Straw man? No. Zinc Avenger is guilty only of cutting straight to the meat of the zealots’ arguments, skipping all of the code words and dog whistles.
This charter school just seems to be a version of the fundie camps for their troubled kids.
The ones that torture them and occasionally kill them.
Any parent would have to be negligent or cosmically stupid to send their kids to this school.
In a lot of states, charter schools are regulated, inspected, and tested. And ones that fail to educate students are shut down. I’m sure Louisiana isn’t among them.
Why oh why did I read the comments?
I, for one, welcome our new pregnancy-policing overlords, and I look forward to the time when we can roll this out on a national scale, expanding beyond the scope of a mere charter school.
It will be glorious. It will mean an end to abortion and sex without consequences. It will mean punishing women the way they deserve to be punished.
It will be simple. We’ll require all girls and women, from the point of verifiable menses to the point of verifiable menopause, to submit to monthly pregnancy tests. They will have to be, because life begins at fertilization, so many forms of birth control must be outlawed. As soon as they are found to be pregnant, then we’ll escort them to these lovely pregnancy-supervision camps, where they’ll be fed food that’s good for the babies and given pre-natal vitamins. Sure, it will be expensive, but no price is too high for the babies, am I right?
If a woman miscarries, she will be prosecuted. She must be guilty of something, because even with the pre-natal care and constant pregnancy supervision, she still managed to shirk her child-bearing duty. The potential prison time will increase with the age of the lost fetus – I mean, baby – and the burden of proof will be on her to demonstrate that she did nothing to end the pregnancy on her own.
All pregnancies will be carried to term, regardless of the health of the fetus – sorry, baby, I keep missing that – or the walking womb. The personhood of the baby comes first, and every chance for life must be taken. Will this result in the deaths of women and babies? Yes, sure – but it will all be for the greater good.
What about the men? Well, they have nearly nothing to do with this, so they won’t have to worry.
(/cynical, sad sarcasm)
I don’t think they have any legal right to do this. It’s a school, not the parents.
Any parent who would let a school run by fundie xians with brains the size of a walnuts make decisions about medical treatment for their kids is an idiot.
(Not that I’m saying they don’t exist. This is Louisiana we are talking about.)
Ugh, I missed that part. I get the definite whiff of company doctors that never diagnose work-related injuries no matter how obvious they are.
@ mythbri
Sarcasm? What sarcasm?
Oh, YOUR sarcasm. You should really blockquote or put an editor’s note on the parts of it that wouldn’t have come from the anti-rights crowd though… otherwise, it seems to be a fairly accurate summation.
See? Take out your
astute observationsoff-message comments, and you could make some serious money writing for LifeNews or some such.I don’t see why they even bother with involuntary pregnancy testing anyway. In the not so long run, it won’t make any difference.
At some point, pregnancy becomes glaringly obvious. Shortly after that, it becomes an incontrovertible, if former, fact.
It’s all simple biology.
But you’ll miss months of shaming! If you wait until it’s visible, you can’t expel them earlier. Not to mention, it’s so much more effective to make them take tests every month.
(Now, I’m aware I’m dangerously close to violating the New Rules, so adios! I’ll go do something productive instead of avoiding work.)
@PatrickG
It makes me even sadder that I could make money writing dystopia that people would WANT to be real.
Disgusting. Simply disgusting. Of course, LA being an abstinence-only state I’m sure this provides them a nice way to cut down on the number of students they’re responsible for teaching, since that system more or less guarantees increased teen-pregnancy rates.
I’d say that’s another example of trying to reserve a right they don’t have. They cannot legally tell a student to go to a physician of the school’s choosing for medically unnecessary testing and demand the results of the test. If they were just having a principal’s aid get the students to piss on a stick I’d say we have a rather grotesque invasion of privacy, but not much else. Involving physicians in it takes it squarely into HIPAA territory which is much more actionable. I’d be curious to know under what circumstances a school could force a student to go to a physician, let alone a specific physician. But they’re also clearly expecting said physician to run a pregnancy test and tell the school the results and that’s just not legal in any way.
I doubt this school teaches that subject very well.
Well, this theory, that I have, that is to say, which is mine, goes like this: Conservatives are trying to hide the statistical evidence that repressive, no-sex conservative methodology has reverse effectiveness for preventing teen pregnancy, whereas those who do not suffer under complete conservatism (have access to sex ed, prophylaxis, and family planning and health services) become unwantedly pregnant at a far lower rate. They want to disappear these young women. Boys don’t show, although they do tell an awful lot, but this has little statistical merit for measuring teen pregnancy rates.
Well sure. You do have a point.
But they can always make it up on volume. IIRC, during the US colonial era, they used to put people in stocks in the public square and make women wear a Scarlet A (Nethanial Hawthorne).
These days with modern technology, we can do better. An LED Scarlet A to start with.
Nothing to do with this subject–at all.
Sam Harris has rightfully and accurately responded to the inane Alternet article, “The 5 Most Awful Atheists”. And to his credit, he has has floated a word of critique of Myers– ‘…that shepherd of Internet trolls…’– and the ‘hive-mind’ machine they refer to as a blog.
Well and accurately expressed Sam! We need more ‘outing’ of the nasty subjective opinion-mongering of Myers and his wide-eyed acolytes, and the blatant bullying the accompanies anyone seeking to explore ideas and evidence along lines other than those given the stamp of approval by Myers and his group of psuedo-intellectual gangbangers. ‘Nuff said.
Does someone want to point and laugh at neuralobserver for such multi-level failure of a post, or should I?
(Oh yeah,… forgot that other telling descriptor, referring to Pharyngula as ‘…PZ Myers odious blog…’ Good to see someone of stature and intelligence telling it like it is!!)
okay, I’ll do it
*Points and Laughs at neuralobserver*
(Have you figured out why you’re being mocked yet?)
How legally close to the school’s entrance can we setup a free condom, real sex-ed booklets and Planned Parenthood pamphlet booth? Or better yet, let’s just shut the school down so one of the choices is “have the baby and stay in school”. Don’t they see that this policy has what they would call “anti-life” consequences?
I can’t even call those hypocrites “pro-fetus” (because they only care about babies before they’re born) anymore. They’re anti-women. Only that can describe them. The fetuses are just a cudgel they use to bash women with.
@64: Don’t do it. Intentional derail.
Excellent article Mr. Harris, revealing Myers to be exactly what many of us have determined him to be after exposure to his blog!
[Without a doubt, he and his groupies with weasel out of the criticism with their usual bag of tricks–‘trolls’,.. ‘tone trolls’,.. ‘morons’,… ‘fuckwits’…and the assorted weaponized epithets that pass for ‘intelligent argument’ on their fantasy planet.
Please,.. we need to see LESS of Myers and similar fuckwits at atheist conventions and gatherings, and MORE level-headed, intelligent and expansive thinkers and speakers that can begin to wield real influence and being to give real traction to this shaky and fledgling movement.
How utterly vile these people are. There was I thinking that it was those evil atheists who pretend that God doesn’t exist so that they can behave just the way that they please. Now I realise that all you have to do is believe in a god that is just as sick and twisted as you are and you can justify doing absolutely anything.
@69 neuralfailure.
Hey Idiot troll.
Myers just opened a thread on Harris’s trolling. It’s at the top of the blog today which are in order of time posted.
Why don’t you troll there rather than continuing to derail a thread about something completely different.
If a requirement of enrollment is that parents must sign a waiver that permits X physician to release their child’s pregnancy status to the school, would that be a legal (but still odious) way to get around the law?
Also, *points and laughs at aneuralobserver*
neuralobserver,
If you want to derail a discussion, please do it at the [Thunderdome] thread.
Being pregnant is an unacceptable character trait? How will the school administrators explain that to their mothers?
And how can anyone possibly think that denying a pregnant teenager a high school education will make matters better for her?
The mind boggles.
Here, aneuralobserver, we’ll make it very easy for you: click here to go to the relevant thread about Sam Harris.
The weird thing is that this almost sounds like something a paranoid conservative would imagine a “liberal” school doing, doesn’t it? Like, liberals hate motherhood and hate pregnancy, they think all embryos should be aborted, and wouldn’t it be just like those feminazis to punish female students who failed to embrace the Holy Sacrament of Abortion?
F wrote:
This pretty much explains it hands-down.
Probably not.
Under US law, you can’t sign away your legal rights.
neuralobserver
You want to talk about Harris, fine, take it to PZ’s post on the subject, in stead of commenting in this completely unrelated thread. That, or go straight to the THUNDERDOME.
At that age, more like make it up a lot.
Ironically, the abortion rate among fundie xian kids is higher than the general population.
They might babble on about fetus worshipping but when it happens to them, well, hypocrisy, is one of their three major sacraments.
More on signing away or contracting away your legal rights.
In general you can’t. Which doesn’t mean people won’t try to get you to do it. But IANAL, so the situation may be more complicated.
I’ve signed these sort of documents before. My lawyer just said to sign them if you have to. Since they aren’t legally enforceable, why not?
Being pregnant isn’t the character trait – compassion is the unacceptable character trait, to be replaced by a formal policy of slut-shaming.
Having lived in a fundie household and attended a school where sex ed wasn’t discussed, I can definitely confirm this. Possessing condoms or birth control is too risky, because parents/siblings might find it, and there’s a ton of guilt around even purchasing said items, because it admits that you’re planning to commit a big sin. If you do bite the bullet on purchasing birth control, you have to travel at least an hour to safely buy it in an area where you’re less likely to run into someone you know. And how do you learn to use it correctly? Well, you can read about it somewhere you won’t get caught, find an adult who who you can 100% trust, try to make the most sense of package directions, go by word-of-mouth instructions, or just use good ol’ trial and error. Basically, the worst possible conditions for safe sex.
In their little brains, they think they can just make it so difficult to have sex that teens won’t be tempted to try, but that’s just a lot of willful ignorance.
F:
Googlemess:
And why would they want to institute these repressive, anti-sexual policies, when the historical record shows that they hurt women far more than they hurt men?
I… fail completely to see the logic of kicking pregnant girls out of school… (aside from the massive pointless privacy invasion and creepyness of the proposed tests). Barring medical complications, pregnancy shouldn’t really interfere with school up until the last month, should it?
I went to a (predominantly middle-class) comprehensive in the UK, and knew of 2 pregnancies while I was there. In the first, the school desperately tried to keep the girl on to finish her GCSEs, going so far as to offer free daycare (volunteered by the 3 women who ran the admin office!). She declined, but the school tried its best. A school that would actively seek to exclude girls just for being pregnant… does not compute…
The controversity is a win-win-win for the school. If the case goes to court and the school wins (which, with the right-wing bloc[kheads] on SCOTUS, is always a possibility), the school keeps the policy. If their lawyers tell them the case is a loser or they can’t afford to take it to court, it settles with the ACLU, then uses the “evil godless commie lawyers” tack to raise funds. If it loses in court, it attacks the ACLU and the courts, uses its “victim” status to raise money, and gets plenty of publicity (all favorable in the eyes of the parents the school seeks to attract) for as long as the case is in the local news and the wingnut media.
You can never be too crazy to succeed in Wingnuttia.
I’m curious… I’ve heard all the tropes about girls going to live with their aunts for senior year, but I can’t find any reliable sources about how pregnancy in schools has been handled (well, ok, I didn’t try TOO hard — didn’t feel like wading through the Pregnancy Conspiracy and LA school stuff when searching). I am wondering if there are any statistics on this.
I find myself wondering if this is in fact an extremely limited form of progress (they have to put this in their policies now, not just hush it up), but I have absolutely no data to back that up.
Rip me apart so I can learn, plx.
I hope the ACLU rips them a very expensive new one. A charter school is a public school and they can not discriminate like this.
LiquoriceAllsort;
Agreed. Nothing on this earth will stop horny teenagers doing what horny teenagers do. The sex drive is just too strong, and the abstinence only brigade engages in a lot of wishful thinking.
Arkady:
Well, we here in the enlightened US also have a general tendency of punishing students by making them miss school. I’m sure this does wonders for their ability to complete classes and graduate.
#50 mythbri
Romania (IIRC) actually did this. If a married woman wasn’t getting pregnant within some “reasonable” time period, she had to go to a doctor and be checked out or explain why. No birth control available,of course.
With a surplus of babies available for adoption, the orphanages were filled with unwanted babies. These cash strapped institutions could not give them proper care. Babies were virtually dumped into cribs and left there for years – fed, changed and bathed, but no other care or attention because the staff didn’t have time.
It produced a whole generation of mentally, emotionally and physically retarded children. (And I mean retarded in the medical sense.) It breaks your heart to see the pictures of the orphanages and hear how badly damaged the babies were by this policy.
Data are going to be hard to come by, as the treatment of pregnant teens is extremely variable depending on the support systems in place. In the deep south, and increasingly nationwide, religious agendas are tied to Crisis Pregnancy Centers which in turn have ties to religious adoption agencies, some of which are coercive and secretive about their practices.
Baseline stats (bolds mine):
http://www.aclu-wa.org/blog/teen-pregnancy-discrimination-and-dropout-rate
—
http://www.cdc.gov/teenpregnancy/aboutteenpreg.htm
—
Starter material on CPCs and adoption centers:
http://americanindependent.com/211926/sonogram-law-widens-the-door-to-anti-abortion-crisis-pregnancy-centers
—
http://www.thenation.com/article/shotgun-adoption
The article doesn’t specifically discuss teens, but there are hints: (emphasis mine)
@ Pteryxx:
Sincerely, thanks for the info. It’s not something I’ve had an opportunity to research, so I very much appreciate it.
I guess they could do forcible ultrasounds to see if the boys’ seminal vesicles are full, or if they’ve had emissions.
That’d make it all fair, wouldn’t it?
Words: I do not have them.
PZ: thank you for this morning’s WTF moment.
Women: Erm I’m very sorry that some of us Peepee Havers are acting like total fuckwits (and also some non-Peepee Havers are joining in, but it’s all about the Peepee, let’s be honest). Please can to be of shootingness them with papier mache bullets in the Peepee hole now?
Louis
Wow. The list of states I never want to have to move to just gets longer, and longer. :(
As illiberal and wrong as the school’s policy is, I am somewhat alarmed that PZ’s first thought on it was “Urine fetishists!”
I foresee that “Play with my squid” is going to become a catch phrase at my house.
Strangely, this might be legal if the parents agree to the testing (which I assume they do for the kids to attend this “charter school”) and the child is under age 18.
I was thinking it violates the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. What’s more self-incriminating that your own wee, and more of an invasion of privacy than having to provide it to a school official on demand? Then again, kids don’t have much of a First Amdenment at school, so I’m not holding out much hope on this.
Good point. With the way children are practically treated as property, that would probably be sufficient to get HIPAA out of the way. And as SnowyBiscuit suggested in #97, being a charter school I’m sure the parents probably are willing so sign it along with whatever paperwork they do to enroll their children. Being a charter school, parents are choosing this school for their children, and they’re choosing this one for a reason. Odds are, they are in agreement with the administrators in their misogynistic worldview. This would explain why they say they haven’t received any complaints about it from parents or students – the parents are on their side, and who are the students going to complain to?
If he’s like me, it wasn’t his first thought, but he decided the first few weren’t fit for saying out loud.
…That’s exactly what goes on with the troubled-teen re-education camps. The contract with the parents legally figleafs the camp employees kidnapping, torturing, withholding medication, and controlling communications to and from the kids.
I work within the field of education in the state of Florida. A charter school (in Florida at least, but I think guidlines are fairly similar from state to state) is a public school with the freedom to do some things a little bit different. I am almost certain a charter school can not discriminate against a pregnant teen any more than any other public school. Such schools definitely receive most of their funding from the state.