Planned Parenthood Rips Catholicism

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on a new report by the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) on sex education:

The goal of IPPF is to sexually engineer society, and one way to accomplish this feat is to smear religious conservatives, especially Catholics. This new report not only substantiates this charge, it makes it clear that Planned Parenthood wants to bring its irresponsible ideas to bear on kids.

“IPPF uses the terms young people, youth and adolescents interchangeably to refer to people who are between 10 and 24.” In other words, 5th graders should be treated the same way graduate students are when it comes to their “sexual and reproductive health and rights.”

The entire program is based on a faulty assumption. IPPF says that “The taboo on youth sexuality is one of the key forces driving the AIDS epidemic and high rates of teenage pregnancy and maternal mortality.” Nonsense. In the 1950s, there was no sex education in the schools, the pill was not commercially available and AIDS didn’t exist. Yet the out-of-wedlock birth rate was comparatively miniscule and sexually transmitted diseases were relatively rare. All because of taboos.

According to IPPF, it’s those Catholics—who are indistinguishable from radical Islamists—who are the problem. “Fundamentalist and other religious groups—the Catholic Church and madrasas (Islamic schools) for example—have imposed tremendous barriers that prevent young people, particularly, from obtaining information and services related to sex and reproduction.”

So the kids in Sister Mary’s class who learn about responsible sex are analogous to Imam Mohammad’s kids who are either denied sex education or are told that homosexuality is punishable by death. Finally, why is it that public school students, who know so much more about sex than those dunces in the parochial schools, are precisely the ones walking around with the highest rates of illegitimacy, abortion and herpes?

Susan A. Fani is the Director of Communications for the Catholic League. This press release was originally issued on February 9, 2010.