The groups work in dozens of school districts across the state, but some public health experts say their curricula can be misleading and biased.
The South Texas Pregnancy Care Center in Seguin, one of the many anti-abortion organizations that is teaching sexual education in dozens of school districts across the state.When Sarah Anderson travels to Texas middle schools to teach sex education, she brings props: a toy baby to represent unplanned pregnancy, a snake for bacterial infections, a pregnancy test for infertility, a skeleton for AIDS and cancer.
With the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade last summer and the near-total ban on abortion in Texas, crisis pregnancy centers are poised to play an even bigger role going forward. In April, the Texas state legislature approved $200 million over two years for the organizations through its, more than double the 2021 budgeted amount. The money funds the groups’ overall work, not just sex ed, but went to at least 14 of the centers identified by Hechinger as working in schools.
“We deal with unexpected pregnancies,” said Jennifer Shelton, the executive director of Real Options, a pregnancy resource center in Allen, which has taught sex ed in more than a dozen public school districts. “The best way to deal with that is at the beginning of the decision-making process.” When she was in eighth grade, the group gave each student a cup and had them pour water back and forth, she said. The exercise was supposed to represent how easily they could become infected with an STI. Srikanth, who graduated from high school in 2019, said the classmates treated it as a joke and purposefully tried to maximize “infections.”
In an emailed statement, Amanda Brim, the Lewisville district’s chief communications officer, said that 180 Degrees was never adopted districtwide, but individual schools could choose to use the program. In 2022, she wrote, Lewisville adopted a new sex ed program to meet updated state standards, which went
“They just tried to scare us,” said Samuel Ingram, a 2020 graduate of the Leander Independent School District, which says that it has used LifeGuard since 2005. Ingram added that he wished he had been given useful information on safe sex instead of being told “here’s what gonorrhea looks like, and you could have it forever.”
The South Texas Pregnancy Care Center’s SHARE script, for example, instructs educators to tell students that teens don’t use condoms consistently because their brain is not fully developed.
“When we are able to show them a baby moving in the womb, it becomes a lot more tangible,” said Shannon Thompson, The Open Door’s executive director. “This baby has its own heartbeat and fingers and toes and eyes and nose and is already developing a personality. When they can see that, suddenly things are different for them. It has planted a seed of life.”
The LifeGuard eighth grade curriculum, for instance, includes a game about fetal development in which students guess whether certain developmental milestones — such as the heart starting to beat and the brain beginning to function — occur at four, six or eight weeks. Speaking at the Heartbeat International conference, Thompson noted that it was, in fact, important for organizations like hers to avoid alienating young people with an anti-abortion, religious message.
“There is overlap between the message of abstinence from a health standpoint and the message of abstinence from a faith standpoint,” Anderson, the program’s lead teacher, said in a presentation to the Yorktown school district’s School Health Advisory Council, or SHAC, in spring 2022. “But that doesn’t discredit its value as the best message to give young people when it comes to their health,” she added.
In that school district, Anderson plays an additional role — she serves on the SHAC. In April, at the group’s regular meeting, she encouraged its members to vote to endorse her SHARE curriculum, noting that it was one of just two under the council’s review that aligned with the state health standards. Moments later, council members voted to winnow their choices to those two, and a month later decided to officially recommend Anderson’s program.
Like many pregnancy resource centers, the South Texas Pregnancy Care Center has been expanding its work in the wake of the fall of Roe. This spring, it started construction on a new building, supported, in part, by donations from Seguin nonprofits and agencies. ADemand for its services is rising too. The center previously averaged around 20 pregnancy tests a month.
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