Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards tweeted “Bravo!” to a group of Bronx charter school students who gave the CEO of their high school the ammunition to cancel a visit to the school by GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz.
A tweet by ColorOfChange – a group that says its goal is to “strengthen Black America’s political voice” by empowering blacks and their allies –praised the students who organized to get Cruz’s visit cancelled. Richards tweeted in response, “High school students organizing and making themselves heard – and getting headlines to boot! Bravo!”
As Breitbart News reported, students sent a letter arguing that they would find Cruz’s presence “offensive,” and that his ideas are “actively working to harm us, our community, and the people we love.” The students referred to Cruz as “misogynistic, homophobic, and racist.”
According to the report:
The hypocritical stance resonated with the school’s Principal Alix Duggins, who subsequently told the students that Lighthouse Academies CEO Khori Whittaker agreed to cancel the Cruz appearance entirely.
Duggins told the students, “I would not have been able to get the visit cancelled without your actions,” according to the NY Daily News report, indicating that Duggins may have wanted to cancel the event before she received the letter. It was not clear whether Duggins had spoken with the students about the appearance before the letter was drafted.
Cruz was in New York in advance of the state’s primary election next week. Richards is stumping for Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton in the Empire State.
In Rhinebeck, New York, Richards touted Clinton’s pro-abortion record.
“She introduced eight separate bills to expand access to reproductive health care,” she said, reports the Poughkeepsie Journal.
Richards praised Clinton who, as a U.S. senator from New York, refused a Food and Drug Administration appointment until emergency contraception was approved for sale over the counter by the federal agency.
“Before, we couldn’t get emergency contraception unless you went and had a doctor’s appointment, got a prescription and then you went and got it filled if your pharmacist would fill it,” Richards said. “We had to fight for all these things … It is now in drug stores all across America because of the work that they did. And the leadership that they provided.”
The American College of Pediatricians, however, states providing adolescent girls with unrestricted access to emergency contraception “bypasses parental involvement” during a developmental stage in which decision-making ability is still immature.
“Research has now documented that the frontal cortex – the important decision-making areas of the human brain – are not fully developed until the mid-twenties,” the College writes, adding:
The decision to engage in sexual activity as an unmarried adolescent in and of itself demonstrates a lack of mature judgment. If parents do not know that their adolescent is engaging in sexual activity, they cannot adequately assist their child with appropriate guidance, nor can they monitor for complications of sexual activity including side effects of contraceptives (ongoing or EC), pregnancy, STIs, and for emotional or behavioral sequelae.
“Rather than facilitating adolescent sexual activity…pediatricians and other health professionals need to facilitate the best for adolescents,” the College states, “encouraging good adolescent-parent communication, teaching adolescents the benefits of delaying sexual activity until marriage, and teaching them how to avoid non-marital consensual sex as well as situations that might result in coerced sex.”