Two teens from a private progressive New York high school showed their support for Planned Parenthood by creating dresses for their school’s fashion show out of the abortion vendor’s bright pink stickers and condoms.
Students Karolina Montes, 17, and Zoe Balestri, 16 – both juniors at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School (ECFS) in the Bronx – said their goal was to educate people about Planned Parenthood, reports Buzzfeed.
Balestri reportedly said
We’ve been best friends since 6th grade. This year we thought after everything that’s been happening in the world and with this country, it was important to make our dresses beautiful and fun but also to give them some sort of meaning. We decided this was the perfect way to support something we both strongly believed in.
The rules of the annual fashion show dictate that no fabric is permitted for the students’ handmade creations.
The top of Balestri’s two-piece dress was made out of condoms that said, “Don’t eff with us, don’t eff without us.”
“I thought that was really funny,” she said. “I actually sewed together the condoms with a needle. That took awhile, and I got lube all over my hands, which was kind of gross.”
On its website, the school quotes its founder humanist Felix Adler – a German-American social reformer of both Columbia and Heidelberg Universities – who said ECFS’s ideal is “to develop individuals who are competent to change their environment to greater conformity with moral ideals.”
“Through a curriculum rooted in the tenets of progressive education, students become independent thinkers as they learn that asking their own questions and seeking their own answers provides the key to the deepest kind of understanding,” the school states about its mission.
“It just seems like such an important part of our culture, that we need to have safer methods [of family planning] and we need to educate,” said Montes about the girls’ support of Planned Parenthood. “That’s the main the point, is to educate people.”
Both girls reportedly participated in the anti-Trump Women’s March.
“They’re trying to shut down Planned Parenthoods and make abortion illegal, and that really frightens and saddens me, because it’s such an amazing thing that is provided to women,” Balestri said. “I have friends who use Planned Parenthood services. It’s been there for people in high school, in college, in adulthood, for people who can’t afford to have a child, or for other circumstances. It’s necessary.”
Planned Parenthood clinics are closing rapidly throughout the country in the wake of videos released over the past two years that have led to allegations the abortion provider sells the body parts of babies aborted in its clinics for a profit.
Pro-life organization Live Action has produced a video that utilizes Planned Parenthood’s annual reports to show the actual decline in its healthcare services, while abortions have increased:
“Over the last six years, Planned Parenthood’s annual clientele has dropped half a million clients,” Live Action reports in the video. “And over the last ten years reported, Planned Parenthood has shut down over 200 facilities.”
The video adds that over the last ten years, Planned Parenthood’s annual breast exams have declined 60 percent, leaving the group with less than two percent of breast exams performed in the United States.
Additionally, the group’s annual Pap tests have decreased 77 percent, resulting in a current market share of less than one percent of these procedures, and its annual cancer screenings have decreased 68 percent, an outcome that leaves the group with less than two percent of U.S. cancer screenings performed for women.
“However, Planned Parenthood’s annual abortions have increased 27 percent,” observes Live Action, noting the group performs 34.9 percent of abortions in the nation.
Despite the stark decline in services other than abortions, Planned Parenthood’s government funding has more than doubled, from $272 million to $553 million, with the group claiming taxpayer funding is not used to pay for abortions.
“Planned Parenthood’s enterprise is crumbling, even while they are still raking in over half a billion dollars a year from taxpayers,” said Susan B. Anthony List president Marjorie Dannenfelser. “Their abortion-centered business model isn’t just morally wrong, it’s a failure. In a market where there are so many better options, women don’t need to get their health care from Planned Parenthood.”