WASHINGTON, Mar 30 (LSN.ca) – On March 20, Planned Parenthood Federation of America and its research arm, the Alan Guttmacher Institute, were among the plaintiffs in an ACLU lawsuit filed in federal court against the recently enacted Children’s Internet Protection Act, which is slated to go into effect on April 20. This nationwide law requires schools and libraries that receive federal aid for Web access (called E-rate) to certify that filtering or blocking technology is in place to protect children from harmful, obscene, and pornographic material.
“It doesn’t surprise me one bit that Planned Parenthood has filed this lawsuit,” said Ed Szymkowiak, national director of STOPP International, “In the 1920s and 1930s, Planned Parenthood fought successfully to eliminate laws that prohibited the sending of sex information in the U.S. mail, thereby opening the mail to the pornography industry. In 1996, Planned Parenthood launched a successful legal challenge to the Communications Decency Act, which would have kept pornography off the Internet.”
Szymkowiak believes the new law will affect Planned Parenthood’s own youth-oriented web site, teenwire.com. “This site contains some very disgusting and graphic descriptions of deviant behavior. Any reliable filtering software would block this site. Once again, Planned Parenthood is defending pornography against the will of the American people,” he said. “By joining in this lawsuit against the Children’s Internet Protection Act, Planned Parenthood has shown, once again, that it does not care about children,” said Szymkowiak.
For more from STOPP International see: https://www.stoppinternational.org