MONROE, Louisiana, August 10, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A school in rural Louisiana has said it will end a policy forcing teen students “suspected” of being pregnant to take a pregnancy test, and to continue their studies at home if the results came back as positive, following a lawsuit threat from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The policy at Delhi Charter School had also stated that students suspected of being pregnant and who do not submit to a test “shall be treated as a pregnant student and will be offered home study opportunities,” and if home study is impossible, “the student will be counselled to seek other educational opportunities.”
School board chairman Albert Christman said that “just a handful” of students had been affected by the policy since it began in 2006, and all of them “came back to school and finished their school.”
The ACLU on Monday called the policy a “blatant violation” of constitutional rights, and promised legal action against the rule in a letter to school officials.
“Schools should be supporting pregnant and parenting teens that face numerous barriers to completing their education, not illegally excluding them from school,” wrote Tiseme Zegeye of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project.
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State school officials immediately followed suit: the Louisiana state department of education told local officials Tuesday that they faced sanctioning unless the policy was changed.
Delhi Charter’s principal Chris Broussard told the Daily News that the school had contracted lawyers to help review the policy, shortly before BBC reported that the policy would end.
Kristan Hawkins of Students for Life of America said that the controversy touched upon a difficult issue for those in the pro-life movement working to ensure moms in school don’t feel pressured to get abortions.
“For the pro-life movement and Christians, we don’t want to be seen as encouraging girls to engage in risky behavior that results in pregnancy,” Hawkins told LifeSiteNews.com in a telephone interview Thursday. “[But] we have to be careful we aren’t discriminating against women who are courageous and say, yeah, I made a mistake, and I’m going to carry my child to term.”
Hawkins said Students for Life of America has its own initiative, “Pregnant on Campus,” that makes sure campuses don’t discriminate against pregnant or parenting students, and provides resources so a young mother “doesn’t feel like she has to choose between her education and the life of her child.” “We in the pro-life movement all know that women don’t view abortion as a choice. It’s a last resort,” she said.
Hawkins says policies like Louisiana’s, in which pregnant girls are simply expelled, are not the answer.
“The only thing this does is make them run to abortionists. We don’t ever want her to run to abortionists. We want them to run to us,” she said. Hawkins also agreed that the policy had genuine problems in terms of gender discrimination.
“What about the guy? Is the guy going to get banned from school too?” said Hawkins.
The problem can be even more pronounced at some universities, where a pregnant student “has the proverbial scarlet ‘A’ [because] she has this life that was created … but the guy has nothing, he can go on living his life,” she continued. “It’s a problem we need to address in these schools.”