News

Ben Johnson contributed to this report.

ATLANTA, GA, July 3, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – As the nation’s largest teachers union held its annual session at the Georgia World Congress Center, pro-life educators and parents picketed the event and urged the union to drop its pro-abortion advocacy.

The 2012-2013 National Education Association (NEA) resolutions clearly state the organization’s support for legal and widely accessible abortion, including taxpayer-funded and school-based ‘family planning’ clinics.

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“The National Education Association supports family planning, including the right to reproductive freedom,” the resolutions state. “The Association urges the government to give high priority to making available all methods of family planning to women and men unable to take advantage of private facilities. The Association also urges the implementation of community-operated, school-based family planning clinics that will provide intensive counseling by trained personnel.”

“We joined the union for representation at the collective bargaining table – not to be misrepresented by a bunch of left-wingers who have taken over our union on social, moral and political issues,” Bob Pawson, president of Pro-life Educators of America, told OneNewsNow.

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Pawson’s group was joined by activists from Georgia Right to Life and the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform at the “Picket and Prayer” rally, during which they asked delegates to repeal the pro-abortion sections of the NEA resolutions.

Suzanne Ward of Georgia Right to Life pointed out that the nation’s largest professional union, the NEA, “hides behind politically correct wording, but its policies have actually contributed to the demise of some 55 million innocent children who never saw the inside of a classroom. It’s high time that the NEA stand for life,” she added.

The union's donation of $60 million to Barack Obama's political fortunes also did not sit well with protesters, some of whom simply ask that the teacher's organization stop addressing the topic of abortion altogether.

“[W]e're not asking the union to become pro-life. We're just saying get out of the abortion issue, and be truly disengaged and neutral on it,” Pawson added.

In recent years, the NEA has refused to abandon its highly controversial pro-abortion stance, leading some educators to distance themselves from the 3.2 million member union in favor of more neutral professional organizations.

In 2009, after the union voted down a resolution to abandon its abortion advocacy and pledged to support efforts to legalize same-sex “marriage,” the American Association of Educators reported an influx of new members seeking an ethical alternative source of liability insurance and other benefits.

Some teachers joining the AAE expressed outrage with retiring NEA general counsel Bob Chanin's speech at the same convention, where he launched into a tirade against “right-wing b—–ds” who are challenging the organization's liberal politics.

The NEA has promoted a radical sexual agenda worldwide, with one spokesman telling a United Nations panel, “Oral sex, masturbation, and orgasms need to be taught in education.”

At 2011’s Commission on the Status of Women, NEA spokesman Diane Schneider advocated for more “inclusive” sex education in US schools, with curricula based on liberal hetero and homosexual expression. She claimed that the idea of sex education remains an oxymoron if it is abstinence-based, or if students are still able to opt-out.

Comprehensive sex education is “the only way to combat heterosexism and gender conformity,” Schneider proclaimed, “and we must make these issues a part of every middle and high-school student’s agenda.” “Gender identity expression and sexual orientation are a spectrum,” she explained, and said that those opposed to homosexuality “are stuck in a binary box that religion and family create.”