A Sutter Middle School teacher who recently aired graphic abortion videos (below) to students during a sex-education class is in hot water with the Sacramento City Unified School District.
The district launched an investigation following complaints from parents whose children had seen the videos, which depict how abortions are performed during various stages of pregnancy. The videos are narrated by physician and anti-abortion activist Anthony Levatino, who describes in detail the process for performing the procedures and urges viewers to “protect the pre-born.”
The classroom presentation, shown earlier this month, included a music video titled “Can I Live?” in which the artist thanks his mother for her decision to forgo an abortion.
School district spokesman Alex Barrios said Tuesday that the videos are “completely inappropriate for the classroom” and fail to “meet the district’s approved family life and sexuality curriculum.”
Parents told The Bee that the teacher is Jenny Thomas, whose specialty is science. Among their responsibilities, science teachers are tasked with educating students about family life and human sexuality. Parents described Thomas as a good teacher, and said they believed she has never used the videos in previous classes.
The series of YouTube videos featuring Levatino demonstrating how doctors perform abortions in the first, second and third trimesters of pregnancy. In the first trimester, Levatino says, a suction machine is activated and “the baby is rapidly torn apart.” The video features a graphic depiction of a fetus being destroyed.
Levatino tells his audience that he performed hundreds of abortions before having an epiphany. “I looked at the remains of a pre-born child whose life I had ended, and all I could see was someone’s son or daughter,” he says.
He hosts similar presentations of abortions in the second and third trimester, describing how the fetus’s head “is grasped and crushed” in the process.
The videos also cite risks and complications of pregnancies, including the possibility of death to the mother.
The “Can I Live?” video, directed by rapper Nick Cannon, thanks his mother for deciding against aborting him when she became pregnant as a teenager.
Full story at Sacramento Bee.
Government school teachers are usually bound by the approved curriculum and are not supposed to deviate without the principal’s or the department’s approval. It appears that parents were not notified?
Parents are allowed to opt-out their children from any offensive material by notifying the school in writing every beginning of every school year.
While we can applaud this goodhearted teacher’s pro-life intentions, parents were not properly notified.
The teacher needs to show the entire movie to the parents and see if they can help get the movie into the approved curriculum—which is currently controlled by Planned Parenthood lobbyists in Sacramento.
JD,
From the information in the article, it sounds like she was within approved guidelines to discuss the issue: it merely sounds like the materials were not age appropriate.
It would have been better to discuss what science knows of the stages of fetal development. This is what the National Right to Life Committee used to do with great success (they used to refer to it as the slide show) and it’s what caused me to become pro-life back in 70’s.
I notice the initial frame shows the abortionist sticking a needle in the child’s head. “The Giver”, often read by kids little older than these students, details a utopia where unwanted infants (who do not meet the utopia’s exacting emotional standards) are murdered by a needle in the brain, then disposed off. The young protagonist, seeing this horror, escapes with a disabled sibling whom he fears will face the same fate. For kids who have read the book and video, the wise teacher can ask: what’s the difference before and after birth?
The pro-abortion faction cowers because the truth is being told about the horrors of abortion, and the truth undermines their position which is based on the false premise that the child to be aborted is nothing more than useless biological material.
The truth hurts, especially when it is not convenient for the pro-abortion agenda.