A bill filed in February to include abortion education in students’ health care studies advanced through the North Carolina Senate on Wednesday.
Under Health Curriculum/Preterm Birth, North Carolina public schools health instructors will be required to teach students abortions can cause preterm births in subsequent pregnancies.
The legislation passed the Senate Monday 38-10, primarily sponsored by three Republican senators.
In 2011, more than 10 percent of North Carolina births were preterm, which is considered any birth 37 or less weeks before the woman’s due date, according to NCFamily.org.
A comprehensive and age-appropriate health curriculum will be taught from kindergarten through ninth grade under the legislation, and the N.C. Child Fatality Task Force (CFTF) recommended including abortion education.
Lenoir County Schools adopted a safer-sex program — Making Proud Choices — at the end of 2012, teaching eighth graders lessons on sexually transmitted diseases, HIV and pregnancy prevention. Previously, schools only taught abstinence but must now include preventative studies.
Abortion is not part of the curriculum of any district health studies.
Rochelle Middle School health teacher Bonnie Wagner, who taught the Making Proud Choice curriculum this year, said she thinks adding induced abortion education to instruction will be beneficial.
“So many of them hear the wrong information,” said Wagner, who’s heard murmurs of the topic among students. “If they learn the correct stuff and know what the purpose of an abortion is, then … they’ll have a better opinion of it.”
She said including the risks of the procedure will fit with the school’s STD program because of the broad range of sex education subjects discussed.
Tammy McMillian, who has a 14-year-old son attending Rochelle, said students will still experiment with sex, but they should be educated.
“To be informed and properly educated about stuff like that is better than not knowing and finding out the hard way,” she said. “If they are informed, then maybe they’ll make better choices.”
But one mother of a Rochelle student felt any discussion about abortions should be excluded from classroom instruction.
“It’s just shocking to hear that they would even consider that,” said a parent who wished not to be identified. “I don’t think it’s necessary. These are middle-schooled aged kids, and I don’t think they need to be introduced to abortions.”
A primary sponsor of the bill was N.C. Sen. Warren Daniel, a Republican who represents Cleveland and Burke counties in Western North Carolina.
“I am hopeful that if young men and women are fully educated about the risks of induced abortion as it relates to preterm births,” he wrote in a statement to The Free Press, “they will be better able to determine whether terminating pregnancy is the right choice for their future reproductive health.”
While there are no clinics in Lenoir County that perform abortion procedures, the local Eastern Pregnancy Information Center serves six area counties on educating women about the procedure and providing free pregnancy tests and ultrasounds. There are also nearby sources for abortion education.
“If (a woman) is thinking about abortion,” said Blake Honeycutt, director of Carolina Pregnancy Center in Greenville, “we try to educate her on the risks and the side effects of abortion, both psychical in emotional.
“We also explain the procedures to her, just so that she’ll understand what it is that she's getting ready to undergo. We don’t want her to walk into it being surprised and not prepared. We do it in a very non-biased way, explaining it using a presentation that’s strictly medical education.”
Honeycutt said she was not well-versed enough in the medical impacts of abortions on preterm births but was aware of articles on NCFamily.org addressing abortion and prematurity.
According to an article on the site by Martin McCaffrey, who Daniel called an expert and an expert the CFTF relied on to make abortion education recommendation to the General Assembly, “preterm birth does not have a single identifiable cause, but it has been associated with a number of factors.”
Among smoking, terminating a pregnancy has been associated with the risk of preterm birth.
The article indicated because an abortion is one of the most commonly performed procedures in the world, it can have a significant “impact on the future reproductive health of a young woman,” and informing women about the risks is important.
Abortion education is only one facet of educating students on preventable causes of preterm birth, according to SB 132. The controversy is that it will be included.
The bill was referred to the House Committee Health and Human Services Wednesday.
Jessika Morgan can be reached at 252-559-1078 or at jessika.morgan@kinston.com. Follow her on Twitter @JessikaMorgan.
BREAKOUT BOX:
Facts about abortion and prematurity in North Carolina, 2011
n 10.4 percent of 12,750 births were born preterm
n 137 case studies demonstrate an association between an induced abortion and preterm birth
n Abortion is associated with:
262 very preterm births
86 very preterm deaths
18 cases of cerebral palsy
Source: NCFamily.org