The groups work in dozens of school districts across the state, but some public health experts say their curricula can be misleading and biased.
The South Texas Pregnancy Care Center in Seguin, one of the many anti-abortion organizations that is teaching sexual education in dozens of school districts across the state.
Anderson isn’t a school district employee. She works for the South Texas Pregnancy Care Center in Seguin, a group founded in 2001 to counsel women against getting abortions. The organization is one of dozens of crisis pregnancy centers across the state that send employees into schools to talk to students and, in some cases, teach sex education classes. dictate that sex education classes emphasize abstinence, those sex ed efforts are particularly widespread.
Staff of crisis pregnancy centers argue that their approach works: Their students report directly to them or in internal surveys that they’ve changed their minds about having sex. Staff also say that their connections with schools grew out of a desire to teach young people how to avoid unplanned pregnancies in the first place, intervening before teens need their services.
For three years as a student in Lewisville Independent School District, near Dallas, Nimisha Srikanth was taught by staffers of 180 Degrees, the 180 Degrees is among the state’s most widespread crisis pregnancy center-affiliated sex ed programs, noting on its website that it has sent presenters to 14 districts in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. In 2019, Real Options reached 18,329 students “with education presentations about sexual purity,”
The sex ed curriculum of 180 Degrees was one of six obtained by The Hechinger Report through public records requests and reviews of school and center websites. All of the pregnancy center curricula emphasize the potential harms of having sex and advocate waiting until marriage, suggesting that doing so will eliminate all risk. that there are 27 different STIs and that, with their various strains, the total number of sexually transmitted diseases nears 1,000.
Four public health experts who reviewed portions of the crisis pregnancy center curricula at the request of The Hechinger Report said the programs frequently fail to provide important context for students to assess the likelihood of various risks and that some parts were biased or misleading, including messaging on contraception effectiveness.
“If I have limited time with a young person, am I going to spend that time giving them a bunch of facts that are not very relevant to them in that moment, that frankly, if they were interested, they could look up on their phone?” Kantor said. Instructors “are making an unfortunate decision to spend precious time with a young person who really needs skills giving out what are probably going to be useless pieces of information.
Other pregnancy center sex ed programs also use talking points associated with the anti-abortion movement and encourage students to visit their clinics. But the groups do emphasize their religious values in other aspects of their operations, sometimes stipulating that job applicants be Christian and hold certain values. A LifeGuard for a curriculum specialist noted that the new hire must have a “strong commitment and dedication to the sanctity of human life and sexual abstinence.” A for an abstinence educator from 180 Degrees listed the top qualification as: “Pro-Life, Christ follower, and believes that the Bible is the inerrant word of God.
The South Texas Pregnancy Care Center assures parents and educators that the religious beliefs that drive the group’s work do not influence its education program, SHARE. After the 2022 meeting in Yorktown, she convinced the district to use SHARE, and this year added Seguin to the program’s growing list of districts.
“School districts and school boards have to rely on the pulse of their communities,” he said, adding that it can be difficult to find enough people to serve on SHACs and that the process of evaluating sex ed curricula took more than a year. “When folks come forward and say they want to serve, we’re going to accept them with the knowledge that the intent is to come on and do what’s best.”
“It makes me so angry to see that crisis pregnancy centers are leading sexual education in the state and not healthcare professionals,” said Davis, who has classmates who were taught by the groups. “They are taking advantage of one of the most vulnerable populations we have, which is young people. … They are teaching young people things to specifically lead them down roads they want them to walk down.
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