Pregnant Teen Photos Banned From Yearbook Because 'Abstinence'

By Katie J.M. Baker  |  May 16, 2013 | 10:20pm
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A Michigan school district won’t let two pregnant students show their baby bumps in the high school yearbook because it would promote teen pregnancy and thereby contradict the state’s abstinence-only sex ed approach. We can’t make this shit up.

White Cloud High School junior Deonna Harris told WOOD-TV that a yearbook staff member recently pulled her aside and told her she had to re-take her photo because her pregnant stomach was too prominent in the original picture. Harris wasn’t wearing a sonogram t-shirt or otherwise drawing attention to her belly; she was posing with a few friends in a truck outside school. But White Cloud Public Schools Superintendent Barry Seabrook said her existence contradicted Michigan’s (clearly incredibly effective) abstinence-only sex ed program.

“It’s our feeling … that (the photos) could very well be a contrary message to (the state policy),” Seabrook told the AP. Ah, abstinence-only logic: eschew condoms and prevent teen pregnancy by literally removing babies having babies from sight.

“It made me tear up. I was trying to hold it back because I didn’t want everyone to ask me why I was crying and stuff,” Harris said.

Senior Kimberly Haney and her boyfriend were voted most likely to get married, so they devised a fake proposal scene for the yearbook. Alas, they’re not actually married, so Haney’s a wayward sinner instead of a glowing mother-t0-be and that photo was nixed, too.

“I also went to the bathroom and cried,” Haney said.

The girls refused to shoot new photos hiding their pregnancies and say they’re being discriminated against. That’s true, but the district’s most egregious crime was failing to teach them about safe sex in the first place.

[WOOD-TV]

 
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