Anti-Choice Lectures In UK Schools Increase

The Guardian (UK): Shock tactics, by Kate Hilpern:

Rawnie Chapman-Kitchin, 15, was aghast when her teacher compared abortion to Nazism, saying that in time history would view both with the same revulsion. "I'd been expecting a regular RE class, but a different teacher was called in to do a talk called Abortion is Murder," she says. "He showed horrifying pictures of dead foetuses, but there was no opportunity to opt out. It was very much a case of 'this is the way you need to think'....

Anti-abortion presentations in schools are not a one-off. At the beginning of this term, the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (Spuc) wrote to every secondary school in the country to offer its PowerPoint presentation. Katherine Hampton, education officer at Spuc, says she visits around 10 schools a term and supervises a further 40 trained speakers across the country. The organisation Life delivered 816 school talks during 2006-07 through its "active schools department", reaching 37,803 students across 316 schools - a 20% increase on the previous year. Then there are the individual teachers, like Rawnie's, who offer to air their anti-choice views to classes. Having realised that teenagers are the most susceptible to anti-abortion messages, lobbyists are increasingly targeting 13- to 17-year-olds.