NYC schools giving out tens of thousands of 'morning-after pills' (Photos)

“I’m in shock. What gives the mayor the right to decide, without adequate notice, to give our children drugs that will impact their bodies and their psyches? He has purposely kept the public and parents in the dark with his agenda.”

The comment was made by Mona Davids, president of the NYC Parents Union. Davids, whose 14-year-old attends a Manhattan high school. It was in reaction to data obtained by the New York Post under Freedom of Information Law request indicating that the Bloomberg administration has been stealthily handing out the “morning-after pill” to sexually active students in an unpublicized drive to curb teen pregnancy.

According to the Post:

Last September, the city revealed it had started giving out Plan B and other birth control in the nurses’ offices of 13 high schools. At the time, officials said 567 girls had gotten Plan B.

But the birth-control blitz was much bigger than the city had acknowledged. About 40 separate “school-based health centers” doled out 12,721 doses of Plan B in 2011-12, up from 10,720 in 2010-11 and 5,039 in 2009-10, according to the newly released data.

About 22,400 students sought reproductive care from January 2009 through last school year, records show. Under state law, minors don’t need parental OKs to get contraceptives.

Part of Mona Davids’ pique is that the majority of school-based health centers are in poor neighborhoods, prompting her to call the administration’s actions “population control on blacks and Latinos without our knowledge.”

In addition to freely dispensing Plan B, some 40 school-based clinics have written prescriptions for birth-control pills, intrauterine devices (IUDs), hormone-delivering injections. In all, the clinics have covered 93,569 monthly cycles through June 2012.

City officials refused to discuss the project, launched by the Bureau of Maternal, Infant and Reproductive Health via a grant from the Fund for Public Health in New York.

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Howard Portnoy has written for New York's "Daily News" and several national magazines. He has one published novel, "Hot Rain," (G. P. Putnam's Sons), and has ghost-written some dozen books on art and literature. He also blogs at Liberty Unyielding and formerly blogged at Hot Air. Click the ...

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