Tuesday on The View, host Whoopi Goldberg was adamant that schools needed to provide free birth control to teenagers without parental consent, because they “don’t teach sex education at school.” Whoopi first made this strange allegation on a February 2 show, when she said that a school shouldn’t have to notify parents before putting condoms in the boys' and girls' bathrooms.
On the April 4 show, the topic of whether or not schools should have the authority to issue out contraception to students was again a hot topic. Whoopi shared an angry mother’s story where the woman found out her 16-year-old daughter received a hormonal birth control implant while on a school trip to a health clinic. While the mother apparently gave her consent for the girl to attend the field trip, she didn’t consent for her daughter to get an implant placed in her body.
From the start, Whoopi defended the school and the teen girl’s “choice.”
Listen, I'm happy if a kid realizes that she needs something and if she is of legal age and she can go get it, I'd rather she did that, you know. I'd rather she did it.
After getting pushback from hosts Sunny Hostin and Jedediah Bila, Whoopi insisted the girl absolutely had the wisdom and medical knowledge at the age of 16 to know what she was doing:
Here's what I'm going to tell you. This girl -- this girl had -- I'm sure this girl went and figured out what she needed and went and got it. Now, I am a huge fan of any kid who decides they need something because they're doing this. Because we bitch at kids all the time about being sexual and oversexual and doing this and boys don't, you know, think they need to carry condoms so it's always on the girl. So I'm happy that this girl -- [applause] I'm going to assume that this girl did her homework and got something and then told her mother what she did.
Host Sunny Hostin pushed back against Whoopi’s points, becoming the atypical defender of parental rights. Hostin said she was “horrified” that the school thought it was it’s right to bring a child to a clinic and get a hormonal implant.
HOSTIN: This is something that needs to happen at home, not with the school! If my kid comes home with an implant --
WHOOPI: If your kid comes home with an implant, it's because she couldn't say to you this is what I need. [ Applause ] I'm sorry, as a parent whose child had a baby early, I can tell you, you really do want them to be responsible.
Whoopi continued berating Hostin before blaming schools for supposedly not teaching sex education anymore:
WHOOPI: You'll find this out. You can talk to them until you're blue in the face, and if they've made up their mind that they're going to do something, you want them to be smart enough to know you don't want to get pregnant, you do want to know about STDs which they will not teach in school, they don’t teach sex education at school and that's part of the problem.
HOSTIN: If they don't teach sex ed at school they don't need to be taking these kids to clinics!
After some more back-and-forth with Hostin, Bila brought up the fact that there are sometimes serious side effects of hormonal implants. But Whoopi again put her faith in the school and the anonymous medical clinic to make the best decision for a teen girl’s health and livelihood.
Now that she's made the relationship to the clinic that she's gone to, they will help her with whatever comes up....You're not walking into -- again, you're at a clinic. You have made a relationship with the clinic and you're dealing with a doctor.
Whoopi then referenced the February 2 show when Hostin and Whoopi had a similar argument, after Hostin found condoms displayed openly for students in her child’s school bathroom. At the time, Whoopi defended it because supposedly schools “don’t teach” “how to avoid having sex.”
WHOOPI: They shouldn't have, the fact of the matter is we don't teach children how to avoid having sex. We don't teach it in school. We don't teach anything about sex. Parents don't want to have the conversation. They always say I want to be the person but they never do it.
It’s hard to know where exactly she is getting this information. Sex education has been a mainstay in public and private schools for decades. On top of that, the Obama Administration increased federal funding for contraception-based sex ed and HIV/STD prevention, while taking millions away from schools that promoted abstinence in their sex education curriculum.
