Last week we told you about the college in Pennsylvania where student can pop in and buy the morning after pill from a vending machine. But if you’re a student in Austin, TX and only in high school, you might have had another option. This story tells about a high school math teacher who went to a Planned Parenthood and bought Plan B for a student not old enough to buy it herself.
Tracy Lee Steinberg, a 32-year-old assistant basketball coach and math teacher at Lyndon B. Johnson High School in Austin has resigned after she said she gave a 16-year-old female student two morning-after pills, or Plan B, when the student showed up in class crying in January after having unprotected sex.
Steinberg admitted buying the pill, but some of what she said after is deeply disturbing. According to the Austin-American Statesman:
“I still love and care about all my students, I always have and always will. I always put their needs before my own.”
Yes, this teacher thinks buying a pill to expel a possibly fertile egg in a woman is somehow putting a student’s need first. In fact according to the police affidavit:
Steinberg told the student that “she and her boyfriend had bright futures, and (Steinberg) could help her out by getting her a ‘morning-after’ emergency contraceptive pill,” the affidavit said…. The student and her boyfriend gave money to Steinberg, who said she then purchased the medication at a Planned Parenthood in North Austin, the affidavit said.
Unfortunately, what happened was the student got sick and texted the teacher, who told her it was normal to feel sick. Eventually the student told her mother who was the one who filed a police report.
However, fellow students still expressed support for the teacher, and one said:
One student wrote, “If your teacher is not concerned…shouldn’t that be a problem? Don’t prosecute her for simply doing her job.”
And rounding out the “you’ve gotta be kidding me” file on this one is that the Austin Independent School District put the teacher on paid administrative leave. She resigned Feb. 1, but even after she admitted doing it, the police affidavit said, “”expressed anger at (the student), blaming her for getting in trouble,” according to the Austin-American Statesman.
I don’t even need to add commentary to make you horrified, probably, but I’m going to anyway because I happen to be a certified Texas teacher, though I don’t work there now. I taught in Texas for eight years and nowhere I taught even let me give a Tylenol to a student, let alone a prescription-only pill. As a matter of fact, in the schools where I worked, even the nurse could not dispense a pill unless the parent had brought it and signed a consent form. I can’t tell you how many sick teenagers were sent back to my room with a peppermint because all the nurse was allowed to do was let them rest for a bit and have a peppermint. So forget that it’s the morning after pill. Educators don’t get to give prescription pills to minors. Period.
That alone is enough of a reason to be outraged, but the idea that it was somehow right because she was helping a student avoid a pregnancy is the most horrifying indication that our culture of death has taken over much of society. If this teacher had given a student Valium or Xanax, what do you think the response would have been? But because we are uniquely obsessed with a right to “choose” students and the teacher herself justify it as help, and even the district put her on paid leave.
It begs the question, at what point will this madness stop? When will we stop defending abortion to the point that we endanger the lives of those around us? The fact that so many found this acceptable is indicative in itself of the downward spiral into which our numb-to-abortion society has succumbed.
LifeNews Note: This column originally appeared at Bound4Life’s blog and is reprinted with permission.
