Proposal to open Planned Parenthood on campus sparks protests
Protestors gather outside Norwalk-La Mirada Unified School District headquarters in Norwalk last week. (Photo by Vincent Medina)
NORWALK – Protesters gathered at the Norwalk La Mirada Unified School District board meeting last week to oppose the permit of a Planned Parenthood clinic on the John Glenn High School campus.
NLMUSD postponed the scheduled clinic discussion and will revisit the issue during a later meeting. District officials declined to comment further.
Outside the boardroom, protesters waved massive banners with images of allegedly aborted fetuses and messages against “Vaccines, abortions, government-sanctioned murder.”
Some parents brought their children to the protest and waved signs threatening to leave the district if the clinic was approved.
However, most protesters were not from the community and did not have children enrolled in NLMUSD.
Ryan Heath, attorney and CEO of The Gavel Project, traveled from Arizona to protest outside the district and later made a public comment to the school board.
“[The Gavel Project] is a civil rights law firm,” Heath said. “I went around California and taught kids how to peacefully disobey their school mask mandates. The same thing that Rosa Parks did back in 1955, refusing to comply peacefully with an unconstitutional policy.”
Heath said a Planned Parenthood clinic would allow girls who are “bombarded with gender affirmation nonsense from their school” access to hormones for gender affirmation therapy.
“I have no problem with girls being taught about the reproductive cycle and the consequences of having sex, but it’s very different than putting something on campus with taxpayer dollars,” the Arizona attorney said.
Raul Ortiz, a candidate for state assembly district 64, also protested against the clinic.
“There’s a Planned Parenthood 15 minutes away from here. They offer the services, and people can drive that distance. We don’t need one in our high schools,” Ortiz said. “[They are] trying to take more of our parental authority away. They’re also going to try to railroad Critical Race Theory and teach our children the victimhood mentality.”
Ortiz is a John Glenn High School alumnus, but his children do not attend school in the district.
“If a parent wants to take their children to charter school, or homeschool, or a private school, they should,” the state assembly district candidate said. “We have a failed system, and we’re 40th in education out of a nation out of 50 states from California.”
Ortiz discussed the issue of exceptions to abortion or special circumstances.
In Ohio, a 10-year-old girl was raped and traveled to another state for an abortion after Ohio banned them after six weeks without exception.
Despite the circumstance, Ortiz said the young girl’s abortion was murder.
“Bottom line abortion is it’s still murder, regardless. It’s not the baby’s fault,” Ortiz said. “Most [abortions] are just done out of just inconvenience because they don’t want it.”
According to the Guttmacher Institute, 1% of abortions are due to rape. However, Pew Research Center reported 629,898 abortions nationwide in 2019.
This means that approximately 6,299 women have abortions because of rape.
Nancy Salazar, the senior pastor at New Harvest Christian Fellowship, compared high schools to Nazi concentration camps if the district approved the clinic.
“In the days of Hitler [Martin Niemöller] said, ‘First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me,’” Salazar said. “So please do not turn our schools into killing kilns.”
NLMUSD school board pulled the discussion of the Planned Parenthood clinic indefinitely, and did not indicate when they would revisit the issue.