Outrage: Bureaucrats Taking Control of Children’s Health Care

I guess parents aren’t for raising kids anymore, just housing them. A Maine school wants authority to issue contraceptives to 11 year-olds without parental notification. From the story:

Students who have parental permission to be treated at King Middle School’s health center would be able to get birth control prescriptions under a proposal that the Portland School Committee will consider Wednesday.

The proposal would build on the King Student Health Center’s practice of providing condoms as part of its reproductive health program since it opened in 2000, said Lisa Belanger, a nurse practitioner who oversees the city’s student health centers...Although students must have written parental permission to be treated at Portland’s school-based health centers, state law allows them to seek confidential health care and to decide whether to inform their parents about the services they receive, Belanger said.

Notice the “heads we win, tails you lose” anti-parental rights cudgel being wielded here: Parents should have to give informed consent for each procedure performed on their child and each prescription or medical task undertaken. Yet, it appears from the story if they give a general permission for the kid to be treated at the health center, they lose that right if bureaucrats decide to keep them of the loop and it is assumed by immature children and/or health care workers. Secondly, even if parents refuse permission to be treated at the clinic, children can go there anyway and keep parents in the dark.

The other day, I reported a story about pediatricians probing into private issues of family life without cause of any abuse or wrongdoing. Now, we see the increase in the powers of health bureaucrats to make crucial medical decisions in place of parents. Strangers are making these decisions based on what they consider in children’s best interests rather than what parents believe, and are deciding health issues based on their morality rather than the parents’ morality.

How did we let these people become so powerful that they rule over parents about children? Why did parents get so meek?