Once upon a time, all you had to do in order to enrol in school was be 6 years old and toilet-trained. How times have changed. Now they want to know how you were born, and why it happened like that.
A California school district has asked parents of prospective students to fill out an application form. Nothing strange about that, except for the part where they ask parents to divulge the method of childbirth they used. Mail Online article (with photos of the application form) here.
Parents hoping to enrol their children in the Dry Creek School District have to complete an application form that asks if their child was delivered naturally or by caesarean section.
Those mothers who tick the ‘C-section’ option are then asked to explain why the procedure was performed.
Naturally, parents are outraged, insisting that the school has no business prying into the personal medical information of parents.
‘I really don’t think the school asking if the child was delivered vaginally or by C-Section is appropriate,’ a mother of two identified as Heather told the local CBS13 station.
Though birth by C-section has reached an all-time high in the U.S., studies have shown that there is no correlation between a child’s intelligence and the method of childbirth used to deliver him or her. There must be some method in the school’s intrusive madness, however, since questions are also asked regarding the child’s early development: at what age did he/she walk, sit up alone? (Do they really pigeon-hole Child A as a slow learner if he walked a month later than Child B?)
Heather said she had asked the school to explain their reasoning behind the invasive questions, but had yet to receive a reply.
‘What’s next? This is an invasion of our privacy,’ she said.
What’s next, indeed? Maybe the school will want to know what the mother ate, read or watched on TV while she was pregnant. Or whether the conception took place under mutually satisfying circumstances… Nah, that’s just too crazy; schools aren’t interested in parents’ attitudes toward sexuality. But that’s a post for another day.
