An Iowa pro-life group is issuing a warning about a website that once offered sex education information to parents and schools but which now directs computer users to pornography. Jennifer Bowen, executive director of Iowa Right to Life, says the website “teenwire-dot-com” had been run by Planned Parenthood but now advertises teen escorts, online sex and other X-rated content.
“We are very concerned for students in Iowa as well as nationally, anybody that uses any curriculum that advises from Planned Parenthood or from the Ellen Guttmacher Institute is very likely using curriculum that points teens to that website, teenwire.com,” Bowen says. Any outdated literature distributed to schools in the past few years, she says, still directs people to that website.
Bowen says her organization mobilized and contacted every school district in Iowa to give them a heads up about the website’s change. “Unfortunately, we only heard back from one and they were not inclined to believe that we were telling the truth,” Bowen says. “We are very concerned about the lack of response that we’ve had from the school districts.”
Bowen says the website, when run by Planned Parenthood, had used an Etch-A-Sketch in some of its videos months ago, so Iowa Right to Life contacted the makers of the toy in an effort to have the site shut down. “At that time, teenwire.com came down for a period of time,” Bowen says. “It went back briefly but then, apparently it came back down again at some point in the last year or two. Unbeknownst to us, it went right into the hands of the porn industry.”
Bowen says she’s been told the website is operating within the law so it won’t be forced to go dark.
By Karla James