How a Planned Parenthood coalition fights to keep sexually graphic books in schools

The COVID-19 pandemic raised parents’ awareness of disturbing content in children’s public school curriculum. Many parental advocacy groups continue to argue that the indoctrination in children’s classrooms and libraries effectively grooms children to become future patients of Planned Parenthood. 

As Live Action News has reported, Planned Parenthood, Advocates for Youth (with digital media arm AMAZE), and SIECUS are all members of the Future of Sex Education (FoSE) coalition and part of a web of sex miseducators. However, the FoSE coalition is not just providing sex education curricula in classrooms. Because the American Library Association (ALA) and affiliated organizations share many of the same views and associations as the FoSE coalition, the coalition’s materials have easily made their way onto children’s bookshelves across the country.  

In 2015, Planned Parenthood ramped up its intentions to include more ‘LGBT-inclusive’ content in its youth sex-ed programs, citing the growing number of children identifying as LGBT+ as the reason for the expansion. But to fully implement this agenda and expand the consumer base, Planned Parenthood and its associates would need more than sex-ed curriculum. The FoSE’s collaboration with the ALA allows the coalition to target youth, subvert parents, and bypass state restrictions on sex-ed programs by ensuring that certain sexually explicit and controversial material is placed in public schools and local libraries. 

ALA’s ties to Planned Parenthood

The ALA has historic and current ties with Planned Parenthood. 

In 1978, the Council of the American Library Association filed a resolution espousing its belief that librarians should have an “active role” in “providing sex-related education, materials, programs, and referral services,” urging librarians to ensure “comprehensive sex-related education materials, programs, referral and health services for youth are available and publicized” (emphases added). 

This 1978 resolution was submitted to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America Inc. “for inclusion in their Positive Policy Handbook of organization statements supporting sexual health and education services for youth.”

The ALA supports easy access to information on abortion for all populations, including children, stating its commitment to “stand firm in opposing any effort to suppress access to information about reproductive health, including abortion, whether for medical purposes or as a matter of public concern and individual liberty.”

The group openly advocates for abortion and ‘gender affirming’ policies to such an extent that the American Libraries, a publication of the ALA, cautions its members when partnering with local Catholic-affiliated hospitals for educational purposes. “Although Catholic hospitals make up a significant percentage of hospitals throughout the United States,” the publication warns, “they rarely provide information about or services related to sterilization, abortion, contraception, or LGBTQIA+ issues.” 

Similar to the FoSE coalition for sex-ed, the ALA is part of a large coalition known as the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC), which also includes Planned Parenthood Federation of America in addition to the organization PEN America. 

PEN America, founded in 1922, has a mission “to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible.” The organization has numerous associates and staff who previously (or currently) worked or interned for Planned Parenthood, and has publicly supported abortion as “reproductive rights,” “human rights,” and “bodily autonomy.” 

After the overturning of Roe v. Wade, PEN America’s former CEO Suzanne Nossel stated:

Reproductive rights are human rights. We stand in solidarity with all rights defenders leading the fight for reproductive freedom.

As a human rights organization, we are deeply alarmed by a decision to brazenly roll back the right to bodily autonomy. When certain well-established rights are treated as dispensable, all other rights – including freedom of speech – become less secure.

Freedom of expression rights are also threatened by this decision. PEN America will fiercely fight to protect the open discussion of reproductive rights and health care options for all.

The organization also publishes a list of so-called “banned books” — many which contain graphic and vulgar content inappropriate for minors — with links to purchase the books. PEN earns a commission from the purchases. 

Planned Parenthood has actively advocated for such illicit material to find its way into public school classrooms and library shelves, publicly denouncing governors and state legislators who have proposed legislation or called for investigation into children’s exposure to sexually graphic books. 

Notably, in 2023, Planned Parenthood Pennsylvania Advocates publicly opposed Senate Bill 7 in the Pennsylvania State Legislature, referring to explicit books in libraries as “education resources” which are “absolutely essential” because they serve as a way to bypass to sex-ed program restrictions. “The alternative,” Planned Parenthood argued, “is no access to this content for many students.”

What is promoted to schools and public libraries

The ALA sends recommended book lists to libraries across the U.S. But it doesn’t just recommend specific books — it awards them as well. The ALA’s 2024 Feminist Rise Book Project Winner was “You or Someone You Love: Reflections from an Abortion Doula,” described by the publisher as:

An eye-opening, transformative, and actionable journey through radical and compassionate community abortion care and support work: what it looks like, how each and every one of us can practice and incorporate it into our daily lives, and what we can imagine and build together in a post-Roe v. Wade United States.

Sex miseducator Advocates for Youth (AFY) offers a “Hope in a Box” program, described as a “curated book list, curriculum guides, and toolkits available to hundreds of additional school libraries and Language Arts classes.” 

Many of the same books on the ALA recommended book list are sent directly to school districts nationwide through the “Hope in a Box” program, despite parental objections. 

The Fight Against Parents

Each of the groups in the NCAC and FoSE coalitions has advocacy arms actively working against parents who are fighting to keep Planned Parenthood-backed sex-ed programs and sexually graphic books from being easily accessed by children. 

The ALA characterizes parental resistance to allowing children easy access to such materials as “false claims of illegal obscenity for minors” as well as objections to “inclusion of LGBTQIA+ characters or themes; and inclusion of topics on race, racism, equity, and social justice.” Yet, the ALA actively promotes the so-called “Banned Book Lists” with titles such as “Gender Queer: A Memoir” by Maia Kobabe (blurred images below). 

Despite the powerful opposition working against parents’ efforts, their fight to protect their children continues to unfold across the country — from the Supreme Court to state capitols. 

Oral arguments in a lawsuit filed by a coalition of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim parents were heard at the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday, April 22, 2025. The parents are suing the Board of Education in Montgomery County, Maryland, for the Board’s refusal to allow parents to ‘opt-out’ their elementary school students from LGBTQ+-themed lessons — which allegedly included instruction for preschool-aged children as young as three.

During the oral arguments, Eric Baxter, the attorney representing the parents in the case, alleged that Board of Education openly chose “indoctrinating” books — which were integrated into other standard daily instruction outside of sex-education — to “disrupt cis-normativity [and] disrupt hetero-normativity” without parental notification once the Board decided that “every student would be taught from inclusivity storybooks.”

As noted by Justice Neil Gorsuch, a district court found that the LGBTQ+ curriculum’s use outside of sex-ed purposes for pre-school and elementary school students was done for the purposes of influencing the students’ ideology — a point conceded by Montgomery County Public Schools attorney Alan Schoenfeld.  

At the state level, a recent committee hearing was held on Texas House Bill (HB) 3225 (“Relating to the prohibition of access by minors to sexually explicit materials in municipal public library collections; providing a civil penalty”). Bonnie Wallace, a member of the Llano County library advisory board, who was sued after harmful books were relocated out of the children’s section, testified in favor of the bill. Wallace stated she has found books in the children’s section of public libraries which she claimed in her testimony “glamorize sex with animals, sex with dead bodies, [and] sex in public while others watch and masturbate.” 

Wallace added that she found books containing QR codes which direct children to online sex shops and books. One of those books, she said, “glamorizes and trivializes a 6th-grade teacher who grooms and molests her 12-year old student.” She described other books this way:

A book series that graphically describes students who kill other students and their teachers, and teachers who kill their students. I have found two books which mention their characters having sex with Jesus.

I have a book here which tells minors how to kill their diabetic relatives in an undetectable way to get away with murder…

This is not about book banning or book burning; this is about book boundaries. Minors need boundaries to protect their minds from content they are not mature enough to process.

Conclusion 

It is not surprising that Planned Parenthood — which brutally ends the lives of hundreds of thousands of preborn children every year, financially benefits from “gender affirming care” often leading to irreversible harm, and is behind sex-ed programs that actively promote pornographic material to children — is also closely connected to the promotion of sexually graphic books to children in their schools and public libraries. The groups and associations involved with this agenda are not protecting vulnerable children; they are sexually grooming them.