Bad Medicine for Children

A problem has arisen within the Santa Ana Unified School District.

This is a problem that until recently was assumed to be part of the solution. But these things tend to get twisted around once somebody whispers, then shouts, an inappropriate word.

Abortion is that word. Contraception is another one. Parental consent has been thrown in for good measure.

FIRE! Now everyone join the stampede. Too bad if common sense gets trampled in the rush.

Here’s where Santa Ana Unified got in trouble.

The district thought it would study the idea of establishing a health clinic, as a pilot program, at an elementary school in east-central Santa Ana.

This is an area served by four grade schools, kindergarten through fifth grade, with some 3,200 children. Most of these kids are Latino and poor. Few receive basic medical care. They all need it; they just don’t get it.

The district knows this because last November two pediatricians examined 107 first- and fifth-graders at Grant and Roosevelt elementary schools, free of charge, after receiving parental permission. They found that 88% of these kids had untreated medical problems, most more than one.

A few of the children were so seriously ill that they were taken directly to the hospital.

Several parents showed up with their kids when they heard about what was going on, but they had to be turned away. Two pediatricians can only do so much in two days.

So the idea of further study --Don’t you just love academics?--was born. An advisory panel, with all sorts of representatives, was formed. The Irvine Co., through the local chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, donated the money for the study.

If a clinic were to be established, it would be funded privately or perhaps, in conjunction with a federal grant.

Then a small group of people, most without children in the district, started asking, “What if. . . . “

What if an elementary school child (maximum age: 12 years old) gets pregnant? What if elementary students are having sex?

A draft of the would-be clinic’s policies said that a doctor would get in touch with the child’s parents, who would have given their written consent for their child to be seen at the clinic in the first place.

The pediatricians, as they do in their private practice, would then refer the parents to different agencies and clinics. Some of these places offer abortions, some arrange adoptions, some counsel, some give out contraceptive advice.

In cases of suspected child abuse--and how many pregnant 12-year-olds have not been abused?--authorities would be notified in accordance with state law.

All of this is Standard Operating Procedure.

Except, of course, for the Catholic Church, which opposes abortion, regardless of any “what ifs.” Artificial contraception is also taboo.

So Msgr. Jaime Soto, liaison to the Latino community for the Diocese of Orange, quit the clinic’s advisory board.

“Even though I realize there would be a very low incidence of this taking place, my issue was the fact that there was a written policy that I might be associated with,” he says. “It has to do with what’s ethical. It is not ethical for a doctor to make that kind of referral, for abortion services.”

Soto, however, has some qualms about the brouhaha that his resignation has encouraged. Poor children are still not getting the health care that they need.

“The school district has the most sincere intentions,” he says. “We do have a community responsibility for health care. There is a crisis at all levels. Is this particular school based clinic the best model? I don’t know.”

Opponents, of course, say they do know. The answer is no. Do not trust the school district on this, they say.

Concepcion Sixtos, a teaching assistant with three children at Grant Elementary School, says opponents have called her and other Latina mothers at home and warned that the district plans to distribute contraceptives to their children.

The reason: American taxpayers are tired of paying for welfare and want to limit the growth of the Latino population.

“This is so ridiculous, but I’m afraid that some people might actually believe it,” she says.

Opponents say the district has a secret agenda. I reveal it here: an elementary school clinic would be phase one of a plan to set up clinics at junior and senior high schools, and then from there, well, you can just imagine the rest. Instead of a candy jar at the reception counter, there would be an assortment of free condoms. And abortions? Count on that too.

“You know what they say about the camel poking his head in the tent,” says Viola Floth, who directs the Coalition for Appropriate Sex Education from her Westminster home. “Pretty soon, he’s all the way inside.”

Floth and others say that if Latinos, or anybody, need health care they should get it from someplace other than the schools. And they don’t trust the American Academy of Pediatrics either. They say the academy is “anti-parental consent.”

Which leaves Paul Qaqundah, a Huntington Beach pediatrician, pretty flabbergasted. He says this is patently untrue.

Qaqundah and David Lang, a pediatrician and chief of infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital in Orange, were the ones who examined the Santa Ana children in November. The two have been working toward getting the idea of a school-based clinic off the ground.

“I am donating my time,” Qaqundah says. “I am doing good. So help me, I just don’t get all this. I like to give a little, for God. These people should be thanking me.”

And for the record, Qaqundah, who attends St. Bonaventure Catholic church in Huntington Beach, opposes abortion himself. But that is not the point.

“We want to help these children,” he says. “I agree that these people should go somewhere else for health care, but they don’t do it. The school is where the children are. We develop trust with them and their parents, then they come to us. We want to introduce them to the American way of medicine--preventive care--not wait until they are seriously ill.”

Which, talking dollars, just makes good sense. Talking ethics, it just makes right. Children, and their families, can be helped.

“I think it’s a really good idea because a lot of kids come here sick,” Rosa Flores, a fifth-grader at Grant Elementary, told me the other day. “They cough all the time in class, so the teacher has to send them outside.”

Last November, Rosa came to school sick herself. Two days of high fever kept her in bed, but she was reluctant to miss any more school beyond that.

“I told her if I had the money I would take her to the doctor,” says her mother, Rosa Gonzalez. “But I don’t, so I bought some syrup at the drugstore.”

But little Rosa got lucky. She was examined at school by the visiting medical staff, diagnosed with pneumonia, and sent straight to Children’s Hospital. She is better now.

The last time Rosa had seen a doctor was when she was 3 years old. She had tuberculosis and spent two months at UCI Medical Center, at taxpayers’ expense, and was on medication for a year after that.

“When I heard it was pneumonia, I got really scared,” says Rosa’s mother. “One of my sister’s boys died of that three years ago in Mexico. He was just a little older than Rosa.”

Some other diagnosis from children at the same screening: a ruptured eardrum, melanoma, curvature of the spine, heart murmurs and a host of viral and bacterial infections.

There were no pregnancies. The word contraception was never brought up.

Oh, and Rosa Gonzalez, a Catholic, is against abortion too. Only she trusts school officials to let her know if her daughter were ever in need of reproductive advice.

Rosa, however, says she has no plans for pregnancy just yet. She wants to be an architect when she grows up.

“I’m going to build a hospital,” Rosa says.

The advisory board’s health clinic study goes to Santa Ana Unified’s board of trustees on May 14.