The Los Angeles Unified School District has the right to make condoms available to students as a means of preventing the further spread of HIV/AIDS. They have a constitutional right to do this, they have the right granted by the favorable attitude of the great majority of adults, and they have the right to act to prevent students from perpetuating a serious, deadly public health crisis. Many of those who are opposed to the program argue that it encourages students to have sex or that it grants approval to their behavior. It is true that premature sexual activity among adolescents is a serious social problem. But any responsible person would take both problems into account -- the social problem and the health problem. A responsible condom distribution program would ensure that students received comprehensive education about the dangers and causes of HIV/AIDS as well as being taught that abstinence is the best means of avoiding the disease and is a preferable choice for many other reasons. A responsible person would not, however, ignore the fact that millions of teenagers ignore all these warnings and are both sexually active and, in many cases, do not even use condoms when they are available.
The courts ruled in New York, when the New York City schools began distributing condoms to students, that the program was not unconstitutional. Some opponents of the plan had claimed that by distributing the condoms, the schools were bypassing parents' rights to have a say in what their children did. The courts ruled that since the acceptance of the condoms was entirely voluntary and no one was being coerced into accepting them, there was no violation of the parents' rights (Zirkel, 1992). The court also ruled that since condoms were available everywhere, and since the Supreme Court had ruled that no one could ban their sale to minors, the schools were not taking on any aspect of medical care or health care that was inappropriate (Zirk...