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Fairfax County’s high school abortion dispute

A Virginia teacher says her public high school facilitated student abortions. Not so, says the school district.


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Fairfax County’s high school abortion dispute

As public school teacher Zenaida Perez took attendance at Centreville High School in Fairfax County, Va., in May 2022, she noticed one of her female pupils had missed several classes. A fellow student in Perez’s English for Speakers of Other Languages class, an 11th grader, told her the absent classmate had had a baby. But what the student said next led to a series of events that resulted in a state investigation and a federal enforcement action.

According to Perez, the girl said she had gotten an abortion the previous November with help from school social worker Carolina Diaz—and the student had suggested to her pregnant classmate she could get help to do the same.

Perez said she asked the 11th grader how she paid for her abortion, but the girl wasn’t sure. “She said, … ‘The social worker took care of everything. She called the place, she made the appointment, and then my boyfriend, who was an adult, drove me to the clinic in his car,’” Perez told me. She said she later spoke with the girl’s uncle, her legal guardian. According to Perez, he claimed he only learned about his niece’s abortion hours afterward when he took her to the emergency room due to heavy bleeding.

In Virginia, it is illegal to perform an abortion on a girl under age 18 without her parent or guardian’s consent in most cases. Perez claims there’s no evidence the student had obtained such consent.

The teacher went public with the allegations against Diaz in August, prompting Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin to direct state police to open a full criminal investigation. The school district, though, says the initial findings of its own investigation indicate that Perez’s claims are “likely untrue.” While the case remains unresolved, it highlights the fraught issue of coerced abortions in the United States and has prompted questions from concerned parents and community members in Fairfax County.

According to Perez, another student was 17 years old and about five months pregnant when, as Perez claims, Diaz helped her find information about abortion. She eventually told her mother about the plans and did not go through with the procedure. She now has a healthy son, according to Perez. “I learned about it by just a confession from one victim, but I’m pretty sure that many other girls went through that,” Perez said. “It has been kept secret and it has been kept away from their legal guardians or the family members who are representing them, and it is absolutely not right.”

Perez says she tried to bring her concerns to administrators before publicizing her story, but she says district officials retaliated and intimidated her. Days after The W.C. Dispatch published Perez’s story on Substack, Fairfax County Public Schools called the situation unacceptable and told WORLD it had hired an external investigator to assess the matter. Meanwhile, in addition to Youngkin’s call for a police investigation, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., sent a letter to the district demanding information about how much school officials knew before Perez’s story became public. Then late last month, the U.S. Department of Education’s Student Privacy Policy Office said it had initiated an enforcement action against the district.

But last week, the district claimed that its initial findings suggested the abortion claims were likely inaccurate. It added: “We have an obligation to protect our staff from wrongful and unjustified accusations.”

In their response submitted Oct. 16 to both Cassidy and the Department of Education, lawyers representing the school said administrators did investigate Perez’s original allegations in 2022. They said the school did not find evidence of Diaz pressuring one of the students in question to seek an abortion or evidence that she paid for the procedure. Instead, lawyers asserted that the social worker referred both pregnant students to the public health nurse to discuss their options.

The district’s lawyers claimed Perez falsified her students’ statements and that she made the allegations based on speculation and not facts. School officials also claimed she spoke out against Diaz in retaliation for an investigation in which Perez was accused of purchasing a pregnancy test for a student and Diaz was a witness.

In a statement to WORLD, Perez’s attorney from Americans United for Life, Steven Aden, called the district’s response a “papering-over job by an expensive Washington, D.C., law firm” and said its investigation was rushed.

Although Virginia offers few protections for unborn babies until after the second trimester of pregnancy, state law requires written proof that at least one of a girl’s parents or guardians has been notified of her intent to receive an abortion. The law also allows an adult who is housing and caring for the girl to stand in for a parent. Alternatively, a judge may grant a bypass allowing a minor’s baby to be aborted.

At least 38 states require parents to consent to or be notified of their daughter’s abortion, according to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute. While abortion laws vary from state to state, it is always illegal to force or coerce a woman or girl to have an abortion, said Tracy Reynolds, director of the Center Against Forced Abortions at The Justice Foundation.

“School counselors and officials can be held liable for forcing or coercing a girl to have an abortion because, in their opinion, it’s going to ruin your life,” she said. While parental notification requirements serve to protect young women from that pressure, Reynolds said parents should also be aware that it is illegal for them to pressure their daughter to have an abortion or threaten to remove her from their home. “You’re responsible for supporting her, but she’s responsible for making decisions about the child in her womb,” she said.

A Louisiana grand jury in January indicted a woman who allegedly ordered abortion drugs online and urged her pregnant daughter to take them even though she reportedly wanted to keep the baby. “The law works both ways, but the bottom line is, it’s to protect the pregnant woman for whatever she is wanting,” Reynolds said.

According to the Fairfax County school district, Diaz and former Centreville High School Principal Chad Lehman were placed on administrative leave. Perez last week notified her lawyers that she had been placed on paid administrative leave as well, accused of professional misconduct. In a statement released Tuesday, her lawyers said they would continue to push for full investigations into her claims and said they were preparing a lawsuit against the school district.

It’s unclear how long the school’s full investigation, or the state probe, might take to conclude. Meanwhile, Perez said that any opposition from the school district won’t stop her from speaking out: “I have God and truth on my side, and I will continue fighting until the end of times.”


Lauren Canterberry

Lauren Canterberry is a reporter for WORLD. She graduated from the World Journalism Institute and the University of Georgia with a degree in journalism, both in 2017. She worked as a local reporter in Texas and now lives in Georgia with her husband.


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