How Courts, Legislatures, Schools, Clinics, and Advocacy Organizations Have Limited the Role of Parents

For the past half century, I have watched the federal government, state governments, and local governments throughout this country – including here in Illinois – systematically squeeze parents out of their children’s care and replace them with agents of the state.

This did not happen suddenly. It came one law at a time.

One court ruling at a time.

One “minor consent” exception at a time.

One school policy at a time.

One administrative directive at a time.

One privacy rule at a time.

And now, in Illinois, we have reached the point where the parents’ role is being reduced to little more than providing housing, food, transportation, insurance, and payment. At the same time, the state, schools, courts, clinics, advocacy organizations, and medical providers make the decisions that actually shape the child.

That is not what anyone would recognize as parental authority. That is custodial maintenance.

Parents are still responsible when something goes wrong. Parents still pay the bills. Parents still provide shelter. Parents are still blamed if the child fails. But when the most important questions arise – What is my child being taught? What medical treatment is my child receiving? What sexual ideology is being presented? Is my child being socially transitioned at school? Has my daughter obtained an abortion? Is my child being prescribed puberty blockers or hormones? The parent is increasingly told,

“That is none of your business.”

This has happened as the result of a long campaign driven by a network of national and state organizations – the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, SIECUS, Equality Illinois, the National Center for Youth Law, LGBTQ advocacy groups, and allied professional associations – operating through sympathetic legislators, agencies, school boards, and courts. These organizations do not always need to write the law themselves. They supply the language, theory, pressure, testimony, talking points, and moral cover. Local legislators carry the bills.

The theory underlying all of it is simple: the child is an autonomous individual whose “rights” must be protected from the parent.

I reject that theory, and so should you.

A child is not the state’s property.

A child is not raw material for ideological experiments.

A child is not a miniature adult.

A child is a developing human being who needs guidance, discipline, protection, moral formation, spiritual instruction, and love.

A committee, a clinic, or a bureaucracy does not meet these needs. Parents meet them – actual mothers and fathers who know the child, love the child, and will sacrifice for the child.

The Supreme Court once recognized this. In Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the Court held that the child is not “the mere creature of the State.” It rejected the notion that the government has a general power to standardize children by forcing them into state-approved instruction. In Troxel v. Granville, the Court reaffirmed that parents have a fundamental right to make decisions concerning the care, custody, and control of their children.

Yet for decades, legislatures and courts have acted as if that right were optional.

The old rule was that children could not make major medical decisions on their own.

They cannot consent to surgery or to ordinary medical treatment. They still cannot sign a contract or buy cigarettes. A child cannot vote, even though the voting age is now 18 rather than 21. A child cannot enlist in the military. In many schools, a child cannot be given aspirin without parental permission.

That is not because children are worthless and have no rights. It is because children are precious and their rights are different from adults’.

The law recognized what every parent knows: children lack the maturity, experience, judgment, or fully developed reasoning capacity to make life-altering decisions on their own. The human brain continues to develop into the mid-to-late twenties, and the prefrontal cortex – the part of the brain involved in planning, prioritizing, reasoning, and judgment – is among the last areas to mature.

So this question must be asked: by what reasoning can a child who cannot receive aspirin at school without parental permission be allowed to obtain an abortion, contraception, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or secret counseling without parental knowledge?

The answer is not that children became wise. Rather, the answer is that adults in power changed the rules and stripped parents of authority over their own children.

Before Roe v. Wade, abortion was illegal in Illinois. After Roe, abortion became a constitutionally protected medical procedure. But minors still could not ordinarily consent to medical treatment. In 1977, Illinois passed a parental consent law for minors seeking abortions. That law did not create some strange new power for parents. It reflected the ordinary rule: parents consent to medical care for children.

Then came Bellotti v. Baird in 1979.

In Bellotti, the Supreme Court held that a state could require parental consent for a minor’s abortion only if it provided a judicial bypass – a path around parental consent through a judge. The judge could authorize the abortion if the minor were deemed “mature enough” or if the abortion was considered in her “best interest.”

That was the first great displacement. The parent was no longer the child’s final protector. A judge – a stranger – could override the mother and father.

There has been no proof presented to any court that a child is capable of weighing the physical, emotional, moral, spiritual, and lifelong consequences of abortion. Likewise, there has been no proof that a 12-, 13-, or 15-year-old has the capacity to make that decision alone. The Court created a route around the family because abortion had been placed within the constitutional “privacy” framework created by Roe.

That point is critical.

Bellotti rested on Roe. It relied on the theory that abortion was a constitutional right. If abortion were a constitutional right and minors had constitutional rights, the Court reasoned that minors needed a way to exercise that right even when parents objected.

But then came Dobbs. Dobbs gutted the foundation under Bellotti.

In 2022, the Supreme Court decided Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The Court held that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. It expressly overruled Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, returning abortion regulation to the people and their elected representatives.

That was a legal earthquake. If there is no federal constitutional right to abortion, then there is no federal constitutional right for a child to obtain an abortion over her parents’ objection or without her parents’ knowledge.

The Supreme Court has not expressly overruled Bellotti. That is why this point must be litigated directly. Bellotti was part of the Roe-era legal framework. Once Dobbs destroyed Roe and Casey, the constitutional foundation beneath Bellotti was gone.

The old Bellotti logic was:

1. Abortion is a constitutional right.
2. Minors possess constitutional rights.
3. Therefore, minors must have a path to exercise the abortion right without parental veto.
4. A judge can substitute for the parent.

But after Dobbs, step one is gone. What remains?

The ordinary rule remains: children cannot make major medical decisions on their own. Parents decide. Illinois, however, went in the opposite direction. It did not restore parental authority after Dobbs. Instead, it doubled down on the framework Dobbs undermined.

Illinois abortion-rights advocates have discussed enshrining abortion protections in the Illinois Constitution. If Illinois creates a constitutional right to abortion for “every individual” or “every person,” that language would not apply only to adult women. It would also apply to minor girls. A 12-year-old is an individual. An 11-year-old is a person. Unless the amendment expressly preserves parental authority, the state will use that language to argue that a child has a constitutional right under Illinois law to obtain an abortion without her parents’ consent and perhaps without their knowledge.

But there is a serious constitutional problem with that.

A state constitution cannot override the United States Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment protects parents’ fundamental liberty interest in the care, custody, and control of their children. That principle is reflected in Meyer v. Nebraska, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, Wisconsin v. Yoder, and Troxel v. Granville.

The state may not simply redefine the parent out of the child’s life by adding new language to its own constitution.

Illinois can amend its state constitution, but it cannot use that constitution to abridge rights protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. A state-created abortion right for minors that excludes parental consent or notification would directly conflict with the federal constitutional right of parents to supervise, protect, educate, and direct their children’s upbringing.

That is especially true after Dobbs. Before Dobbs, abortion advocates relied on Roe and Casey to argue that abortion was a federal constitutional right to privacy. That claim underpinned Bellotti. But Dobbs held that the federal Constitution confers no right to abortion and expressly overruled Roe and Casey. Once that foundation was removed, Illinois had no federal constitutional excuse for excluding parents from a child’s abortion decision.

If Illinois now tries to create a state constitutional abortion right that includes children, it would be a blatant attempt to use state constitutional law to circumvent the federally protected rights of parents. The state may recognize rights for adults. It may regulate abortion. It may legislate in the area of health care. But it may not convert a child into an autonomous medical decision-maker to defeat the parent’s Fourteenth Amendment rights.

Children do not become independent constitutional actors against their parents merely because Illinois politicians write the word “individual” into a reproductive-rights amendment. Parents remain parents. Children remain children. And the federal Constitution remains supreme over any state constitutional provision that seeks to destroy the parent-child relationship.

Any Illinois constitutional amendment that creates a right to abortion for “every person” or “every individual” must be opposed unless it expressly protects parental consent and notice for minors. Otherwise, it is not merely an abortion amendment. It is a parental-rights destruction amendment. It would invite the state to argue that children possess autonomous medical rights against their own parents. That cannot be reconciled with the Fourteenth Amendment, with Pierce, with Troxel, or with the basic truth that children are not mere creatures of the state.

In 1995, Illinois replaced parental consent with parental notice. Parents no longer had to approve a minor’s abortion. They merely had to be notified. Even that notice requirement was delayed for years by litigation and did not take effect until 2013.

That was a major erosion of parental authority. Consent means the parent has authority. Notice means the parent is a spectator.

Then, Illinois eliminated even notice.

HB370, the Youth Health and Safety Act, repealed the Parental Notice of Abortion Act. The ACLU of Illinois celebrated the repeal, noting that as of June 2022, minors were no longer required to notify an adult family member to access abortion in Illinois. The ACLU’s own language is revealing:

“Minors are no longer required to notify an adult family member.”

When Governor J.B. Pritzker signed the law, Illinois minors no longer had to tell their parents before having an abortion.

So the sequence is this:

• Parental consent became parental notice.
• Parental notice became no notice.
• Parents went from decision-makers to bystanders to people deliberately kept in the dark.

After Dobbs, Illinois cannot say the federal Constitution required this. It did not. Illinois politicians chose it and continue to choose it.

In 2019, Illinois passed the Reproductive Health Act. It declares that every “individual” has a fundamental right to make autonomous decisions about reproductive health, including the right to use or refuse reproductive health care. The statute does not limit the term “individual” to adults.

That word carries enormous weight.

Once the child is treated primarily as an autonomous individual, the parent can be recast as an obstacle. The mother and father are no longer the natural protectors. They become potential obstacles to the child’s self-declared autonomy.

That is the thinking behind this entire revolution.

Illinois’ Consent by Minors to Health Care Services Act provides exceptions that allow minors to consent to certain services. Section 4, for example, allows minors 12 or older to consent to diagnosis or treatment for sexually transmitted diseases and for drug or alcohol abuse. Other provisions and related Illinois confidentiality guidance recognize minors’ access to specified services, including certain counseling and reproductive health-related care.

The original argument for these laws was narrow yet emotionally compelling: a teenager with an STD or a drug problem might not seek help if parents had to be notified.

But once that exception exists, it expands.

• STD treatment becomes contraception.
• Contraception becomes abortion.
• Abortion becomes reproductive autonomy.
• Mental health counseling becomes gender identity counseling.
• Gender identity counseling becomes a social transition.
• Social transition becomes puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.

Each step is defended as narrow. Each step sets a precedent for the next.

Then HIPAA helps seal the door. HHS explains that parents are generally personal representatives for their minor children. Still, parental access depends in part on whether the parent has authority under state law to make the health care decision. Where state law permits the minor to consent, parental access to records can be restricted.

That is how the state cuts parents out twice. First, it lets the child consent. Then, because the child consented, the parent is blocked from accessing the records.

In 2015, Illinois enacted the Youth Mental Health Protection Act. The law prohibits licensed mental health providers from engaging in what it defines as “conversion therapy” with minors, including efforts to change sexual orientation or gender identity.

The public argument was protection, but the effect was restriction.

Parents who believe their child is experiencing sexual confusion or gender distress cannot access certain forms of licensed counseling that align with their moral, religious, or biological understanding. The state has taken one side of a contested moral and medical question and forbidden licensed professionals from assisting families in the other direction.

Then came the schools.

In 2019, Illinois enacted the Inclusive Curriculum Law, requiring public schools to teach about the contributions of LGBTQ individuals to state and national history. Equality Illinois described the law as bringing LGBTQ historical contributions into the public school curriculum, and implementation guidance indicates that Equality Illinois, the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, and the Legacy Project formed the Illinois Inclusive Curriculum Advisory Council to support schools in implementing the law.

In 2021, Illinois enacted SB818, the Keeping Youth Safe and Healthy Act. The ACLU of Illinois said SB818 established personal health and safety standards for grades K-5 and updated comprehensive sexual health education standards for grades 6-12. SIECUS explains that Illinois schools are not required to teach sex education, but if they do, it must be comprehensive under the Healthy Youth Act and aligned with state standards. SIECUS materials also note that when sex education is taught, instruction must include sexual orientation or gender identity.

The opt-out is not enough. Parents may be told they can opt out of a unit, but they cannot opt out of the school’s culture. They cannot opt out of the hallway. They cannot opt out of the teacher’s assumptions. They cannot opt out of the library display. They cannot opt out of the pronoun policy. They cannot opt out of the peer environment that the state has intentionally created.

In December 2021, the Illinois Department of Human Rights issued guidance on transgender, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming students. The guidance states that Illinois students have the right to an educational environment free from discrimination and harassment based on gender identity, and that schools cannot treat students differently because their gender identity does not align with the sex assigned at birth.

Again, the issue is not whether children should be protected from bullying. Of course they should. The issue is whether contested claims about identity become state-enforced rules that override parental knowledge, authority, and religious belief.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor significantly strengthens this argument.

In Mahmoud, parents challenged a Maryland school district that introduced LGBTQ-themed storybooks into elementary school instruction and then eliminated parents’ ability to receive notice and opt their children out. The Supreme Court held that parents were entitled to a preliminary injunction because the policy burdened their religious exercise. The Court explained that the government may not condition the benefit of public education on parents accepting instruction that poses a very real threat to the religious beliefs and practices they are trying to instill in their children.

That matters enormously. For years, school districts and state agencies have acted as if, once a child enters a public school building, the parents’ authority becomes secondary. The state sets the curriculum. The school controls the classroom. The teacher manages the discussion. The parent is told, at most, that he may complain afterward.

Mahmoud rejects that arrogance.

The case does not say that parents own the public school curriculum. Nor does it say that every parent can veto every book. But it does say something very important: public education cannot be used to undermine the moral and religious formation parents are trying to provide at home. When the state compels a child to participate in instruction on sexuality, identity, gender, or morality that conflicts with the family’s religious convictions, the state burdens parental rights and religious liberty.

That principle applies directly to Illinois.

Illinois has embedded gender identity, sexual orientation, and reproductive ideology into schools through curriculum laws, sex education standards, administrative guidance, and professional training. Parents who object are often told that the state’s view is settled, that the school knows best, and that resistance is bigotry. But after Mahmoud, that posture conflicts with the law.

A state cannot force parents into a false choice: surrender your child to ideological instruction that contradicts your faith or abandon public education entirely. Public schools belong to the public, and parents do not lose their First Amendment rights when they enroll their children in them.

That is why Mahmoud belongs alongside Meyer, Pierce, Yoder, Troxel, Dobbs, and Skrmetti. It is part of the same constitutional line: the state may educate, but it may not replace the parent. It may provide schools, but it may not use them to sever children from the moral, religious, and familial authority of their mothers and fathers.

Mahmoud gives lawyers a powerful new tool. It can be used to challenge school policies that deny notice, deny opt-outs, or force children to receive instruction on sexuality and gender that conflicts with their parents’ religious convictions. It also reinforces the larger point: parental authority is not a courtesy extended by school boards. It is a constitutional right.

HB5294 belongs in this sequence because it appears not as an isolated bill but as a culmination. By the time it arrived, Illinois had already restricted therapeutic alternatives, rewritten curriculum standards, repealed the parental abortion notice, and institutionalized school secrecy around gender identity. HB5294 did not create the environment. It consolidated it.

The materials I have reviewed identify HB5294, SB3138, HB4834, and related measures as part of a broader pattern in Illinois: legislative activity that appears designed, step by step, to weaken family authority and control by shifting authority to schools, agencies, courts, clinics, and state systems.

That is exactly how this works.

There is no single bill titled “The Abolition of Parental Authority Act.” There never has been. Instead, there is:

• a sex education bill.
• a privacy bill.
• a medical consent bill.
• a school guidance memo.
• a prescription monitoring exemption.
• a homeschooling registration bill.
• a child welfare expansion.
• a curriculum mandate.
• a civil rights regulation.

Each has its own justification. Each has its own sympathetic example. Each is defended as narrow, compassionate, necessary, and modern. Taken together, they form a system. That system has one result: the parent disappears.

Now we come to HB4834.

As of May 4, 2026, HB4834 is moving through the Illinois 104th General Assembly. The bill amends the Illinois Controlled Substances Act and provides that the Prescription Monitoring Program does not apply to testosterone, mifepristone, misoprostol, GnRH analogs, or estrogen. It also directs the Department of Human Services to purge existing testosterone prescription records from the monitoring system by January 1, 2027, and to prevent future testosterone records from being created or maintained in the system.

Illinois has a statewide prescription ledger. HB4834 would remove puberty blockers, sex hormones, and chemical abortion drugs from that ledger. A family physician treating your child would not see them listed. A pharmacist reviewing a prescription history would not see them, and a parent trying to understand what is happening to a child would find another door closed.

GnRH analogs are commonly known as puberty blockers. In United States v. Skrmetti, the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s restrictions on certain sex-transition treatments for minors, including puberty blockers and hormones, against an Equal Protection challenge.

Whether one supports or opposes these treatments, the parental question remains: who has the right to know what is being done to a child? HB4834 answers: not necessarily the parent. Earlier laws removed consent, then notice, then sealed records; now they are trying to remove the prescription trail.

When parents see what is happening in public schools, many do the natural thing: they leave. They homeschool. They reclaim their children’s education. That is why homeschooling is now under attack. In Illinois, HB2827 – the proposed Homeschool Act – would establish requirements for homeschool administrators and programs, reporting requirements, and changes to state law, including requiring, rather than merely allowing, nonpublic schools to register with the State Board of Education.

The bill requires the State Board of Education to create a Homeschool Declaration Form for a homeschool administrator to submit information showing that a child is enrolled in a homeschool program to the public school or district the child would otherwise attend.

Supporters call this accountability. But accountability to whom? Parents are already accountable to God, their children, their families, their communities, and the results of their children’s education. HB2827 shifts accountability upward—from the family to the bureaucracy.

First, the state creates schools that many parents believe are morally and intellectually dangerous. Then, when parents withdraw their children, the state follows them home.

Connecticut shows where this is headed. HB5468, which passed the Connecticut House and moved to the Senate calendar in April 2026, concerns parent-managed learning. The bill analysis describes an annual process in which parents must indicate whether children will attend public school, attend nonpublic school, or receive parent-managed learning. Earlier versions and debates included more aggressive oversight measures; the current bill still establishes an annual state-supervised process for parent-managed learning.

Even when softened, the premise remains dangerous: homeschooling is being transformed from a parent’s right into a state-supervised category.

That is elitism run amok.

The underlying assumption is that parents are not competent to educate their own children unless the state says so.

The same public education establishment that has failed to educate millions of children adequately — and whose own research suggests that hundreds of thousands in each graduating class have experienced educator sexual misconduct sometime before graduation — now wants to supervise parents who are trying to rescue their children from that failure.

Parents control education. Not the state. The state may set basic rules against truancy or abuse and punish real neglect. But it has no rightful power to presume that ordinary parents are incompetent until they register, report, document, and satisfy the bureaucracy.

The homeschooling issue should also be considered in light of Mahmoud. If public schools cannot condition education on parents surrendering their children’s religious formation, then the state should not be allowed to harass parents who leave those schools to preserve that formation. Homeschooling is not an escape hatch that the state may close when too many parents use it.

It is one of the oldest and most direct exercises of parental authority: the right of mothers and fathers to educate their own children when state institutions become hostile to the family’s faith, morals, or understanding of truth.

Let’s not pretend these bills emerged from the keen insight of concerned legislators.

They did not.

A network of advocacy organizations — coordinated in purpose, funding, language, and legislative strategy — works year after year to advance the same ideology through state legislatures, school agencies, and local policy bodies across the country.

The ACLU of Illinois openly supported SB818 and HB370, celebrating the repeal of parental notice and the expansion of sex education standards. Planned Parenthood of Illinois argued for the repeal of parental notice, contending that young people can make informed decisions about unplanned pregnancy and noting that Illinois laws already allow pregnant minors to make certain medical decisions without involving a parent or court.

SIECUS tracks and promotes sex education policy across states, and its Illinois profile explains the effect of Illinois law: if sex education is taught, it must meet comprehensive standards and include instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity.

The National Center for Youth Law produces a national compendium on minor consent and confidentiality, describing itself as an organization involved in litigation, policy development, technical assistance, and youth rights. Its compendium focuses on laws that allow minors to access sensitive health care with their own consent and in confidence.

Equality Illinois and allied groups helped drive the Inclusive Curriculum Law. A Public Health Institute of Metropolitan Chicago release stated that the law was an initiative by Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, Equality Illinois, and the Legacy Project, with support from more than 40 education, health care, and civil rights organizations.

The process is simple. National and state organizations develop the ideology and model policy. Local legislators introduce the bills. Advocacy groups provide testimony, apply pressure, and frame the media narrative. Agencies issue guidance. Schools implement policies. Courts defer. Parents learn what happened only after the authority has already been transferred away from them.

That is how institutional capture works.

This is what these groups and complicit lawmakers have taken:

• Parents lost the right to consent before a minor’s abortion.
• Parents then lost the right even to be notified.
• Parents lost access to portions of their child’s medical decision-making once minor consent laws and confidentiality rules were expanded.
• Parents lost the ability to seek certain forms of licensed counseling for children struggling with sexual orientation or gender identity.
• Parents lost meaningful control over the sexual and gender ideology introduced in public schools.
• Parents lost the assumption that schools will tell them the truth about their own child.
• Parents are now facing laws that would regulate and monitor homeschooling – the last major refuge from state-controlled education.

And if HB4834 passes, parents may lose another source of knowledge: the prescription trail for puberty blockers, sex hormones, and chemical abortion drugs.

What remains for the parents?

• The bills.
• The mortgage.
• The groceries.
• The health insurance.
• The tax payments.
• The liability if something goes wrong.

This is not parenthood. This is the financial support system for a child whose mind, body, education, and identity are increasingly controlled by institutions hostile to the family.

Here is how I understand a child’s rights.

A child has the right to be raised in a loving home, with a mother and a father whenever possible, who know, love, and sacrifice for them.

A child has the right to be protected – from predators, from exploitation, and from ideologues who see them as raw material for experiments.

A child has a right to an education that equips them in both secular and spiritual matters so that they can become wise, grounded human beings rather than mere consumers of slogans.

A child has the right to be raised into a happy, productive, patriotic adult: someone who understands both duties and freedoms, honors father and mother, and can raise a family of their own.

Those are the rights of the child as I understand them.

And those rights are not granted by a committee in Geneva, Switzerland, or Springfield, Illinois. Planned Parenthood does not protect them. The ACLU does not protect them. SIECUS does not protect them. They are not protected by a school district that withholds information from parents.

They are given by God and protected by parents – by actual mothers and fathers.

The legal counterattack to all this is ready and waiting. The Supreme Court has already laid much of the groundwork. Meyer holds that parents have a liberty interest in directing their children’s education. Pierce holds that a child is not the mere creature of the state. Yoder holds that the state cannot simply override parents’ religious formation of their children. Troxel holds that parents have a fundamental right to direct the care, custody, and control of their children. Dobbs holds that abortion is not a federal constitutional right and returned the issue to the people and their representatives. Skrmetti holds that, under Equal Protection theory, states are not constitutionally required to permit sex-transition treatments for minors. And Mahmoud holds that public schools cannot condition the benefit of public education on parents accepting instruction that seriously undermines the religious beliefs and practices they are trying to instill in their children.

These cases provide the constitutional foundation for a serious legal counterattack.

I am not a lawyer. I cannot personally bring these cases. But lawyers can.

They should challenge the continued application of Bellotti after Dobbs. They should challenge laws that permit minors to obtain abortions without parental notice. They should challenge state schemes that block parents’ access to medical records. They should challenge school secrecy policies. They should use Mahmoud to challenge school policies that deny parents notice and opt-outs when instruction on sexuality, gender identity, or moral anthropology conflicts with parents’ religious convictions.

They should challenge prescription-monitoring exclusions that hide life-altering drugs from family physicians and parents. They should challenge homeschooling regulations that turn parental rights into bureaucratic privileges.

The tools exist. What is needed is courage, financial backing, and legions of parents to speak up.

Christians especially need to wake up.

Pastors need to stop treating this as ordinary politics. This is not merely politics. This is the state reaching into the family, taking authority that belongs to parents and handing it to strangers.

If pastors will not speak out when children are being separated from their parents morally, medically, educationally, and spiritually, then when exactly do they intend to speak?

• Parents need to demand repeal of these laws.
• Legislators need to be confronted by name.
• School boards need to be watched.
• Homeschooling families need to be defended.
• Lawyers need to bring cases.
• Churches need to organize.
• Citizens need to track the organizations behind these bills and expose the way they operate through local legislators.

Because this will not stop on its own.

If the state can decide what your child is taught, conceal your child’s identity from you, authorize your child’s abortion without notice, seal your child’s medical records, hide your child’s prescriptions, and then regulate your attempt to educate your child at home, parental authority has already been reduced to a slogan.

And if parental authority becomes a slogan, the family becomes a shell.

If that happens without challenge, without fighting back, the country is lost.