Parents, educators and community leaders recently attended a Fairfax County School Board meeting in Virginia to ask questions about an alleged coerced abortion case involving two Hispanic minors at Centreville High School.

Centreville High School has a minority enrollment of 69%, and 32% of its students are economically disadvantaged. For pregnancy matters, the school’s policy states that students are encouraged to discuss their concerns with their parents.

The whistleblower at the school, Zenaida Perez, is an English as a Second Language (ESL) Teacher and is originally from Cuba. She immigrated to the United States in 1990 and holds a master’s degree in ESL.

Perez claims that, beginning in 2022, she discovered a social worker was arranging and paying for minor girls to obtain abortions without parental knowledge or consent, which is required in the state of Virginia.

She reportedly brought her concerns to school administrators seven times. But instead of district officials addressing these allegations, Perez says she experienced bullying from administrators and attempts from the school to undermine her integrity by falsely accusing her of handing out pregnancy tests to students.

The allegations are deeply troubling given both of the girls involved were underage. Perez says that one student, who was five months pregnant and wanting to keep her baby, said she felt like she “had no choice.” The other girl told Perez she was terrified because her legal guardians did not know about her abortion.

Worried parents in attendance at the school board meeting questioned whether these were isolated incidents or part of a broader pattern of overriding parental rights and disregarding state law.

Most Americans support parental consent for abortion as they recognize that life-and-death decisions should not be made without parental guidance. In Troxel v. Granville, the United States Supreme Court affirmed the fundamental rights of “parents in the care, custody, and control of their children,” and 36 states require parental involvement in abortion-related decisions for minors.

Despite the guarantee of parental rights, Virginia is attempting to strip them from the abortion equation by passing House Joint Resolution 1, a constitutional amendment that enshrines intentionally broad “reproductive freedom” as a right in the state constitution.

The Centreville High School case also underscores over a half-century of abuse by so-called “reproductive health care” advocates targeting minority communities for abortion.

Sadly, abortion peddlers know impoverished minority girls are abortion-vulnerable due to the broader inequalities they face, like racial prejudice, economic disparities, and access to authentic health care. They are also unlikely to resist coercion, especially when it comes from authority figures like school officials.

Their struggles are not just statistics to me, because I lived them. I grew up in the middle of the same kind of hardship after my mother’s attempted abortion with me. She had come to the U.S. from Honduras, already struggling to raise seven children she couldn’t provide for, trapped in an abusive home. She too believed she had no other choice.

She did defy coercion from her abortion physician in the end, but this kind of resistance is rare. Victims are often threatened, manipulated, and face real barriers like lack of money, absence of support, or fear for their safety.

I am thankful that the Governor Glenn Youngkin has directed the state police to open a criminal investigation into the case. Parental rights should not be usurped, and school employees have no right to hide secret abortions from parents.

Children need protection and parental guidance, especially when faced with an unplanned pregnancy, not forced secrecy by adults attempting to usurp fundamental rights of parents to make decisions regarding the wellbeing of their children.

Girls from marginalized communities, including Hispanic girls from Centreville High School, deserve better than betrayal from people they should trust and cover-ups by school bureaucrats.

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Sarah Zagorski is the Senior Director of Public Relations and Communication at Americans United for Life.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.