Teenage Journalists Expose Creepy Christian Van Lurking Outside High School
By Hemant Mehta, December 9, 2018

Here’s the power of inquisitive teenagers and a stellar school newspaper.

Recently, at California’s Arcata High School, three students noticed a van that parked across the street on Tuesdays. It was supposedly a mobile medical van that provided help for pregnant students. What sort of help? That’s what journalism students Jacquelyn Opalach, Caledonia Davey, and Jazmine Fiedler wanted to know.

Their eventual report in the school paper, the Pepperbox, found that the van was faith-based and full of misinformation. They wanted to catch students before they obtained an abortion and resorted to lies to convince the students not to go through with it.

J. Rophe Medical is a pro-life organization with religious ties. While some of the information provided by J. Rophe is accurate, other information is false or skewed. As a medical institution, J. Rophe operates with questionable medical ethics. Considering all of these factors, Pepperbox was left with this question: Should the J. Rophe Medical mobile unit be parked so close to a high school?

Several of the facts provided in [the group’s pamphlet] “Before you Decide” contradict the facts provided by both Planned Parenthood and other medical organizations. The Pepperbox analyzed several factual topics presented in this pamphlet, including when pregnancy begins, emergency contraception, the alleged association between abortion and breast cancer, and the alleged association between abortion and compromised mental and physical health.

While the van’s location may be legal since it’s not directly on school property, the students used the opportunity to inform fellow students about how the information they might find in the van doesn’t match up with reality. While noting that one of their classmates had a positive experience with the women in the van, they make clear that kindness doesn’t translate to medical accuracy.