7/7/09
A seventh-grade girl in California was ordered by her school principal to remove her pro-life T-shirt on "National Pro-Life T-Shirt Day." The T-shirt depicted pictures of a fetus growing in the womb.
The incident occurred in April, 2008, at McSwain Elementary School, a K-8 school in Merced, California. Anna Amador, mother of the child, says that Principal Terrie Rohrer, Asst. Principal C.W. Smith and clerk Martha Hernandez denied her daughter's First Amendment rights by ordering her to leave the cafeteria and remove her shirt.
A lawsuit filed on behalf of the girl appears to be bolstered by the 1969 Supreme Court case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District decision. The Court ruled in favor of the right of public school student to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War. As Amador's attorney William Becker points out, "The message of the T-shirt is that life is sacred. One would be very hard pressed to find anything wrong with that particular idea, except that some people do object to the political message.”