With a man like Donald Trump serving as President of the United States, it should come as no surprise that major policy decisions are often turned into spectacles ripe with suspense or shock value (see: the build-up to his decision to leave the Paris climate accord and his surprise Twitter storm banning transgender men and women from military service).
But amidst his typical fanfare, the President is also no stranger to discretion—and it’s these quiet efforts, like those rolling back teen pregnancy prevention programs, that are just as likely to undermine the public’s well-being without commanding a major spotlight.
Yes, in mid-July, the President stealthily slashed nearly $214 million in funding from over 80 teen pregnancy prevention programs. As has been a trend in the Trump administration, these cuts target something put in place by former President Barack Obama—specifically, a 2015 measure that awarded five-year grants to programs that would, according to Reveal (a publication from The Center for Investigative Reporting), “find scientifically valid ways to help teenagers make healthy decisions that avoid unwanted pregnancies.”
These funds were granted not only to major research institutions, like Johns Hopkins University and the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, but also for pregnancy prevention programs that served at-risk communities. And now, thanks to the Trump administration, the grants will cease to exist come 2018—and aside from funds quickly drying up, the research programs that relied on this money will not have the financial means needed to complete their studies and reach conclusive findings.
Despite how harmful this development is, it should come as no surprise to those who have followed the President’s positions on health care. His Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tom Price, is a long-standing opponent of any federal programs that help pay for contraception. And within HHS, some of the department’s top officials are notorious for an abstinence-only approach—like Valerie Huber, the chief of staff to the assistant secretary of health. Huber is on record trying to rebrand abstinence education to something more palatable—she told PBS in 2016 that she prefers the term “sexual risk avoidance”—and has said she’s skeptical that contraception can actually reduce unintended pregnancies. Moreover, she previously served as the president of an organization that was once known as the National Abstinence Education Association (its current name: Ascend) and her ultimate goal is to “normalize sexual delay more than we normalize teen sex, even with contraception.”
Making this movement toward abstinence-only education all the more mind-boggling is the fact that the teen pregnancy rate in the U.S. is currently at an all-time low. There’s an obvious reason as to why: Contraception is much more readily available than it ever was pre-Obama (and pre-Affordable Care Act). If the Trump administration has its way, however, this trend could quickly be in jeopardy.
Beyond cutting funding to teen pregnancy prevention programs and research, the White House is also looking to build up abstinence-only education and in the proposed 2018 budget, nearly $300 million would be set aside and be distributed over a ten-year period to such programs. But as research has consistently shown, this approach to sex education does more harm than good. Recently, the Journal of Adolescent Health published a report examining the consequences of abstinence-only-until-marriage policies and programs—one that updates their last deep-dive into the subject, which came in 2006—and as expected, abstinence-only programs simply don’t work.
“Health and medical researchers have shown consistently that high-quality sex education can make a measurable difference in adolescents’ health and well-being, which makes the appointment of abstinence-only-until-marriage education advocates to key positions within the Department of Health and Human Services deeply concerning,” Leslie Kantor, Ph.D., MPH, one of the co-authors of the JAH report and the vice president of education at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, told Glamour.
In theory, abstaining from sex is a guaranteed way to prevent pregnancy or STIs. But programs that follow an abstinence-only approach, rather than offer comprehensive sex ed, don’t prevent young people from having sex—and they don’t prevent them from getting pregnant or contracting an STI. Instead, these programs have been found to withhold information from teens and young adults—and even spread false information—preventing them from making informed decisions about their own sexual choices. And with an average of roughly ten years between when men and women first have sex and first get married, perpetuating the idea of abstinence until marriage is a futile effort.
To put things into context, federal support for abstinence-only efforts can be traced back to the early 1980s and the Reagan years. In 1981, the Adolescent Family Life Act allocated funding for community organizations and faith-based groups that encouraged “chastity” and “self-discipline.” In the mid-90s, these programs saw a major boost after Congress expanded abstinence education under the 1996 welfare reform bill—and were only propelled further upon the creation of an abstinence-only education federal grant program in 2000. Federal funding became more readily available but was only given to programs that specifically targeted children between 12 and 18 years old and provided them with no information about contraception or safe sex.
By 2004, the House Committee on Government Reform determined that such programs “contained false, misleading, or distorted information about reproductive health, misrepresentations about the effectiveness of condoms in preventing sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and pregnancy, as well as gender and sexual minority stereotypes, moral judgments, religious concepts, and factual errors” (as JAH reported).
By no coincidence, state governments soon started saying “thanks, but no thanks” to federal funding designated for abstinence-only education (by 2009, almost half had declined such money). Though funding for abstinence-only plans was incorporated into the 2010 Affordable Care Act to get it through Congress, the crux of funding was put toward pregnancy prevention programs and research. But after a slew of new Republicans were ushered into Congress following the 2010 midterm elections, abstinence-only programs experienced renewed support.
These advocates, however, continue to neglect just how effective comprehensive sex ed actually is. Medical groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Society of Adolescent Health and Medicine have come out in opposition to abstinence-only plans, and even the United Nations has declared that all young people have the right to access in-depth information about their sexual health. Further, the Centers for Disease Control determined that these high-quality programs not only reduce the risk of pregnancy and STIs, but lower the initiation and frequency of sexual activity, decrease the number of sexual partners, and diminish the likelihood of unprotected sex for those teens and young adults how are given this type of education.
In short: Giving young people all the info they need about sex means they’re more likely to actually abstain from sexual activity than those who are given abstinence-only education. But with Trump in the White House and people like Price and Huber at HHS, abstinence-only advocates are having a huge moment—and teens and young adults, especially those in the most vulnerable communities, will suffer because of it.
