The Trump administration’s Health and Human Services Secretary, Alex Azar, is taking a decade of declining teen pregnancy rates and placing them – and teenagers – at risk by shifting up to $61 million into funding abstinence-only programs.
Under the Obama administration’s comprehensive (read: honest and realistic) sex-ed programs the teenage pregnancy rate dropped to an all-time low, according to CNN.
Abstinence-only programs – which the Trump administration now calls “sexual risk avoidance” – just plain “don’t work,” according to The Washington Post. Despite that, Congress last year increased funding for these medieval monsters to $90 million. At the same time, HHS announced it would “end funding for the Office of Adolescent Health’s evidence-based Teen Pregnancy Prevention program next year,” The Post notes.
And now, as The Hill reports, the Trump “administration will shift federal funding aimed at reducing teen pregnancy rates to programs that teach abstinence.”
The “grants will be geared toward organizations that teach abstinence education to teens instead of the comprehensive sex ed approach the previous administration supported.”
This is just the latest in a long list of ideological moves the Trump administration, Azar, and his HHS have taken that literally defy logic and science in favor of religious morality.
In March, NBC News reported: “The Trump administration’s cancellation of a federal program to prevent teen pregnancy was directed by political appointees over the objections of experts in the Dept. of Health and Human Services.”
And in July of 2017 the Trump administration tried to gut funding from 81 institutions working “with teenagers across the country to prevent unwanted pregnancies.”
On Thursday a federal judge ruled “that the Trump administration’s cuts to the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program were unlawful.”
The Secretary of Health and Human Service is Alex Azar (photo), a former drug company president. In January Politico profiled “The religious activists on the rise inside Trump’s health department.”
Image via Wikimedia