Trump admin. abruptly ends teen pregnancy prevention programs

HHS Secretary Tom Price

The Trump administration has a novel approach to dealing with teen pregnancy rates: get rid of the programs that study it.

The Trump administration has quietly axed $213.6 million in teen pregnancy prevention programs and research at more than 80 institutions around the country, including Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles and Johns Hopkins University.

The decision by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will end five-year grants awarded by the Obama administration that were designed to find scientifically valid ways to help teenagers make healthy decisions that avoid unwanted pregnancies.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and other top Trump appointees are outspoken opponents of federal funding for birth control, advocating abstinence rather than contraceptives to control teen pregnancies.

Among the programs that lost their funding: the Choctaw Nation’s efforts to combat teen pregnancy in Oklahoma, Johns Hopkins’ work with adolescent Apaches in Arizona, the University of Texas’ guidance for youth in foster care, the Chicago Department of Public Health’s counseling and testing for sexually transmitted infections and the University of Southern California’s workshops for teaching parents how to talk to middle school kids about delaying sexual activity.

The elimination of two years of funding for the five-year projects shocked the professors and community health officials around the country who run them.

The grants were awarded in 2015 and were due to end in 2020; HHS just cut that down to 2018. Many of these are long-term, multi-year studies that become worthless if their funding is pulled before the researchers are able to collect and analyze all their data. These scientists have effectively been told they’ve wasted the last couple years.

Y’know, if I’m confronted with a societal problem – say, a teen pregnancy and birth rate that’s higher than in most other developed nations – my first reaction would be to look into it and try to understand it, the causes underlying it, and to find the most effective methods for dealing with it. I think most people would favor a similar approach. Somehow, the current leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services has got all that turned precisely around.

Trump and his Republican acolytes really do hate everything that’s good and has any beneficial effects for society, don’t they?

(via Secular Student Alliance | Facebook)