Crooked Media got their hands on an internal Trump administration memo that outlines the goals of the worst president in history, from the "travel ban to the budget process." But the document also revealed plans to drastically slash federal funding for family planning and pregnancy prevention programs. Instead of providing actual birth control and accurate information, low-income women will now be told to either abstain or use the “rhythm method.”
And they hope to halve federal funding for Title X, the grant program that provides family planning and prevention services to the poor, and divert the money into programs to promote “fertility awareness” methods of birth control—popular among socially conservative contraception foes—which fail annually for a quarter of couples.
Members of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council (DPC) transmitted these and other priorities and concerns, as part of their longer wish list, to the Office of Management and Budget, seeking their inclusion in the budget the president will submit to Congress next year, according to a source who provided the memo to Crooked Media.
Crooked Media goes on to note the people behind these recommendations have been pushing this half-baked agenda for quite some time:
Each of the document’s repeated references to fertility awareness, including as a preferred remedy for teenage pregnancy, can be found in subsections that identify DPC staffers Katy Talento and Alexandra Campau as points of contact for OMB officials. Talento, a former adviser to Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), attracted the attention of the health news service STAT earlier this year, after Trump selected her to help shape the administration’s health policy, for expressing “strong rhetoric against birth control and abortion.”
In a January 2015 article for the right wing website The Federalist, Talento suggested that “chemical birth control” is “causing miscarriages of already-conceived children,” and, “breaking your uterus for good.”
Fertility awareness methods—including the so-called “rhythm method”—are birth control alternatives popular among social conservatives, who advance dubious claims that prescription contraception is abortifacient. These methods, by which women seek to avoid pregnancy by tracking ovulation, are “about 76% effective,” meaning “24 out of 100 couples who use FAMS will have a pregnancy each year,” according to Planned Parenthood.
You can read more analysis about the Trump White House wish list at Crooked Media. They’ve shared a re-creation of the memo (in order to protect their source), which can be viewed below.
The Trump White House Policy Wish List by Crooked on Scribd