When the Trump administration abruptly and clandestinely pulled $213 million from teen pregnancy prevention programs, everyone knew that the “abstinence only” crowd in Trump’s Health and Human Services (HHS) Department was clearly behind it. NBC News has notes and emails showing that appointees with abstinence-only philosophies campaigned tirelessly to let down young people across the country.
The $213 million Teen Pregnancy Program was aimed at helping teenagers understand how to avoid unwanted pregnancies. It had bipartisan support in Congress and trained more than 7,000 health professionals and supported 3,000 community-based organizations since its inception in 2010.
In the notes provided to NBC News, Evelyn Kappeler, who for eight years has led the Office of Adolescent Health, which administers the program, repeatedly expressed concerns about terminating the program, but appeared out of the decision-making loop and at one point was driven to tears.
The integrity of the Teen Pregnancy Program seemed pretty clear, as the United States has seen declining teen pregnancy rates for about two decades and one could very easily argue that the numerous studies showing that teen prevention programs that include sex education and contraception education work.
“The pregnancy rate for women in the United States continued to decline in 2010, to 98.7 per 1,000 women aged 15–44, a record low for the 1976–2010 period. This level was 15 percent below the 1990 peak,” wrote researchers Sally Curtin and Joyce Abma of the NCHS and Kathryn Kost of the Guttmacher Institute.
“The estimated number of pregnancies dropped to 6.155 million in 2010, the lowest number since 1986,” they added.
That included record low rates for abortions. You would think that the pro-life crowd would be cheering this on but they weren’t, because for all of the hand-wringing (and in many cases genuine delusion) about trying to save unborn fetuses from the furnaces of hell, controlling women’s sexuality is the primary cause of their distress.
In a June 21 note by Kappeler, Steven Valentine, Huber’s deputy, is described as having “taken the lead” in reversing the program. Valentine directed Kappeler to halt the review process for the grants, the notes say.
Before coming to HHS, Valentine was a legislative assistant to Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., an outspoken abortion rights opponent. Valentine also worked for a short time at the Susan B. Anthony List, a political organization that supports candidates who oppose abortion rights.
Huber is Victoria Huber, who was the chief of staff for Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health and former president of Ascend, an abstinence-only advocacy group that seems to believe God spends most of His days watching people have sex and judging them for it.
The notes show that, as with the rest of this Republican administration’s agencies, the HHS has become an oppressive and theocratically-based tool for promoting the one area Trump has succeeded in fulfilling his promises: the evangelical war on women.
Study after study has shown that while teens that do not have sex will not get into sexually related “trouble” (i.e. pregnancy and disease), abstinence programs don’t actually stop teens from having sex. They are worthless by themselves and expending resources on programs that simply tell people to not to do something while offering zero education always ends up hurting success rates in the long run. And so while there are sexual education programs that have shown real success in keeping younger people both healthy and pregnancy-free, conservatives continue to practice the age-old, and historically destructive fight to control society through a narrow, orthodox view of sex.