In the continuing saga of the idiot-in-the-oval-office’s effort to burn down the institutions of our civil society by destroying its government from the inside, Donald Trump has appointed a variety of close-minded forced-birthers to the Health and Human Services Department (HHS). Some, such as Teresa Manning, notorious anti-abortionist and onetime legislative analyst for the hate group Family Research Council, have already stepped down from their positions (she was in charge of HHS’ family planning program). Fortunately, there is no shortage of those who refuse to believe in science—or even simple cause and effect—and Valerie Huber has been able to step forward to dictate how Title X dollars are distributed.
Some family planning advocates, such as Ginny Ehrlich, chief executive at the nonprofit Power to Decide, criticized the administration’s decision to put Huber in charge of the Office of Population Affairs.
“Manning’s departure would be positive news except for the fact that the Trump administration has chosen to replace Manning with Valerie Huber, who is well known for placing ideology over an evidence-based approach to ensuring that young people have the information and services they need to avoid an unplanned pregnancy,” said Ehrlich, whose group backs federal support for sex education and a wide range of contraception methods. “What we really need is for this administration to take women’s health issues seriously and appoint an individual who is not only well qualified for the position, but also values women.”
Huber once headed up the National Abstinence Education Association (NAEA)—which has been renamed Ascend, because conservative linguistics require that words be used that do not mean what they appear to mean. Interestingly, she also headed up Ohio’s abstinence-only program between 2004 and 2007, which was when Ken Blackwell, who led Trump’s transition team for domestic policy, was Ohio’s secretary of state and managed to disenfranchise thousands of Ohio voters in 2004. Ken Blackwell is currently a senior fellow at the Family Research Council—the hate group that is now deeply embedded in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Even before they were able to write their religious beliefs into the U.S. Code, these conservative groups agitated against the growing movement for comprehensive sexuality education:
Groups like Focus on the Family, Concerned Women for America, Moral Majority and the Eagle Forum spearheaded campaigns to discredit comprehensive sexuality education. Aware of the changing times, these groups no longer argued for the complete removal of sexuality as a subject in school. Instead, they acknowledged the importance of sex education but contended there should be only one message: sexual behavior outside of marriage was unacceptable. These national conservative groups spread their brand of sex education by working from the bottom up and the top down. They approached local school boards and national politicians with the same message: sexual behavior among unmarried young people is an epidemic, and abstinence-only-until-marriage programs in school are the solution.
One of their early successes at the national level came as part of the Adolescent Family Life Act (AFLA), which was passed in 1981 and is widely considered the precursor to today’s abstinence-only-until-marriage programs.
By the way, Focus on the Family, itself listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group, is the parent organization of Family Research Council, which was originally a division of James Dobson’s Colorado Springs hate group. What they finally managed to accomplish was the federally funded abstinence-only education program under Title V of the Social Security Act. In order to obtain grant funds under Title V, the abstinence-only education must:
- Have as its exclusive purpose, teaching the social, psychological, and health gains to be realized by abstaining from sexual activity;
- Teach abstinence from sexual activity outside marriage as the expected standard for all school age children;
- Teach that abstinence from sexual activity is the only certain way to avoid out-of-wedlock pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and other associated health problems;
- Teach that a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity;
- Teach that sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects;
- Teach that bearing children out-of-wedlock is likely to have harmful consequences for the child, the child’s parents, and society;
- Teach young people how to reject sexual advances and how alcohol and drug use increases vulnerability to sexual advances; and
- Teach the importance of attaining self-sufficiency before engaging in sexual activity.
Just like vultures circling roadkill, groups formed to accept federal funding to teach our children absolutely nothing that they did not already know. Unsurprisingly, one such group was National Abstinence Education Association, which is the primary advocacy group for abstinence-only education. Valerie Huber, now in charge of allocating grants under Title X, was their CEO before she joined the marauders of team Trump.
In 2010, faced with the mandatory grant program under Title V that required abstinence-only education for children, the Obama administration started the Teen Pregnancy Prevention (TPP) Program in addition to seeking reduced funding for Title V. The TPP has had greater success in its brief lifespan than did Title V in the many years that preceded it.
Last year Dr. Christine Dehlendorf, director of the Program in Woman-Centered Contraception, which worked with The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy to develop a teen pregnancy prevention program, wrote that between 2010 and 2014 there was a 35 percent decrease in teen birth rates due to the implementation of the TPP program. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, birth rates among teens aged 15 to 19 dropped by one-half between 2007 and 2017. No study has ever shown that abstinence-only has ever worked. On the contrary, from Guttmacher Institute:
Even judging the abstinence-only approach on its own limited terms—where the only thing that matters is stopping or even delaying sex outside of marriage—this approach is ineffective. The first federally funded evaluation of Title V abstinence-only programs, conducted in 2007 by Mathematica Policy Research on behalf of HHS, found no evidence that these programs increased rates of sexual abstinence.11 In fact, according to scientific evidence amassed over the past 20 years, abstinence-only programs do not have a significant impact on the age of first sexual intercourse, number of sexual partners or other sexual behaviors.12 Further, abstinence-only programs may place young people at increased likelihood of pregnancy and STIs once they do become sexually active.11,13,14
Dehlendorf wrote:
The National Campaign estimated that in 2010, teen pregnancies cost the US roughly $9.4 billion — about 90 times more than the annual Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program budget of $101 million. And teens who avoid unintended pregnancy don’t just save the system money — they learn more and earn more, too.
After revealing his initial budget, Trump called on the federal government to, “Do so much more with the money we spend.” His administration will be hard-pressed to find an investment that produces a better return on investment, or brighter futures for our youth, than equipping teens with the tools they need to prevent pregnancy.
I happen to agree with her, except that she believes that “equipping teens with the tools they need to prevent pregnancy” is a value to this administration. She might want to consider that many of the tax-funded dollars that Trump wants to distribute will be going to his fellow travelers, friends, allies, and cronies. That includes those who happen to believe (like longtime Trump friend Ken Blackwell) that repression is the answer to any sexual issue that makes them uncomfortable.
Created by Congress in 2000, another source of federal funding for these fantasy classes in sexuality bypasses the states and goes directly to private organizations that preach the gospel according to “Just say no.”
Under the George W. Bush administration, annual funding for the program—then called “community-based abstinence education” and explicitly tied to the same restrictive eight-point definition—ballooned from $20 million initially to $113 million at its peak. The program ended briefly after Obama came into office, but was revived in federal fiscal year (FY) 2012 at $5 million.
Both of these programs have been revised and renamed in recent years, but the goal remains the same: to implement programs exclusively focused on voluntarily refraining from sexual activity outside of marriage. First, in FY 2016, Congress renamed the competitive grant program as “sexual risk avoidance” and decoupled it from the eight-point definition of “abstinence education.” To qualify for funding, programs must, among other things, “teach the benefits associated with self-regulation, success sequencing for poverty prevention,” and “resisting sexual coercion…without normalizing teen sexual activity.”9 Funding for the program has again started to increase, rising to $15 million in FY 2017 and likely to go as high as $25 million under House and Senate spending proposals for FY 2018.
In February 2018, Title V funding was renewed for two years at $75 million a year. And just as the NEAE has relabeled itself as Ascend, the new abstinence-only education grant program will now be dedicated not to abstinence, but to “sexual risk avoidance education.” Meanwhile, the only program with proven results in decreasing teen pregnancy is under continuing threat.
A decision was made at HHS to terminate the TPP last year, claiming that it was ineffective.
Based on the internal emails and notes, NBC News reported that the program’s abrupt cancellation in July of 2017 was directed by Trump political appointees over the objections of career experts at HHS.
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The notes and emails showed that three appointees with strict pro-abstinence beliefs — including Valerie Huber, the then-chief of staff for the department's Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health — guided the process to end the program.
The reason they wanted no input from the career professionals at HHS is obvious: they would have urged the continuation of this highly effective, bipartisan program.
Evelyn Kappeler, a career official and director of the HHS Office of Adolescent Health, which oversees the TPP program, wrote in memos that her office was not aware of the changes until the last minute.
Kappeler indicated in a memo that career staff at the Office of Adolescent Health were discouraged from offering recommendations about the program and were told they should get in line with the administration by Don Wright, a high-ranking career official, who weeks later became acting HHS secretary following Tom Price’s departure.
“He stated that as civil servants, our responsibility is to implement the administration’s agenda whether we like it or not, as long as it is legal. And if we can’t, we should consider other options” Kappeler wrote in the memo.
The Omnibus spending bill passed by Congress last month restored $108 million to TPP, but its future is uncertain as the anti-science zealots at HHS are still in charge.
Speaking of our HHS anti-science zealots, they were in attendance at a closed-door meeting during last month’s annual UN Commission on the Status of Women. The purpose of the meeting was to decide on the terms to be used in the UN document on gender equality and the empowerment of women globally. According to Ema Connor, writing for Buzzfeed:
The Trump officials’ approach at the UN meeting makes it clear that the administration intends to extend its views on abortion, contraception, and sexual education beyond US borders to an extent that is unusual even for Republican administrations.
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According to the delegates, the Trump officials discussed “sexual risk avoidance” programs — a coded term for encouraging teenagers to delay sex until marriage — and told the group that HHS was conducting research to show these tactics helps lower teen pregnancy and STD rates, the delegates said.
Huber also discussed teaching young women sexual “refusal skills,” Torres and two other sources confirmed.
“She spoke of ‘trying to get women to make better choices in the future,’ which is that terrifying and outmoded idea that women make bad sexual choices and that what happens to them is their fault,” one of the delegates who attended the meeting told BuzzFeed News, adding that during this moment of the #MeToo movement, it seemed “particularly regressive.”
Apparently Huber’s recommended views managed to unify most of the 45 member nations of the Commission on the Status of Women against the United States’ policy. There is always something ominous about a nation urging its religious beliefs onto others. And Valerie Huber’s forced-birther nature is guided by her Christian beliefs, as she made clear in her master’s thesis:
… and her stated belief that sex education should focus on “Biblical standards.”
- In her 2009 master’s thesis on sex education in public schools, Huber wrote that Christians “should promote Biblical standards” in sex education. The thesis goes on to mention abstinence 213 times while mentioning contraception only 21 times. [Valerie Huber Master’s Thesis, 2009]
But perhaps more striking was the phrase “that HHS was conducting research to show these tactics helps lower teen pregnancy and STD rates.” Huber did not maintain that HHS was conducting research to determine the best ways to lower teen pregnancy and STD rates, but only sought to prove that her cherished faith truly is the only way to do so.