The Trump administration is recycling the failed message that teens should be sexually abstinent, said Jill Filipovic in Slate, and urging them “to forgo contraception, get married, and plan their lives around having babies.” The Department of Health and Human Services recently canceled 53 of 67 grants, totaling $68 million, provided through the decades-old Teen Pregnancy Prevention program. The federal government will now provide grants only to sex education organizations that emphasize fertility over contraception, falsely depict the pill and hormonal contraception as dangerous, and urge teens to prepare for marriage and parenthood. The new guidelines ban any “content that encourages, normalizes, or promotes sexual activity for minors.” Since TPP began in 2010, the birth rate for 15-to-19-year-olds has decreased by over 65%, reaching a record-low 11.7 births per 1,000 last year. Now HHS is “stripping money from the programs that sent teen pregnancy rates tumbling to put it toward those that tell teens that actually, reproduction is the goal.”
But the teen birth rate has been declining since the 1990s, long before TPP, said Michael J. New in National Review. HHS tried to refocus grants toward abstinence education during Trump’s first term, but grantees sued and kept their funding. They’re doing so again, and “conservatives should hope” Trump is more successful this time. The purpose of sex ed has changed, said Kat Rosenfield in The Free Press. Preventing unplanned teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease was a “reasonable and appropriate” goal when they were more common. But it doesn’t make much sense “in a world where young people are barely having sex” compared with previous generations.
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