Trump administration cuts short anti-teen pregnancy grants

BUFFALO, N.Y. Dozens of teen pregnancy prevention programs deemed ineffective by President Donald Trump’s administration will lose more than $200 million in funding following a surprise decision to end five-year grants after only three years.

The administration’s assessment is in sharp contrast with that of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which credited the program with contributing to an alltime low rate of teen pregnancies.

Rachel Fey of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy said Tuesday that grantees under the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program were given no explanation when notified this month their awards will end next June. The program, begun under President Barack Obama’s administration, receives about $100 million a year.

“We know so little about the rationale behind cutting short these grants,” said Fey, who said the teen birth rate has fallen by about 40 per cent nationally since the program went into effect in 2010. The focus of the program is on evidence-based interventions aimed at preventing teen pregnancy. It does not pay for or provide contraceptives.

A Health and Human Services spokesman said late Tuesday that an evaluation of the first round of grants released last fall found only four of 37 programs studied showed lasting positive impacts. Most of the other programs had no effect or were harmful, the department said, including three that it said increased the likelihood that teens would have unprotected sex and become pregnant.

“Given the very weak evidence of positive impact of these programs, the Trump administration, in its ... 2018 budget proposal, did not recommend continued funding for the TPP program,” the department statement said.

The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists urged the administration “not to turn back the clock” on progress.

The North Texas Alliance to Reduce Unintended Pregnancy in Teens, one of more than 80 current grantees around the country, will lose just under $1 million a year, about three-quarters of its budget, Executive Director Terry Goltz Greenberg said. The program worked with more than 1,700 kids last year in high-poverty neighbourhoods where the teen birth rates are three to five times the national average, she said.

“Most of the evidence-based programs are not just talking about contraception but are putting it in the context of bigger goals in life, such as, ‘Where do you want to be in three years?’ ‘How does a kid fit into that,’” she said.