THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION AND BIRTH CONTROL

Women’s progress in the United States has been inextricably tied to the availability of birth control. Landmark Supreme Court decisions in 1965 and 1972 recognizing a constitutional right to contraception made it more likely that women went to college, entered the workforce and found economic stability. That’s all because they were better able to choose when, or whether, to have children.

A 2012 study from the University of Michigan found that by the 1990s, women who had early access to the birth control pill had wage gains of up to 30 percent, compared with older women.

It’s mind-boggling that anyone would want to thwart that progress, especially since women still have so far to go in attaining full equality in the United States. But the Trump administration has signaled it may do just that, in a recent announcement about funding for a major family planning program, Title X.

Since 1970, the federal government has awarded Title X grants to providers of family planning services — including contraception, cervical cancer screenings and treatment for sexually transmitted infections — to help low-income women afford them. It’s a crucial program.

Conservatives — often male ones — like to argue that Title X improperly uses tax dollars to subsidize women’s sex lives, and that some forms of birth control can be obtained inexpensively.

“Back in my days, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives,” the Republican donor Foster Friess said in 2012. “The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn’t that costly.”

Leaving aside that potentially procreative sex requires a man’s participation, those conservatives should note that the safest and most effective form of birth control for women might cost considerably more than a bottle of aspirin. The intrauterine device, or IUD — a long-lasting contraceptive method that has a vanishingly low failure rate and is a favorite among women’s health care providers — can cost more than $1,000 out of pocket.

Yet the Trump administration appeared to accept the conservatives’ retrograde thinking with a recent announcement from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Population Affairs outlining its priorities for awarding Title X grants. Alarmingly, unlike previous funding announcements, the document makes zero reference to contraception. In setting its standards for grants, it disposes of nationally recognized clinical standards, developed with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that have long been guideposts for family planning. Instead, the government says it wants to fund “innovative” services and emphasizes “fertility awareness” approaches, which include the so-called rhythm method. These have long been preferred by the religious right, but are notoriously unreliable.

The announcement also says the government will look to fund programs that involve parents or guardians in minors’ family planning decisions, and get spouses involved, with no mention of privacy. And the announcement suggests that the government wants to promote abstinence until marriage.

This is not a surprise, given who is in charge of the Trump administration’s Title X office — Valerie Huber, a longtime advocate of abstinence-until-marriage education programs, which are generally considered to be less effective than comprehensive efforts. The new funding announcement is in keeping with the Trump administration’s thwarted attempt last year to roll back the mandate in the Affordable Care Act that employer-sponsored health insurance policies cover contraception.

The Trump administration may not be advocating that women stock up on aspirin to avoid pregnancy, but its priorities are nearly as backward and unscientific. And that will harm the health and self-determination of women, particularly the most vulnerable among them.