Funds to limit teenage births slashed
The Trump administration has abruptly slashed federal funding for programs to reduce teenage pregnancy rates, including three Bay Area projects that had been promised money under the Obama administration to operate through 2020.
The Bay Area programs were among 81 nationwide that learned this month that the five-year grants handed out by President Barack Obama’s administration in 2015 were being canceled as of June 2018.
The Trump administration gave no explanation for the decision, which rescinded $213 million in grant awards. However, the official responsible for doling out the grant money — Valerie Huber of Health and Human Services’ Office of Adolescent Health — has complained that Obama’s antiteenage-pregnancy programs did not focus on encouraging youths to abstain from sex.
At the same time it ended funding for the grants, Health and Human Services Department proposed sharply increasing funding for abstinence education.
The changes were contained in Trump’s proposed fiscal 2018 budget, which still must go through Congress. But Health and Human Services alerted grant holders in recent weeks that their funding would disappear in June. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, sent a letter co-signed by 147 House colleagues to agency Secretary Tom Price on Tuesday, asking why the money had been pulled before Congress finalizes next year’s spending plan.
Many of the projects that receive money under the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program are designed to reduce pregnancies among youths with limited access to medical care or sex education. One
grant recipient, in San Francisco, drew up an education program for boys incarcerated in juvenile hall. A Contra Costa County health department program focused on underserved groups in poorer areas.
Researchers working on some of the projects said they were in the middle of trying to establish the effectiveness of their programs. That will be impossible with the funding cut off two years earlier than planned, they said.
“To be told at the start of year three that it is your last year forces a lot of tough decisions,” said Anthony Petrosino, director of the Justice and Prevention Research Center for WestEd Justice, a research nonprofit headquartered in San Francisco.
WestEd was awarded $575,729 annually three years ago to start and measure the effectiveness of Healthy U, a computer program for male teenagers incarcerated in Oregon. The effort was aimed at 300 boys locked up by the Oregon Youth Authority who otherwise do not have access to sex education.
“The goal, and I know it sounds altruistic, is to help young people,” Petrosino said. “The idea was, let’s find out what works for them. This was a program with potential and promise. There’s not a lot of great options for the study now.”
The U.S. birth rate among teenagers has plummeted since 1991, but it remains higher than that of many industrialized nations. About one-quarter of U.S. girls and young women become pregnant by age 20, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and many of the projects funded by the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program were directed at understanding why the U.S. has a higher teen birth rate than other countries.
Under the Trump administration cuts, the Contra Costa County Health Services agency would lose $1.25 million that goes to programs in Pittsburg and West Contra Costa County aiming to reduce sexually transmitted infections and teen birth rates, and encourage open communication among parents and teens about sex. UCSF would lose $995,321 for a program to spread long-acting contraceptives such as intrauterine devices to young women in the Bay Area, Central Valley and Los Angeles regions.
“We have a lot of existing evidence that shows that these programs provide great return on the investment,” said Eleanor Bimla Schwarz, a professor of medicine at UC Davis and a researcher in the UCSF study.
“Any cuts are either an oversight or a sign of shortsighted thinking,” Schwarz said. “It means that the last couple of years we spent getting this program up and running will be wasted. It really reflects our current administration’s lack of understanding of the ways science is part of the infrastructure needed to build and keep our community healthy.”
UCSF also lost a bid to have the federal government renew $400,000 in annual funding for a research project that studied the effectiveness of contraceptive counseling. Money for that program ran out this year.
Price and other Trump appointees have framed funneling money into programs that advocate for birth control as a moral issue. Price has long spoken out against using federal money for contraceptive education, favoring an abstinence-only curriculum.
The administration’s proposed budget for next year would earmark $277 million for abstinence education. Obama removed all funding for abstinence-only education last fiscal year.
The Teen Pregnancy Prevention grants are run out of Health and Human Services’ Office of Adolescent Health. The office’s new chief, Huber, was formerly the head of Ascend, a group in Washington, D.C., that advocates for abstinence education.
In 2014, Huber wrote a paper critiquing the Obama administration’s anti-teen-pregnancy efforts, saying its “agenda was (and is) at least as much about destroying abstinence education as it is about supporting ‘comprehensive’ sex education. ... The current Obama administration has used its fiscal scalpel to eliminate the growth of abstinence education within America’s school systems.”
Cutting out scientific research that aims to lower the teenage pregnancy rate and focusing only on abstinence has far-reaching implications, said Andrea Miller, president of the National Institute for Reproductive Health, a nonprofit in New York that works to protect access to contraception.
“It’s shocking when you consider how this funding is supposed to work,” Miller said. “But it is sadly not surprising given how many ways the Trump administration and Congress have sought to undermine reproductive health care and information over the last several months. We are in a truly new world now.”
The House Appropriations Committee defeated a proposal last week to restore the grant funding. Advocates are holding out hope that the Senate will put the money back in, but it’s unclear whether Health and Human Services would let the grant recipients continue their work.
The letter signed by Lee and other House members asked Price to explain why his agency announced the grant funding cutoff before Congress has approved his agency’s budget.
“This decision ... would be a blow to bipartisan efforts to prevent unplanned teen pregnancies," the House members wrote. “At a time when young people are most in need of information and education to protect their sexual and reproductive health, this administration is denying evidence and science.”
Christine Dehlendorf, who was involved in both UCSF programs that lost funding, said she worries about how teenagers who need reproductive information will find it.
“We aren’t going to be able to complete the project we spent the last two years doing,” Dehlendorf said. “In order to have a research program, you need stability and predictability. To have those things pulled without warning — that threatens the entire research enterprise and your ability to execute reliable and credible scientific results.”