Programs to fight teen pregnancy at risk of cuts
ANDERSON, S.C. — At age 14, Latavia Burton knows something about teenage pregnancy. Her mother gave birth to her at 18 and couldn’t attend college because of it. And Latavia’s former best friend became pregnant at 16.
So a pregnancy prevention program in eighth grade and another in her neighborhood this summer hit home. Latavia hasn’t had sex yet, and said if she were asked to she’d say, “Let’s just wait a little longer.” But to be safe, she plans to get an intrauterine device at a clinic for teenagers the program introduced her to. And since she learned that it would not protect her from sexually transmitted diseases, but that condoms would, she said she would “just go to the teen clinic and get some for free.”
The pregnancy prevention projects Latavia attended are among hundreds across the country, reaching more than 1 million youths, that are funded by a program the Trump administration has scheduled for elimination in its proposed budget. If Congress concurs, it will end the Obama-era effort to shift away from decades of reliance on abstinence-only programs, which showed little to no evidence of effectiveness. Most projects begun under the Obama administration’s Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program teach about contraception and sexually transmitted diseases in addition to abstinence.
Even before the budget is voted on, the Health and Human Services Department is curtailing the projects, which it funds through grants of $89 million a year to 81 organizations. As reported last month, officials told all the groups their pregnancy prevention grants would end in June 2018, two years early. But only recently did the department offer a reason for the elimination, attributing it in a statement to “very weak evidence of positive impact of these programs.”
Health commissioners from 20 large cities are protesting, writing to Tom Price, the health and human services secretary, that cutting funding “will not only reverse historic gains made in the U.S. in reducing teen pregnancy rates, but also make it difficult to truly understand what practices are most effective.”
Shortly before the groups receiving grants learned their money would be cut early, a leader of an abstinence education advocacy organization, Valerie Huber, was named chief of staff to the health and human services assistant secretary who oversees adolescent health.
Vafiades said the funding cutoff was “not a decision made by one individual or based on anyone’s like or dislike of one approach.” Still, Huber, whom the department declined to make available for an interview, wrote in an opinion piece in March that the best message for young people was “to avoid the risks of teen sex, not merely reduce them.”