Ruling shreds safety net for sexually active teens

A teenager walks into a clinic. She’s embarrassed to ask for contraception but knows the alternative. Not asking could mean becoming a mother before she’s ready.

For more than 50 years, this scene has been playing out in family clinics funded by Title X, a federal program that provides free contraception to teens without judgment. Their backgrounds, age, incomes and immigration status — or that they chose to have sex instead of abstaining — didn’t matter.

In 2022, 205,818 Americans younger than 18 received family-planning services at Title X clinics, according to a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report.

Now, if a 5th Circuit Court of Appeals decision to require parental permission for minors to get contraception holds, Texas teenagers will no longer have that safety net.

On Tuesday, the three-judge panel of the federal appeals court based in New Orleans affirmed a 2022 ruling by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Amarillo in a case filed by a Texas father who opposed Title X. In his ruling, Kacsmaryk gutted some of the only places some Texas teens could get birth control: federally funded family-planning clinics.

Before the decision, federal clinics had been exempt from the state law that requires minors to get parental approval before receiving birth control.

This is another step on the path toward the destruction of all reproductive rights.

Back in June 2022 when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion that the court’s decision wouldn’t apply to other rights.

“We have also explained why that is so: rights regarding contraception and same-sex relationships are inherently different from the right to abortion because the latter (as we have stressed) uniquely involves what Roe and Casey termed ‘potential life,’ ” Alito said.

In his concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote explicitly about revisiting those rights.

“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” Thomas wrote, referencing the court’s decisions protecting contraception, same-sex sexual conduct and same-sex marriage.

Nationwide, the number of adolescents having sex at earlier ages has decreased from

1988 and contraceptive use has increased since the 1990s. As a result, the U.S. saw its lowest teen pregnancy and birth rate in years. Still, in 2019, 38.4% of all high school students reported they had had sexual intercourse.

Nationwide, the teen birth rate has been declining since 1991, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which attributes the declines to more teens abstaining and more teens who are sexually active using birth control.

According to the CDC, the 64% drop in the teen birth rate between 1991 and 2015 resulted in $4.4 billion in public savings in 2015 alone.

But the fallout from political policies rooted in extremeright Christian nationalism doctrine that takes reproductive choices away are making their mark.

In 2022, teen birth rates increased in Texas for the first time in 15 years. It’s now 50% higher than the national average, according to CDC data.

To answer the question of whether teenagers will ask their parents for birth control, it’s best to ask other questions.

Do they ask their parents’ permission to have sex?

Will not having access to birth control stop them?

Are they ready to become mothers?

For many teens, the answer to all of those questions is no.

Now, when they walk into a clinic, instead of asking for birth control, it could be to confirm they are pregnant or have a sexually transmitted disease — or both.