Once again, President Trump is taking
heat for a morally conservative stance – this time for tighten the budget on
promiscuous, ineffective teen pregnancy prevention programs.
Under the Obama Administration,
Congress decided in 2010 to allocate $100-million a year in grants to contraception-based
Teen Pregnancy Prevention programs (TPP). In 2017, all funding for abstinence education was
eliminated from the budget.
But the Trump Administration’s
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) noted that three grantees’
programs reported an increased likelihood that teens would become pregnant and,
using the evidence, they recommended discontinuing the program in mid-2018. “Given the very weak evidence of positive
impact of these programs, the Trump Administration … did not recommend
continued funding for the TPP program,” stated an HHS press release.
Instead of funding programs that
advocate abstinence, under the Obama Administration TPP grantees promoted “safe
sex” to adolescents between 10-19 years old. The tax-funded programs taught condom use and
pushed kids to have LARCs (Long Acting Reversible Contraception) implants,
abortifacient IUDs, and controversial chemical release implants.
Skeptics were repeatedly assured that
programs would be closely evaluated for effectiveness in preventing teen
pregnancy. Federal funding was only to go
to programs that proved they were reducing teen pregnancies.
The evidence is in and the program is
failing, according to the TPP report by the U.S. Office of Adolescent Health: Some
organizations didn’t report findings; some admitted there was no difference in
teen pregnancy rates; some reported improvements that quickly faded; and some
showed increasing pregnancy rates.
Despite the government’s promise of
“evidence-based” reporting, only 40% of grantees revealed the results of
effectiveness analysis. Of those
grantees continuing past programs, only 4 of more than 75 reported effective
results, and those results were short-lived. Of the grantees trying “new” ideas, only 8 of
27 showed the slightest effectiveness.
As pro-marriage and family advocates
predicted, some reports showed their contraception programs resulting in
increasing rates of sexual risk-taking among teens.
Planned Parenthood of the Northwest,
which received $4-million, admitted their minor subjects were just as likely as
any other teen to have sex without birth control. In fact, teen girls reported even higher
rates of pregnancy than those without the program.
As soon as the HHS announced the Trump
Administration cuts, the mainstream media bellowed its disapproval. National Organization for Women president
Terry O’Neill told Healthline, “This
is yet another anti-women policy that kills women.”
Democratic senators wrote a letter to
HHS Secretary Tom Price demanding an explanation and calling the budget cut
“short-sighted.”
The
Federalist
noted that in the liberal media’s zeal to castigate Trump and defend
promiscuity education, “No media outlet mentioned the ineffectiveness of teen
pregnancy prevention programs, whether it was NPR, the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch, Politico, Business Insider, The Independent, Forbes, Teen Vogue, or Bustle.”
The
Washington Post
quoted American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists president Haywood Brown
criticizing Trump. “It’s as though the
evidence and the facts don’t matter,” Brown said without stating any of the
reported “evidence and the facts” of programs’ ineffectiveness.
The Los
Angeles Times
and National Public Radio (NPR) falsely claimed the programs were
working:
“We
can also attribute these declines to the evidence-based teen pregnancy
prevention programs,” Texas A&M’s Kelly Wilson told NPR, despite published proof to the contrary.
“Trump’s
hires at HHS were notably hostile to teen pregnancy programs that worked. Now they’ve killed them,” the LA Times wrote.
Ironically, when President Obama
eliminated abstinence education last year, he attributed the decline in teen
pregnancy to condom-based education and claimed that abstinence education was
ineffective.
Rev.
Dr. Kenneth L. Beale, Jr.
Chaplain
(Colonel-Ret), U.S. Army
Pastor,
Ft. Snelling Memorial Chapel
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