Trump Orders Schools to Make Chilling Change to Sex Ed Programs

The Trump administration has canceled millions of dollars worth of federal grants to organizations running teen pregnancy education programs nationwide, suggesting that the widely effective underage pregnancy prevention services were inappropriately promoting premarital sex.

The funding did not align with the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health’s outlined priorities, according to a government factsheet that specified the office would not support “content that encourages, normalizes or promotes sexual activity for minors.”

One such organization interrogated by the assistant secretary—South Carolina nonprofit Fact Forward—was accused of including lessons with “advice on making condom use more pleasurable” and promoting discussions that normalize “use of pornography,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by The New York Times.

“That information was just not true,” Rena Dixon, who runs the group, told the Times. Dixon added that Fact Forward had never used the lessons or materials to which the assistant secretary referred.

Other program directors that spoke with the Times also said that the government had distorted the materials they were using in order to make erroneous claims about their education plans. Several noted that the grants they won required them to use “courses from a federally approved list shown by research to be age-appropriate and effective,” according to the Times.

The federal government first got involved in preventing teen pregnancy in 2010, allocating roughly $100 million to the cause and eventually creating the Office of Adolescent Health and the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program (OAH).

At the time, teen birth rates were already in decline, yet the program’s influence still caused rates to fall faster than ever. The government-funded programs advanced the waning trend by investing in proper sex education and increasing access to reproductive health care in communities suffering from disproportionately high rates of teen pregnancy.

But Donald Trump and his allies have nonetheless abhorred the effort. Last month, a spokesperson for Health and Human Services revealed that the agency had cancelled 53 out of 67 grants—totalling $68 million—alloted to the pregnancy prevention program. The impact was broad, affecting more than two dozen states across the country.

It’s unclear if the effort will hold up in court. Trump took similar actions during his first term, suddenly cancelling dozens of grants issued under the Obama-era program in 2017, though his efforts did not succeed.

In April 2018, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson—then a U.S. district judge—ruled that HHS had violated its own regulations by prematurely ending the grants without an adequate explanation, ordering the agency to restore the terminated funds. ...