The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) just announced it will resume grants for groups working to prevent teen pregnancies, a reversal from last year’s sudden announcement that it would abruptly end the program.
The Obama-era Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program (TPP) was created by Congress to conduct rigorous scientific research into what approaches work to lower teen pregnancy rates and try to provide the best ones for at-risk youths.
The “highly unusual” mid-grant cancellation affected 81 organizations managing such programs in 39 states across the country.
As reported in The Hill:
All 81 grant recipients then launched, and won, five separate lawsuits, with judges ruling that the administration’s termination of the funding was unlawful. The most recent ruling came in June, when Judge Kentanji Brown ruled in favor of 62 of the grantees that filed a class-action lawsuit.
Up until now, it was unclear whether HHS would appeal any of the rulings, but the agency spokesperson told The Hill that HHS would follow the courts orders.
“We will be funding the original grantees for the next year under the previous criteria” set by the Obama administration, the spokesperson said.
At the time of Trump’s unlawful reversal, Valerie Huber, an abstinence advocate appointed to act as deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Population Affairs, argued that the teen pregnancy prevention program “normalize[d] teen sex.”
Overall, Pennsylvania’s unplanned pregnancy rate is higher than the national average, though teen pregnancies have gone down. Between 1991 and 2015, unplanned pregnancies among Pennsylvania teenagers between 15 and 19 years old decreased by 62 percent.
Despite this loss, the Trump Administration’s war on birth control is far from over.
One aspect of Trump’s goal to “watch Obamacare go down the tubes” and then “blame the Democrats” has been focused on reducing access to contraception.
Last October, Trump announced another new rule that would “allow virtually any employer to claim a religious or moral objection to Obamacare’s birth control coverage mandate.” This rule was also blocked by a federal judge thanks to a lawsuit filed by Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro.
This May, Trump proposed another new rule, sometimes referred to as “the domestic gag rule” that could prohibit doctors from using Title X funds, the nation’s only funding reserved explicitly to subsidize family planning for low-income Americans, if they refer their patients to abortion providers.
Almost 4,000 Title X health centers serve more than 4 million low-income women and men every year, providing contraception and preventive health services such as birth control, sexually transmitted infection testing, and cancer screenings.
The proposed gag order rule could also lead Title X funds to be diverted from real healthcare facilities providing medical services to fake clinics focused on religious counseling. Pennsylvania already pours millions of taxpayer dollars into “crisis pregnancy centers,” even diverting emergency funding for needy families to Real Alternatives, an organization that sued the state Auditor General for attempting to find out how they are spending the grant money.
Attorneys at the Women’s Law Project strongly oppose the new Title X rule, and formally submitted comment explaining our opposition during the notice-and-comment period.
From our comments:
Pennsylvania has the third largest patient population that qualifies for Title X funding in the country, after California and New York. In 2017, 191 healthcare providers used Title X funds to provide low-income Pennsylvanians with reproductive healthcare such as cancer screenings, sexually transmitted infections (STI) testing, and contraception. While Title X providers have been instrumental in expanding access to services that reduce the number of unintended pregnancies, the rate in Pennsylvania still outpaces the national average. Well-documented negative health outcomes associated with unintended pregnancies prove that lowering the rate of unintended pregnancy is a significant public health priority.
Read the rest of our submitted comments here.
The Women’s Law Project is a public interest law center in Pennsylvania devoted to advancing the rights of women and girls.
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