By The Herald Editorial Board
For the second time in less than a week, a federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration was unjustified in ending a teen pregnancy prevention program — administered by Planned Parenthood chapters — three years into a five-year study of the effectiveness of the comprehensive education programs.
The decision serves as a rebuke of an administrative decision that arbitrarily sought to terminate an effective program that was benefiting the health of teens by preventing pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases while also — cynically — aimed at preempting an examination of the program’s effectiveness.
A U.S. District Court judge in Spokane issued a permanent injunction Tuesday that stops the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from cutting funding for the final two years of prevention programs run by Planned Parenthood of Greater Washington and North Idaho. That decision followed a similar one April 19 in a D.C. federal district court that also found the cuts to the grants were unlawful.
Also last week, a three-judge panel for the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a 2016 Ohio state law that barred Planned Parenthood and other providers that offer abortion services from receiving federal funds for teen pregnancy prevention programs.
Last summer, HHS cut funding for 81 programs across the nation that administered Teen Pregnancy Prevention grants, providing comprehensive education services to 1.2 million youths in 39 states. The funding administered by the Planned Parenthood chapter in Washington and Idaho served about 40,000 youths in the two states, The Spokesman-Review reported Tuesday.
The funding cuts, aimed squarely at Planned Parenthood, followed a month after President Trump’s appointment of Valerie Huber to a top HHS office. Huber, before joining the administration, worked for an advocacy group that promotes abstinence-only education.
As the funding cuts were announced, Huber wrote an opinion piece critical of the lack of funding for abstinence-only programs. The 2019 federal budget released earlier this year by the Trump administration allocates $75 million to HHS to fund abstinence-only and “personal responsibility” sex education programs, rather than more comprehensive programs that — along with abstinence — also discuss birth control methods and ways to protect against sexually transmitted diseases.
Huber and other supporters have sold abstinence as the only method of birth control that is 100 percent certain to prevent pregnancy.
That’s true, so long as teens abstain from sexual activity.
But when they don’t, those youths risk becoming sexually active without the the full knowledge of how to protect themselves from pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.
The track record for abstinence-only programs is not impressive. Research detailed last September in the Journal of Adolescent Health, found that those programs frequently fail to prevent teens from having sex, withhold important information and instead provide medically inaccurate and stigmatizing information. The result: Abstinence-only programs “threaten fundamental human rights to health, information and life,” the study concludes.
Even though the five-year study of the effectiveness of Teen Pregnancy Prevention is incomplete, data from 2010 through 2016 shows that the teen birth rate in the U.S. had dropped by 41 percent because of comprehensive sex education programs. That’s a figure that should be celebrated — not opposed — by abstinence-only supporters for having avoided the end result of more unwanted pregnancies and more abortions.
There’s a place for persuading teens that it can be a good idea to wait to become sexually active. But teens will be most receptive to that message when they are treated like the adults they are developing into and have all the information they need to make good choices regarding their health and their future.
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