Bye-Bye, Teen Preggo Prevention Programs! Hello, Bumper Crop Of Future Trump Brides!

OK, everybody take some...oh, shoot, no funding for rubbers.

In an important step sure to win favor with the Junior Anti-Sex League and fundagelicals, the Trump administration last week let holders of federal grants for prevention of teen pregnancies know that their grants, originally set to last five years, would all end next year instead of their original end date, 2020. We have to pay for the Wall and that war in Venezuela and some tax cuts for the obscenely rich somehow, and the best way to do it is to stop funding wasteful programs that just tell girls to go be sluts. Now that funding for the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Programs has been abruptly eliminated, teens will surely realize they'd better stop having sex, so no increase in teen birthrates can possibly be expected. This is 100% logical. Also, the grant program was started by Barack Obama in 2010, so it goes without saying it had to be eliminated.

Oh, but how the liberal warpers of impressionable young minds have howled!

“There was no communication about the reason. The notice of the award just stated that instead of a five-year grant, it is now a three-year grant,” said Baltimore City Health Commissioner Dr. Leana Wen.

Baltimore’s program aims to decrease the overall teen birth rate there, which is three times higher than the national average.

But the program will now lose $3.5 million in grant funding over two years, meaning 20,000 fewer students will have access to reproductive health education and other services.

“We don’t have another way to fill this deficit. This will leave a huge hole in our ability to deliver health education,” she said.

How about sending them to church so they can learn not to be sluts, huh? PROBLEM SOLVED.

Chopping off the two years of funding will save the government about $200 million, and only a crazy person would suggest that the price tag for increased services for babies born to teens will vastly outweigh the savings, because 1) We just told you that kids will stop having sex once the liberals stop telling them about birth control and 2) You should just see the cuts in welfare the administration has planned.

HHS spokesperson Mark Vafiades said the cuts were put in place because there was no proof the programs, in 39 states and DC, worked. And also because they weren't included in Trump's "budget," which we should note is still just a mathematically impossible proposal and has not actually been passed by Congress, but that's no reason not to start slashing.

“Given the very weak evidence of positive impact of these programs, the Trump administration, in its FY 2018 budget proposal did not recommend continued funding for the [TPPP],” he said in a statement to The Hill.

“Current [TPPP] grantees were given a project end date of June 30, 2018.”

You might think assessing the programs' effectiveness before they've actually completed their five-year runs might be a tad difficult, but don't worry, HHS didn't offer any actual proof to back the assertion anyway, so it's safe to assume Vafiades was just lying. The main thing is that now America will be great again. Also, for all we know, Trump saw the initials of the program and thought it had something to do with his campaign program to pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. What's one more "P"? (If you're a scared teen with a home pregnancy test, it could be everything...)

Say, and speaking of research, the unexpected cuts will also fuck over the research grants that actually were assessing the programs, isn't that funny?

In addition to school and community-based classes like the ones in Baltimore, the program also funds five related research grants at Johns Hopkins University, the University of California at San Francisco and other institutions. The grants' early termination will make the first few years of data invalid because researchers won’t be able to continue some studies.

Not to worry, though, because regardless of the studies' findings, Trump's HHS would have ignored them anyway.

The organizations running the slashed programs were the only ones who were informed of the cuts, because the administration didn't actually offer an announcement to the press. The media learned of the cuts from cities and schools affected by the disappearance of the grants. And now that a lot of the research will have to be discarded, we won't have to keep hearing propaganda from so-called "experts" who insist that comprehensive sex education programs and easier access to contraception have cut teen birth rates, while states with mandatory abstinence-only policies have the highest teen pregnancy rates. 

Still, the news was cause for celebration at Ben Shapiro's Internet Tendency, which lauded the cuts as "a nice hat tip to social conservatives who believe in teaching teens the virtues of abstinence and waiting until marriage rather than just handing out contraceptives to them" and explained, based solely on the unsubstantiated statement from HHS, that the programs had been proven to be "worthless." And while Shapiro and his website aren't generally big fans of Trump himself, the article had high praise for the abstinence duckspeak of Valerie Huber, the HHS chief of staff for the assistant secretary of health, whose office oversees the now-truncated grants. She wrote a terrific op-ed for The Hill surveying the Brave New World where teens will learn to keep their pants zipped again:

Policymakers finally have an opportunity to give American youth the reinforcement they need to continue to make healthy choices — and to normalize sexual delay for all teens and especially for those teens who currently feel pressured to have sex by social media, their favorite music, or their sex education classes.

It doesn't have to work. It just has to please the fundies. Now you teens just learn to resist your urges, and soon we'll be back to the teen pregnancy rates of the '50s!

Oh. Those were higher than in the last decade.

[ The Hill / Think Progress / WaPo / Daily Wire / Centers for Disease Control ]