In 2010, when the Obama administration helped establish the Teen Pregnancy Prevention program (TPP), the teen birth rate stood at 34 births for every 1000 girls and women between 15 and 19. Today, in 2026, it is now just 11 for every 1000 girls and women the same age. That is a pretty incredible success story for any government program, so it would be pretty weird to change it in order to make it less effective. And yet! That is exactly what the Trump administration has been trying to do. What they wanted to do was cut the budget for the Teen Pregnancy Prevention program in its entirety, but instead ended up eliminating the grants for all but a few of the current programs and requiring that any new programs be “abstinence-only” and teach “body literacy” — which discourages masturbation and birth control. They’re also not permitted to “normalize” teenage sexual behavior by acknowledging that it exists or teaching teens about how they can lower their risk for pregnancy and STIs if they do choose to have sex.
However, this terrible plan was put on hold last week when federal Judge Christopher Cooper, an Obama appointee, issued a temporary block in response to a lawsuit filed jointly by Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, Hennepin County, Minnesota, and King County, Washington.
As disappointing and horrifying as it may be, the administration generally has the right to decide which kinds of programs will get funded, so long as Congress gives them the okay — but it’s not that simple, both because of the extremely smart way the TPP is structured and because of our old pal the Administrative Procedure Act.
“HHS is perfectly entitled to formulate its own views about how to stem teen pregnancy — or even whether it is worth preventing at all — and to pursue policy initiatives consistent with its viewpoint. But it is not at liberty, under the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”), to impose conditions on grant recipients that Congress did not intend or that are unreasonable or unexplained,” Judge Cooper wrote in his opinion.
The way TPP actually works is that there are meant to be two tiers of funding streams. The vast majority of grants, 75 percent, are meant to go to the Tier 1 stream, defined as “programs that have been proven effective through rigorous evaluation to reduce teenage pregnancy, behavioral risk factors underlying teenage pregnancy, or other associated risk factors.”
So, you know, not abstinence-only education and a glorified rhythm method.
The Tier 2 funding stream requires that 25 percent of the budget “be available for research and demonstration grants to develop, replicate, refine, and test additional models and innovative strategies for preventing teenage pregnancy.” If those programs end up proving to be successful, they will then be eligible for Tier 1 funding.
It should be noted that Congress already approved a separate, non-TPP-related $35 million budget just for abstinence-only education.
The problem with all of this is that there are not studies showing that either abstinence-only programs or “body literacy programs” are effective at preventing teen pregnancy, which thus makes them ineligible for Tier 1 funding.
Cooper refers to “body literacy” throughout his opinion as “nebulous” and “amorphous,” and that’s because it is. The HHS’s new grant solicitations, or “notices of funding opportunity” or “NOFOs,” define it as “the ability to understand how the body functions in a state of health.”
Some aspects of it are totally normal and reasonable, like being aware of how hormones, sleep, food, etc. affect your mind and body, and others have a lot more to do with right-wing ideology, as Cooper notes in his opinion.
The concept entails, among other things, “two distinct educational modules” focused on “female reproductive health and male reproductive health” that address topics like how “repeated or artificially stimulated arousal may affect neural development and behavior over time.”
Under the “body literacy” heading, awardees must also provide instruction that includes “an overview of approaches to managing menstrual health concerns, including the advantages and disadvantages of ovarian suppression compared to approaches that address root causes.”
In case that wasn’t clear, what they’re talking about is telling teenagers that masturbation will affect their brain development somehow (this is not supported by science, and, in fact, most studies show that it has largely positive psychological effects) and encourages girls to not take birth control, even for things like reducing severe cramps, because the Right is all psycho about birth control now. Note that they don’t get specific about what this magical way of “addressing the root cause” would even be. One would imagine that if they had some magic “addressing the root cause” cure for cramps, for PMS, for irregular periods, for PMDD that did not involve hormones (which are, in fact, usually the “root cause” of menstrual issues), someone would have mentioned that by now, instead of just referring to “addressing the root cause.”
It also encourages girls — once they are married of course — to use the “fertility awareness method” (which is like an updated rhythm method that involves daily testing of one’s basal body temperature and cervical mucus) for family planning instead of hormonal birth control, probably because it isn’t all that effective if you don’t do it perfectly.
Cooper noted in his opinion that “there are a ‘near absence of body literacy education standards nationwide’ — let alone any that have proven effective at reducing teen pregnancy or a related risk behavior.”
He added, “Even though Tier 2 funding is designed to test innovative new strategies for preventing teen pregnancy, the agency has proffered no explanation
whatsoever, much less a reasonable one, for requiring all Tier 2 grantees to adopt a “body literacy” focus, given the myriad other “innovative” teen pregnancy prevention strategies “whose development HHS has funded in the past and now abruptly abandons.”
However, RFK Jr. had a solution for all of that, and it was submitting “studies” and “articles” that were clearly hallucinated by AI. According to Cooper’s opinion, five out of the seven articles could not be proven to exist as cited, two appeared to be “completely made up,” and “three were not published in the cited journals but appear to have similar titles to articles published in completely different journals.”
Well, what else could RFK Jr. do when, as Cooper notes, “there seem to be no pregnancy prevention curricula and programs that ‘center [on] body literacy’ and other newly-imposed TPP requirements”? It’s not his fault that there aren’t real studies that say what he wants them to say, so shouldn’t he be allowed to submit fake ones that do? It’s only fair.
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But Cooper wasn’t into it and refused to accept the hallucinated articles as evidence in the case.
“While abstinence-only education may well be appropriate for some age groups or communities, the agency has offered no explanation or evidence to support its across-the-board mandate that only abstinence strategies be pursued,” he wrote. “On the topic of body literacy, the notices (remarkably) reference public health studies that appear either not to exist or not to support the propositions for which they are cited — a hallmark of AI-generated citations.”
This is not the first time that HHS has used fake AI “studies” to make its case, as many of the citations in its “MAHA” report turned out to be faked by AI as well.
Given the success and necessity of the TPP, I certainly hope that the administration is fully blocked from blowing it up before 2028 rolls around, but it’s more likely, frankly, that it will go to the Supreme Court, which will then decide that AI-hallucinated studies are perfectly acceptable to use as evidence in a court of law if the mean liberal scientists won’t fashion you any real ones.
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My abstinence-only approach in high school (and part of college) was a revolutionary method called 'crippling shyness.' I don't recommend it.
Never forget that one of the biggest reasons they oppose any sort of sex education is it helps sexually abused kids realize they're being sexually abused.
Edited for typos