As if we needed yet another reminder that 2017 is not going to be good for reproductive health, the White House quietly took things one step further: on Friday, the Trump administration quietly nixed over $200 million worth of funding for teen pregnancy prevention programs at 81 institutions across the country.
According to the Reveal Center for Investigative Reporting, the move will put an end to what were supposed to be five-year grants put in place by the Obama administration, and were created to find scientifically-proven ways to prevent teen pregnancy. (Since, you know, data and facts have shown over and over that abstinence-only education doesn't work.) Instead, the Trump administration has put a stop to these programs after only two years of research, which basically makes any data the researchers have collected useless, since they now won't have time to analyze it before the projects end in June 2018.
Programs at major reserach institutions, such as those at the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles and John Hopkins University, will be among those affected. None of the programs being cut provided any kind of abortion counseling, and were only involved in preventing teen pregnancies.
While it's an upsetting decision, it's also not necessarily surprising. Health and Human Services Secretary John Price is a well-known proponent of abstinence-only sex education, and a major opponent of federal funding for contraceptives.
"They don’t like to deal with the sexual reproductive health of teens," Pat Paluzzi, the CEO and president of the Healthy Teen Network, told Reveal. "They frame it in this country as moral issues. Public health issues shouldn’t be political issues."