The Trump administration’s anti-abortion agenda is well known, but another attack on women’s reproductive rights is largely unknown and flying below the media radar. That’s the regime’s recent cancellation of $68 million in federal grants for teen pregnancy prevention. Evidence-based sex education and access to birth control options have driven the national teen pregnancy rate down more than 80 percent from a high of 62 births per 1,000 teens in 1991.
Teen motherhood can have negative impacts on a teen mom’s mental and physical health, education attainment and economic well-being, especially since the structural dismantling, in the mid-1990s, of the federal welfare program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.
Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Anna Bernstein, the principal federal policy advisor at the Guttmacher Institute, a non-profit research and policy organization that focuses on sexual and reproductive health and rights. Here she talks about the new policy the Trump administration is implementing that prioritizes abstinence, a policy directly advocated for in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook.
ANNA BERNSTEIN: This latest action was in July when over 50 grantees of the Teen Pregnancy and Prevention Program received notice that their funding was suddenly being terminated for not aligning with the administration’s values. And then a few days later, the administration, HHS, released some new funding guidance. These are known as notice of funding opportunities and this lays out what grantees should include in their applications and how applications will be reviewed and funding decisions to be made.
And so this was really a departure from previous iterations of the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, which focused on more comprehensive sexual health education for adolescents. The new guidelines emphasize abstinence-only education, so-called “parental rights,” and some other really MAHA-coded themes that we often see in places like this push for so-called “restorative reproductive medicine” and other sort of echoes of their pro-natalist agenda. Whereas before, this program really was focused on giving accurate information to young people about building healthy relationships, avoiding unwanted pregnancies and also just a more holistic view of sexual health.
And it also had a really important role in creating an evidence base for new programs. The new guidelines really suggest moving away from this sort of evidence-based accurate information.
MELINDA TUHUS: You said something about restorative reproductive medicine. What is that?
ANNA BERNSTEIN: So this is a term that the administration has often used and reputable medical groups like ACOG, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, have noted that this is not a medical term. These guidelines really focus on “sexual risk avoidance” education, which is abstinence-only education essentially rebranded, despite the fact that studies have shown that abstinence-only education does not delay sexual intercourse or reduce adolescent pregnancy. And we know that much of the decline in adolescent pregnancy over the last several decades is largely driven by increased use of contraception. And it’s notable that these guidelines don’t require any sort of education on contraception or other evidence-based methods for reducing unwanted pregnancies among teens and young people.
MELINDA TUHUS: Are these more executive orders or what’s the basis on which they’re switching all this teen pregnancy prevention practice from many previous years to what they want to see now?
ANNA BERNSTEIN: Yeah, so this program, the teen pregnancy prevention program, is not in statute. It is appropriations language that has typically been bipartisan. It was first passed in 2010. So it typically has support among Republicans and Democrats in Congress. This is really the Trump administration taking the appropriating language and turning this into guidelines that are really meant to align with their agenda.
There has already been a lawsuit filed from some groups who were previously grantees to challenge that this is not really implementing the goals of the program as stated in the appropriating language. So that lawsuit I believe is ongoing. What’s important is understanding this through line of the Trump administration’s attacks on the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program as part of this larger agenda that seeks to reduce people’s bodily autonomy, reduce access to services like contraception and abortion.
I think something else of note in these guidelines is that they really focus on what they call “parental rights.” They’ve really co-opted this term and it is an ultra-conservative movement to roll back bodily autonomy for young people, especially for LGBTQI+ young people, to limit access to evidence-based information. They sort of censor information for young people and the rights of LGBT young people in particular. So they’re really prioritizing this ahead of young people’s access to this evidence-based information.
Just to say explicitly, we’re seeing a lot of movement from the far right on this pro-natalist agenda and the restorative reproductive medicine concept is definitely part of that. And I think what we’re seeing in these guidelines, which really does not actually focus on preventing unintended pregnancies, but concepts like fertility tracking and reproductive goals counseling—which you would typically think of for someone who is trying to become pregnant or for folks that are struggling with infertility—is a really worrisome subversion of this program’s original intent.
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