A judge has blocked the Trump administration from stripping the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program (TPPP), a bipartisan sex education program that has been running since 2010. Under Donald Trump, the Department of Health and Human Services tried to push an abstinence-only model and strip federal funding from other programs.
“This ruling is a positive step for young people across the country to be able to receive honest, medically accurate information to empower their health and their futures – not politically motivated messages,” said the president and CEO of Democracy Forward, Skye Perryman. “The court recognized what we’ve argued: this administration cannot override Congress’s clear demand that this program be guided by evidence, not ideology. We will continue fighting to make sure that directive is honored and look forward to the next steps in the case.”
Related
Implementation of abstinence-only programming would have been another blow for LGBTQ+ people, as it tends to assume that all students are cis het and has been known to “ignore or actively degrade LGBTQ students,” according to the advocacy organization Sex Ed for Social Change. Studies have also repeatedly shown that abstinence-only education is not only ineffective, but also puts youth at risk.
In June, the Trump administration sent letters to groups across the United States terminating their federal funding for programs intended to reduce the risk of teen pregnancy and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. The letters accused the groups of “normalizing sexual activity for minors” and pushed for abstinence-only programs.
Never Miss a Beat
Subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights.
Some groups, along with an anonymous HHS source, spoke to Politico to raise concerns about how those groups had been identified in the first place. Many that received the termination letters already provided abstinence-only education to minors. Rena Dixon, the CEO of Fact Forward, a South Carolina nonprofit, said she was “thrown for a loop” when programs that had been supported by the state’s Republican legislature were terminated.
A letter Dixon received claimed that they were showing children a video that “depicted youth engaging in sexual activity,” but Dixon says the video was “a discussion between two girls on a train, and one of them said that she had sex and her friend pushed back and talked about the consequences.”
The HHS source said of the process that, “Either they looked at the curricula and didn’t understand how people modified it to be abstinence-only, or they looked at abstinence-only programs and they thought they weren’t good enough. Or they threw everything in AI. It’s unclear.”
Federal Judge Christopher Cooper has now blocked the changes in a lawsuit brought by a nonprofit called Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, a Planned Parenthood chapter that operates in Iowa and Nebraska, Hennepin County of Minnesota, and King County of Washington state.
Because the TPPP grants were allocated by Congress, the judge ruled that the executive branch could not unilaterally make these changes. “[The administration] 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,” Cooper wrote in his ruling. “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.”
In addition to challenging the legal aspect of the administration’s actions, the judge also questioned the logic of doing away with the existing and functional system, saying that the HHS policy “fails to consider the seeming logical impossibility of operating an effective pregnancy prevention program without some discussion of sexual activity.” He went on to say, “If the drop in the teen birth rate — a roughly two-thirds reduction over the last two decades — is any indication, the program has been a resounding success.”
The ruling also blocks a proposed HHS policy that would have allowed parents to review all sex education materials before their kids took the class and to have the choice to opt their child out. HHS defended that requirement by citing the Supreme Court ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor, which ruled parents with religious objections to school books could opt their children out of reading them. However, Judge Cooper said that there is a difference between school programming, as discussed in Mahmoud, and the dispersion of a federal grant.
This is the Trump administration’s second attempt to implement a major overhaul of sex education programs in the president’s second term. Last year, they insisted that California schools remove all mentions of diverse gender identities from their programs. When they refused, the administration pulled federal funding. It then tried to intimidate 46 states and territories into removing the gender-inclusive education materials. In response, 16 states filed a joint lawsuit against, and the administration’s efforts were blocked.
Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.