A porn star is engaged in a highly public legal spat with the president of the United States over her ability to speak freely about their extra-marital affair. A second porn star has come forward to reveal the president’s effort to recruit her for a threesome.
A third woman, a former Playboy Playmate, has also launched a legal battle to reclaim the right to reveal her own extra-marital affair with the president. And a fourth woman, a former contestant on “The Apprentice” back in Donald Trump’s days as a reality-TV star, has accused the president of groping and sexually harassing her and is suing him for calling her a liar.
OK. Take a moment to ponder the ridiculousness of all that, particularly when viewed from a pre-Trump perspective, if that is still possible. Then, when you’ve finished, think about this:
Deep in the bowels of the federal bureaucracy, political appointees of this very same president are attempting to dismantle successful federal programs and grants designed to reduce teen-pregnancy rates. At the Department of Health and Human Services, five-year grants to some 80 non-profit agencies around the country that are fighting to reduce teen pregnancy will be arbitrarily ended June 30, two years early.
That’s a loss of $200 million for those programs. And why are they being stripped of federal funding that is critically important to their mission?
Because they advocate an “abstinence-plus” approach to sex education, teaching abstinence for as long as possible but also teaching contraceptive use and STD avoidance should teens decide to become sexually active. That approach contradicts the highly moralistic, Christianity-based, abstinence-only approach that is preached by this administration.
"Documents released under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request indicate that three political appointees directed the changes to the Teen Pregnancy Prevention (TPP) program: Valerie Huber, who prior to joining HHS headed a national abstinence education advocacy group; Teresa Manning, a former anti-abortion rights lobbyist who has since left HHS; and Steven Valentine, who previously worked for Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), chairman of the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus."
The problems with this approach are manifold. Study after study have documented that for middle-school and high-school students, abstinence-only programs do not work well. They can delay the onset of sexual experience, but they also leave students unprepared to handle the situation responsibly once they do become sexually active, as most eventually do.
For example, a study published by the National Institutes of Health comparing state policies and teen pregnancy rates concluded that "increasing emphasis on abstinence education is positively correlated with teenage pregnancy and birth rates. ....These data show clearly that abstinence-only education as a state policy is ineffective in preventing teenage pregnancy and may actually be contributing to the high teenage pregnancy rates in the U.S."
Another study, conducted at Case Western University, looked into the curriculum and results of abstinence-only programs in Ohio. Students in those programs were urged to take chastity pledges and were taught virginity until marriage as their only defense against pregnancy. They were further told that condoms were ineffective in preventing pregnancy and STD transmission, with claimed failure rates that were "exponentially higher than the well-documented scientific evidence." They were even told that condom use could lead to death.
It probably will not surprise you to learn that the person heading Ohio’s abstinence-only program at that time was Valerie Huber, now one of the Trump political appointees leading the effort to defund abstinence-plus programs.
Such changes in public policy pose a threat to what has so far been a genuine if largely uncelebrated success story. Thanks in part to an increased emphasis on science-based, evidence-backed abstinence-plus programs, and more funding, the rate of teen births was cut by almost half between 2007 and 2015, as illustrated by the CDC chart above.
Unfortunately, under this administration, you can no longer create, defend or fund policies that are "science-based" and "evidence-based." Shoot, in this administration, you are discouraged from even saying those words. Instead, you sanctimoniously lecture sexually curious 17-year-olds as immoral and impure while you utter not a word about the horndog-in-chief who gave you your job and your power.
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