The Trump Administration has cut $216 million in funding for the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, administered by the Health and Human Services Department’s Office of Adolescent Health (OAH). OAH describes the program as “a national, evidence-based program that funds diverse organizations working to prevent teen pregnancy across the United States … with a focus on populations with the greatest need in order to reduce disparities in teen pregnancy and birth rates.”
The cuts will affect more than 80 institutions around the country that are currently conducting multi-year research projects. The projects were awarded five-year grants in 2015 that will now end on June 30, 2018. The funded projects are exclusively involved in preventing youth pregnancies and do not provide abortion counseling.
Both Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and Assistant Secretary for Health Valerie Huber are advocates for abstinence-only education and oppose Federal funding for birth control.
As a Republican Representative from Georgia, Price voted in 2015 for an amendment that would have allowed insurers to opt out of covering preventive services for women, including birth control, on the basis of religious or moral objections. In 2011, he supported a resolution that would have eliminated the Title X Family Planning Program.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 229,715 babies were born to women aged 15 to 19 years old in 2015, for a birth rate of 22.3 per 1,000 women in this group. This represents a record low for U.S. teens and a drop of 8 percent from 2014. Despite this decline, the CDC says the U.S. teen pregnancy rate is substantially higher than in other western industrialized nations, and racial/ethnic and geographic disparities in teen birth rates persist.
The CDC also estimates that in 2010, teen pregnancy and childbirth cost U.S. taxpayers $9.4 billion in increased health care, foster care, incarceration rates among children of teen parents, and lost tax revenue because of lower educational attainment and income among teen mothers.
For related background, see the May 2014 issue of Supreme Court Debates on “Contraception Under Obamacare” and the April 2012 issue of Congressional Digest on “Mandated Contraceptive Coverage.”
