Insider reveals the bogus decision-making process behind cutting teen pregnancy prevention program

By Walter Einenkel 
Tuesday Mar 20, 2018 · 11:54 AM EDT

When the Trump administration abruptly and clandestinely pulled $213 million from teen pregnancy prevention programs, everyone knew that the “abstinence only” crowd in Trump’s Health and Human Services (HHS) Department was clearly behind it. NBC News has notes and emails showing that appointees with abstinence-only philosophies campaigned tirelessly to let down young people across the country.

The $213 million Teen Pregnancy Program was aimed at helping teenagers understand how to avoid unwanted pregnancies. It had bipartisan support in Congress and trained more than 7,000 health professionals and supported 3,000 community-based organizations since its inception in 2010.

In the notes provided to NBC News, Evelyn Kappeler, who for eight years has led the Office of Adolescent Health, which administers the program, repeatedly expressed concerns about terminating the program, but appeared out of the decision-making loop and at one point was driven to tears.

The integrity of the Teen Pregnancy Program seemed pretty clear, as the United States has seen declining teen pregnancy rates for about two decades and one could very easily argue that the numerous studies showing that teen prevention programs that include sex education and contraception education work.

“The pregnancy rate for women in the United States continued to decline in 2010, to 98.7 per 1,000 women aged 15–44, a record low for the 1976–2010 period. This level was 15 percent below the 1990 peak,” wrote researchers Sally Curtin and Joyce Abma of the NCHS and Kathryn Kost of the Guttmacher Institute.

“The estimated number of pregnancies dropped to 6.155 million in 2010, the lowest number since 1986,” they added.

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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/3/20/1750493/-Insider-reveals-the-bogus-decision-making-process-behind-cutting-teen-pregnancy-prevention-program