The Trump administration has canceled all but a handful of grants meant to teach teenagers and caregivers about reducing teen pregnancies, arguing they are “normalizing sexual activity for minors.”
Transcript
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The Trump administration has canceled all but a few teen pregnancy prevention grants. That funding went to public health departments, universities and nonprofits to help teach young people and their caregivers how to reduce teen pregnancies. The Department of Health and Human Services wrote in termination notices that the grants were being canceled for, quote, “normalizing sexual activity for minors.” NPR’s Selena Simmons-Duffin has more.
SELENA SIMMONS-DUFFIN, BYLINE: Paige Preston just turned 18. She lives in Tuba City, Arizona, part of the Navajo Nation. And earlier this year, she attended a workshop put on by Hozho Horizons from the Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health. She says she learned about safe sex and good communication and birth control options beyond condoms.
PAIGE PRESTON: Some of the stuff that I learned that were really meaningful to me was that there were types for women.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Like birth control pills and IUDs. Preston says she knows this information is important. Several of her peers got pregnant in high school. She was ready to help with another workshop later this summer, but it was canceled when the funding was cut.
PRESTON: I was kind of taken aback and just really shocked.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: In fact, the Trump administration canceled 53 teen pregnancy prevention grants at the end of June, totaling $67 million. The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to NPR’s multiple requests for comment about the cancellations. President Trump’s 2027 budget does call for eliminating the teen pregnancy prevention program because the grants have gone to groups that, quote, “promote radical leftist ideology,” unquote, and because the document says there’s no evidence these programs have, quote, “contributed to the historic decline in teen pregnancy, which is now at an all-time low,” unquote. Trump also canceled all of these grants in his first term. Even with that history…
GINGER MULLANEY: This really was a shock.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Ginger Mullaney is president and CEO of Healthy Futures of Texas. After President Trump issued several executive orders last year, including on gender ideology and, quote, “radical and wasteful government DEI programs,” Mullaney’s team spent months reworking all of their materials to comply with those orders.
MULLANEY: Those programs and curricula had all been rigorously adapted and reviewed by federal staff last year to be in compliance and were approved.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Then seemingly out of nowhere, their $2 million-a-year grant was canceled.
MULLANEY: I’m frustrated that these are lives that were being changed. There’s generational impact and social and economic mobility for communities using programs that are proven and demonstrated to be effective.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Nicholas Mark agrees that the evidence is robust. He’s a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He says the grants were created to apply the educational methods that were proven effective through randomized controlled studies.
NICHOLAS MARK: The whole, like, basis of the program was in effective, rigorously evaluated programs.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: As for the reason the agency gave for terminating the grants, quote, “normalizing sexual activity for minors,” Mark calls that framework bizarre.
MARK: In just, like, a world where teens have smartphones – I mean, teens are surrounded by sex, and it seems silly to think that having a source of verifiable, trusted information on safe sex would be worse than the information environment that people are already steeped in.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Paige Preston, the 18-year-old in Arizona, says that the workshop she participated in was way better than trying to read something online or go to a regular health class.
PRESTON: When you participate and you learn from people like you, like in Indigenous communities, that means a lot more because it’s showing you that someone like you is so knowledgeable about a subject and they’re really passionate about that.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: She says that makes you want to listen more.
Selena Simmons-Duffin, NPR News.
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