The Trump administration is hoping a raft of pregnant teenagers spurs a U.S. baby boom, something that has become a creepy fever dream among conservatives.
That’s the most logical interpretation of its decision, confirmed by the Department of Health and Human Services this week, to cancel grants for programs that fight teen pregnancy and, instead, prioritize programs that promote “healthy pregnancies.”
Making the news all the more disturbing is that it comes after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has fretted on multiple occasions over today’s teens supposedly having low sperm counts.
Stateline recently reported on funding guidelines the administration issued for Title X grants that fund reproductive health measures and preventive care, including contraception, but not abortions.
The department’s recently issued funding guidelines for Title X grants represent a significant mission shift.
Instead of expanding access to contraception, the focus of Title X will be “to strengthen family formation and assist clients in achieving healthy pregnancies,” according to the new guidance. That will align the program with the administration’s efforts to increase the U.S. birth rate.
Writing for Vogue last year, author Seyward Darby, whose work focuses on white nationalism and extremist culture, explained how some sectors of the MAGA movement have been promoting the racist idea that white women must start having more babies to essentially save American society from diversification, which these people falsely portray as an existential crisis for the nation.
In addition to the Title X overhaul, the Trump administration also will be diverting millions of dollars from the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, as Bloomberg Law reported this week. Per the outlet:
An HHS official confirmed that the reclaimed TPPP funds will be redirected into two additional funding streams that HHS promoted in two new notice of funding opportunities on Tuesday. In total, the new opportunities would fund $71.7 million in grants, and both applications are due July 23.
“The goal of this initiative is to identify effective interventions focused on body literacy and ensuring transparency and protection of parental rights for future replication by adolescent health practitioners and youth-serving professionals, and to disseminate the research findings and lessons learned to inform future studies,” one notice states.
For those in the know, that line about “parental rights” being a factor in teen pregnancy is a disturbing callback to last year’s Senate confirmation hearing for Brian Christine, who was confirmed as assistant health secretary. As I wrote at the time, Christine has said “society works best when men and women are fulfilling their roles, when they are doing what they’re supposed to do, raising children and propagating the species,” calling it “the natural and moral law.” He also has said some transgender people are “pawns” used by liberals to challenge “traditional gender roles” as part of an attack on “traditional religion and theology.”
When Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md., asked about whether and how Christine would undermine programs meant to curb teen pregnancy, he replied that efforts to curb teen pregnancy should be left to the “purview of the parents,” suggesting that the federal government’s successful efforts to combat the scourge of teen pregnancy are either unlawful or unwarranted.
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