When Hettema contacted the Department of Health and Human Services for an explanation, staff in the Office of Adolescent Health "were extremely shocked and still trying to find out who made the decision and how this came about," she said.
The University of New Mexico had been recruiting for a randomized study of 1,000 participants in a program created for doctors’ offices to help low-income Latino and Native American teens. Now they’ll probably end up with half that number, which would turn it into a pilot study with much less value for health providers, Hettema said.
“It’s kind of like building half a skyscraper and then saying, ‘Never mind,’ ” Hettema said. “And there are thousands of health care providers in this country who are winging it in terms of how to talk to teens about unintended pregnancies.”
Luanne Rohrbach, an associate professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California, said the eliminated programs, including the one she directed, are scientifically based.
“We took decades of research on how to effectively approach prevention and have applied it on a large scale nationally,” she said. “We’re not out there doing what feels good. We’re doing what we know is effective. There are a lot of data from the program to show that it works.”
The USC program supports a sexual health education program in middle schools in the Los Angeles and Compton unified school districts and in an alternative high school system. Included are workshops that teach parents how to talk to kids about delaying sexual activity and where to find health services for preventing disease and pregnancy.
In the San Antonio area, Healthy Futures of Texas provides education on preventing teen pregnancies and uses a control group to assess the effectiveness of the program.
“Our research design is to follow young people for a year and see if the program is making a difference,” said Dr. Janet Realini, associate vice president of Healthy Futures of Texas. Without the funds, “it’s going to be very difficult for us.”
“The folks I’ve talked to who have had many federal grants say they would normally have had some notice,” she said.
In May, Congress approved $101 million for the third year of the 81 grants. But Trump’s proposed budget did not include any funding for fiscal year 2018.
Huber, the new chief of staff for the office of the assistant secretary for health, previously was the president of Ascend, which used to be named the National Abstinence Education Association.
In a 2014 paper on the history of sex education, Huber criticized Obama for creating comprehensive sex education programs at the expense of focusing on abstinence.
“Pro-sex organizations used every opportunity to attack abstinence education,” Huber wrote with co-author Michael Firmin. “This agenda was (and is) at least as much about destroying abstinence education as it is about supporting ‘comprehensive’ sex education. … The current Obama administration has used its fiscal scalpel to eliminate the growth of abstinence education within America’s school systems.”
Tom Price, an orthopedic surgeon who was a US Representative from Georgia, was confirmed by Congress as health secretary in February. He has been vehemently opposed to federal programs involving contraception.
In Congress, he voted to eliminate Title X, which subsidizes contraception for low-income women. He opposed an Affordable Care Act provision that requires insurance plans to cover contraception.
"Bring me one woman who has been left behind. Bring me one. There’s not one," Price told a ThinkProgress reporter when asked about the provision in 2012. "The fact of the matter is this is a trampling on religious freedom and religious liberty in this country."
The US teen birth rate remains higher than many other developed nations despite a continuing decline.
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