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For nearly a decade, the sex education workshops run by Good Deeds Now have taught thousands of Georgia teenagers about safe sex, healthy relationships and abstinence. Funded through a federal initiative designed to combat teen pregnancy, the nonprofit’s age-appropriate lessons have been offered to middle and high school students.
But in late June, that work came to an abrupt end after the Trump administration announced it was cancelling a majority of grants that have funded evidence-based programs nationwide, including the one at Good Deeds Now.
“It was shocking,” said Vincent
Dortch, the organization’s CEO.
Awarded under the federal Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, the cancelled five-year grants totaled $68 million and were terminated two years ahead of their scheduled end date.
Notices were sent to 53 of 66 grantees by a branch of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, according to federal legislators. Organizations were told their program “normalizes or promotes sexual activity for minors” and no longer aligns with federal priorities.
The agency has also laid out new conditions for the grants that include requiring awardees to emphasize abstinence and marriage in their programs. References to “gender ideology” and diversity, equity and inclusion practices are additionally prohibited in education materials.
The cuts have prompted the dismantling of sex ed programs in schools, group homes for foster youth, community centers, health departments and Planned Parenthood affiliates across the country — as well as a federal lawsuit and pushback from congressional members.
Foster and homeless youth impacts
The federal Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program directed resources toward “historically underserved” populations who are “adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality,” and are more likely to get pregnant as teens, including youth with prior involvement with the foster care and juvenile justice systems.
These are the groups Anita Barbee, a social work professor at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, worries about most.
Seven out of 10 girls who leave foster care are pregnant by age 21, according to the National Foster Youth Institute. Trauma, instability and a desire to form a family after experiencing disrupted relationships are some of the reasons behind that statistic, Barbee said. Foster youth already face steep barriers to school, employment and housing when they age out, and early parenthood can make it even harder for them to achieve goals and build stable lives.
The cancellation of nearly all of the program’s grants runs counter to the Trump Administration’s recent public pledges to support foster youth, said Barbee. Foster youth advocates have voiced similar criticism about recent administration decisions to gut social services that disproportionately affect foster youth and to roll back protections for LGBTQ+ foster youth, who are overrepresented in the child welfare system.
“In a time where we say we care about kids in foster care, we’re taking away support or some information that can help them make good decisions that can affect their stability, economically and emotionally,” Barbee said.
Attempts to reach the agency about criticism surrounding the cuts were not successful.
The sex ed grants were especially significant for Southern states, which rely heavily on federal dollars to fund social programs and have higher rates of teen pregnancy, she said.
Programs make immediate cuts
In Georgia, Atlanta’s Morehouse School of Medicine, the Fulton County Board of Health and the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Power Inc. each lost nearly $2 million in grants.
Good Deeds Now had received funding for its workshops through the Morehouse grant, which was dispersed to organizations serving areas with historically higher rates of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. The announcement meant the immediate cancellation of all summer workshops and the elimination of 15 part-time facilitator jobs, its CEO said.
Dortch said 5,300 students have gone through the workshops in the past year alone. The instruction was designed to “grow up” alongside the students, he said, starting with basic lessons on health and decision-making in middle school and then shifting to safe sex topics, including abstinence, once students reached the ninth grade. After the current administration came in and its stance on funding these types of programs became clear, the nonprofit “strictly’’ focused on abstinence, he said.
Workshops took place in 15 schools in western and southern Georgia.
The loss of funding means teens have lost their only source of comprehensive, evidence-based sex education, said Dortch, whose nonprofit serves at-risk youth and their families.
“Those kids were looking forward to us coming back,” he said. “We had relationships with them, with the coaches, with the teachers. A lot of the schools are not really giving the kids this type of information otherwise.”
Elsewhere around the country, the cuts have impacted programs in rural and urban areas alike — from Hurricane, West Virginia,population 7,367,to New York City, where Children’s Aid was forced to end a program tailored to foster kids living in group homes.
That nonprofit’s $936,700 grant was terminated “without any transition period” last month, said Rhonda Braxton, vice president of health and wellness at Children’s Aid.
The funding had also covered sex ed programs that reached 1,200 children in the city’s most under-resourced neighborhoods, including Harlem and the South Bronx, she said.
Braxton said the cuts came “very much as a surprise” to the prominent child welfare organization, since it had received positive feedback about its program from government officials this past year. As many as nine staffers could be laid off, she said.
“Our program was really youth-centered and raised up youth voices, and we really met them where they were at,” Braxton said. “One thing that’s being lost is the trusted relationships we’ve been able to build with these communities.”
Rejecting evidence and science
The grant terminations have come under fire from public health experts, advocates and lawmakers. A July 1 letter signed by nearly20 U.S. senators urged Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy to “immediately” reinstate funding.
The letter credits the program for helping drive the nation’s teen pregnancy rate to a historic low last year.
“Your decision to terminate this funding squarely aligns with your department’s established pattern of rejecting evidence and science, ignoring Congressional intent, and undermining the ability of people to make their own healthcare decisions,” the letter stated.
A recently filed federal lawsuit challenging the terminations was brought by a coalition of organizations and local governments. Plaintiffs include Hennepin County, Minnesota, where a program called 'Together Hennepin’ has sent health mentors into schools and clinics to provide sexual health education and one-on-one support to students.
Other plaintiffs include King County in Washington; the progressive legal group Democracy Forward; Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States.
A 2018 Democracy Forward lawsuit overturned a similar attempt by the first Trump administration to terminate Teen Pregnancy Prevention grants.
The new complaint, filed July 14, criticizes the administration for replacing the evidence-based framework of the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program with a new version that abandons “the statutory criteria established by Congress in favor of their own policy priorities.”
“Discussing teen sexual activity — which Defendants apparently equate with encouraging, normalizing, or promoting such activity — is a proven, effective method of reducing teen pregnancy, and it is all but impossible to deliver effective sexual education programming to young people without acknowledging that teens engage in sexual activity,” the lawsuit states.
New requirements for funding, including that awardees must now affirm “marriage and parenthood as meaningful and valued components of adult life,” are also being challenged in the lawsuit.
Children’s Aid doesn’t plan to apply.
“There’s no interest,” Braxton said. “We are used to providing medically accurate, evidence-based interventions.”
Upending longstanding education practice
The Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program began more than 15 years ago with bipartisan congressional support. Managed by the Office of Population Affairs, the grants have funded education about sexual health, contraception, consent, abstinence and relationships.
Congressional lawmakers, spanning multiple presidential administrations and parties, have appropriated $101 million annually to the program, which is estimated to have benefitted 1.4 million youth, according to the Democracy Forward lawsuit.
Under the initiative, recipients have been required to run medically accurate and age-appropriate programs based on curricula that have been proven through research to effectively reduce teen pregnancy. The curricula are provided by the federal Office of Population Affairs.
A portion of the federal funding has gone towards researching new ways to prevent teen pregnancy and reduce risky behaviors.
For example, as part of the Teen Pregnancy Prevention program’s research directive, Barbee received a grant in 2016 to study the efficacy of a sex education curriculum called Love Notes that was being used with foster and disadvantaged youth in Louisville at the time.
Before the grant terminations, Love Notes was among the many evidence-based programs being taught across the country.
What made Love Notes different, Barbee said, is that the lessons were taught in the context of relationships, life goals and values, rather than relying on just telling teens to abstain from sex or use contraception. Specifically, it helped teens learn about the benefits of the “success sequence” — finishing school, getting a job and then starting a family after entering a committed relationship such as marriage.
Teens who completed the program reported delayed sexual initiation, reduced pregnancy rates and increased contraceptive use.
“We’ve made a lot of progress, and so all this does is just slow down that progress,” she said.
Barbee said she is particularly concerned that effective, time-tested approaches like Love Notes will be replaced with simple calls for abstinence.
“This belief that somehow if you say ‘Don’t do it,’ they won’t, tends to not work,” she said. “What the evidence finds is that if you talk to kids about sex, they’re less likely to do it. When you say nothing, all they get is the media and their peers. It’s not good information or good role models.”
Dortch agrees, and rejects the administration’s claim that workshops like the one run by Good Deeds Now promote sexual activity among teens.
The nonprofit leader and pastor felt the curriculum was appropriate enough to bring to his Baptist congregation. Parents welcomed the program because they sometimes struggle on their own to find a way to discuss sex and relationships with their children, he said.
“It was never promoting sex,” Dortch said. “I would say it was helping kids not make that choice.”
This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Trump administration cuts to sex ed create wide impacts
