Judge Halts Trump’s Abstinence-only Overhaul Of Teen Sex Ed Program

A federal judge in Washington on Wednesday blocked the Trump administration’s recent changes to the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, which hit groups around the country that teach classes on healthy relationships, abstinence and contraception.

Judge Christopher Cooper, an Obama appointee, sided in part with the nonprofit Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States; a Planned Parenthood chapter serving Iowa and Nebraska; and the governments of Hennepin County, Minnesota, and King County, Washington, which had sued after abruptly losing millions in federal funding earlier this summer.

The Trump administration, he wrote “is perfectly entitled to formulate its own views about how to stem teen pregnancy — or even whether it is worth preventing at all — and to pursue policy initiatives consistent with its viewpoint. But it is not at liberty, under the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”), to impose conditions on grant recipients that Congress did not intend or that are unreasonable or unexplained.”

The Trump administration in June terminated funding for most programs around the country that teach children and teenagers how to prevent pregnancy and sexually-transmitted infections, and issued new guidance requiring grantees to teach abstinence, minimize contraception education and include lessons on “body literacy” and fertility.

The preliminary injunction will stop the Department of Health and Human Services from using that new criteria to dole out grants as the group’s lawsuit moves through the courts. The judge declined, however, to restore the tens of millions of dollars the challengers and other sexual health educators lost earlier this summer, saying he wasn’t sure if he had the power to do so.

The Health Department did not immediately respond to POLITICO's request for comment on the ruling.

The conservative overhaul of the program for minors comes on the heels of other Trump administration policies, including a controversial revamp of the Title X Family Planning Program and a one-year moratorium on taxpayer money to Planned Parenthood, which threaten adult access to contraception and STI testing.

The cuts to the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program were additionally notable because they stripped funding both from more progressive organizations and from conservative-aligned groups that for years have worked to warn teens about the dangers of sexual activity, with the Trump administration criticizing their lessons as too sexually explicit.

"An educational initiative that counsels teens on how to avoid pregnancy without discussing the realities of unprotected intercourse and its alternatives would seem to defy social reality, common sense, and scientific evidence alike,” Cooper wrote. “Yet HHS seeks to impose these and other unexplained criteria on all TPP grantees moving forward.”

Advocates for sexual education fear that without a permanent injunction from the courts, the new policies could cause a backslide in the significant progress the country has made in recent decades in reducing minors’ unintended pregnancies.

In their lawsuit, the plaintiffs accused the administration of unlawfully forcing them to “use non-evidence-based curricula that exclusively promote abstinence-only before marriage” and “ideologically-driven, medically inaccurate information, including misinformation regarding contraception.”

As he heard arguments in the case in early August, Cooper appeared sympathetic to plaintiffs' argument that the new criteria the Health Department imposed on the program in July clashed with Congress's goal of reducing teen pregnancies and only funding research-backed lessons proven to work.

The “the amorphous concept of body literacy” could be “a stalking horse for fertility,” Cooper said, referencing fears the groups bringing the lawsuit expressed that the administration’s new criteria shifted the program’s focus from preventing pregnancy to achieving it.

He went further in his ruling, calling body literacy “a nebulous concept that appears to elevate fertility and marital procreation over well-tested forms of contraception and pregnancy prevention.”

The judge has asked both the administration and the challengers to propose a schedule for next steps in the litigation by Sept. 1.

“The court recognized what we've argued: this administration cannot override Congress's clear demand that this program be guided by evidence, not ideology," said Skye Perryman, the president of the legal advocacy group Democracy Forward, which represented some of the plaintiffs in the case.