Trump admin blocked from defunding radical "sex-ed" programs

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper has issued a split ruling on the Trump administration’s latest reforms to the federal Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program (TPP), allowing already-made cuts to stand while preventing the new rules from being applied to future grants.

Last month, LifeSiteNews reported that the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) Office of the Assistant Secretary of Health’s Office of Population Affairs notified more than 50 organizations, including Planned Parenthood’s California Central Coast and Heartland affiliates plus several state and local government health departments, that upon review it determined “some curricula normalize adolescent sexual activity and are not age appropriate, as they contain overly sexually explicit or pornographic content that is not necessary to achieve the TPP program’s statutory mission.”

Highlights of the offending material include detailed instructions about condoms and other contraception methods, discussion prompts on how to obtain condoms, discussions of being exposed to pornography at young ages, and stories about teenagers having sexual activity.

Several groups sued, including the Sexuality Information & Education Council of the United States; Planned Parenthood; and the local governments of Hennepin County, Minnesota, and King County, Washington. Cooper sided with them, Politico reports, ruling the Trump administration “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.” At the same time, he believed that he lacked the authority to reverse the cuts that the administration already made...

Pro-lifers warn that Planned Parenthood’s efforts on the subject actually increase unintended pregnancy by encouraging sexual activity among minors rather than taking a firm line that it should be delayed until marriage. This is believed to come partly out of the “progressive” movement’s far-left ideology and partly in order to generate more demand for Planned Parenthood’s “services.”

Former President Barack Obama was adamantly pro-abortion, but even a 2016 report from his Office of Adolescent Health found that, across six different Planned Parenthood affiliate partners, more than 3,500 students, and 87 schools, a Planned Parenthood-backed “sex-ed” program left students “significantly more likely than controls to have ever been pregnant or to have caused a pregnancy.”