Because the little beavers in the Trump Administration have been busily chewing away the underpinnings of democracy, all sorts of other policies have been changed while I was yelling about something else.
Thus, I missed that Trump has stopped all funding for broad-based sex education programs which were intended to reduce teenage pregnancy rates and also abortion rates. The closing of one such program was in today's news:
Colorado Youth Matter received 75 percent of its funding from the federal grant, about $750,000 per year. The grant had been scheduled to run through 2020, but the Trump administration ended the federal Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program grants as of next summer for all of the 84 organizations around the country that received them. The administration cited concerns about whether the programs were effective, a rationale critics have questioned.Compare that to this report from last May:
Not only would President Donald Trump’s proposed 2018 budget harm women and families by barring Planned Parenthood from receiving any federal government funding, it would also invest $277 million in abstinence-only education, which has been shown to be a completely ineffective means of sexual education.
Both bolds in these quotes are mine.
The lessons here are several:
First, the Trump administration uses weak excuses which are not based on evidence to cut any program that the Obama administration instituted, and any programs which benefit women and/or minorities at all.
I've read that various policies are "too cumbersome" or "too costly" or "possibly ineffective," where no actual cost-benefit analyses are performed. We are never told how many people are inconvenienced by those horrible safety regulations, for example, or why it's too cumbersome to keep earnings data separately by demographic category or why broad-based sex education is just deemed to be ineffective, while abstinence-only education doesn't require any proof of effectiveness at all.
All that is irritating and demonstrates contempt toward the voters. And major intellectual laziness.
Second, the so-called Christian "pro-lifers" who voted for Trump (the thrice-married adulterous pussygrabber) don't really want to reduce abortions via the reduction of teenage pregnancies. They are for the ineffective abstinence-only education and against any wider sex education, even if that actually did end up reducing abortions (as it seems to have done in other countries).
This suggests that they want the sluts to suffer for their fornication by becoming pregnant.*
Third, this is yet another example of shifting money from people who probably didn't vote for Trump to people who probably did vote for Trump. The Graham-Cassidy health insurance bill, initially crafted by the right-wing religious radical, Rick Santorum, is another example of that. The blue states are intended to suffer in that plan.
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* A lot of abstinence-only education sounds similarly hell-firish: Sex is yucky, disgusting and dangerous, so better save it to marriage with the person you love best. Besides, premarital sex turns women into used tissues or something similarly gross in the minds of fundies, though men who have premarital sex can still be playahs.