The Admin’s Creepy Pronatalist Agenda Has Come for the Nation’s Teenagers

The Trump administration’s Gilead-coded fuckery—and profoundly creepy obsession with teen pregnancies dropping—continues. 

Grant applications for the coming year’s Teen Pregnancy Prevention (TPP) programs are due on Thursday, but many organizations this time around are facing some new and ghoulish caveats. They must adhere to the administration’s newest guidelines, which focus less so on sex education—and more so on “body literacy,” “abstinence,” and “reproductive goals counseling.” Oh, and—brace yourselves—fertility and marriage. Under his eye, and all that. 

The new guidelines come as one of the administration’s latest efforts to enforce its pronatalist agenda, kicking off when the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Population Affairs last month suddenly canceled 53 of the program’s 67 grants, thus slashing about $66 million in grants across the nation. Funds that are meant to support teens, teach them to avoid pregnancy, and provide imperative guidance relating to sexually transmitted diseases.

“Attempting to remake the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program into a funding stream for conservative ideology not only flies in the face of the congressional appropriators who have funded this evidence-based program every year since FY 2010, but also denies young people the high-quality sexual health education they need and deserve,” Rachel Fey, interim co-CEO of Power to Decide, a reproductive well-being organization, said in a statement shared with Jezebel last month, after grantees received notices of termination from the Department of Health. 

Eliminating comprehensive sex ed was one of the goals of Project 2025—the conservative blueprint and fascist handbook Trump once swore he knew nothing about. As such, anti-abortion activists have been gagging to swoop in and change the curricula to stigmatize abortion, as well as mislead teens on fetal development. The biggest way we’ve seen this manifest has been through “Baby Olivia” laws, referring to an anti-abortion propaganda video created by Live Action, which starts off with an animation of a sperm swimming to an egg with a narrator saying, “This is the moment that life begins.”

Ugh. And don’t even get me started on the baby-think-it-over dolls.

TPP operates as one of four federal programs exclusively focusing on teenage pregnancy, with the other three being the Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP), the Title V Sexual Risk Avoidance Education Program, and the General Departmental Sexual Risk Avoidance Education Program. The program was first created in 2010 by Congress, under the Consolidated Appropriations Act, which stated that it—among others—must be “proven effective through rigorous evaluation to reduce teenage pregnancy, behavioral risk factors underlying teenage pregnancy, or other associated risk factors.” It’s since been considered widely successful—albeit much to the, again, creepy chagrin of MAGA. Because after the CDC published a report in April saying the U.S. birth rate is at a record low after the teen birth rate dropped 7%, pronatalist conservatives… started losing their shit.

Still, for 16 years after it was created, TPP was regularly supported as a bipartisan issue. Trump, however, has long opposed it. In 2018, during his first term, he attempted to overhaul it—but was later blocked by courts. Upon returning to office, he again attempted to do the same—though he was again blocked in October. Per the New York Times, the administration this time around is thus taking “steps to be on firmer legal ground.” Great!

“There is a long history of the Trump Administration attempting to destroy the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program,” added Fey. “Now, they are at it again, reaching into the pockets of communities around the country and stripping away a source of high- quality, evidence-based sexual health education–and in doing so, harming the pipeline for growing our knowledge about what programs work best to help young people.”