A few weeks ago, Rena Dixon, the head of Fact Forward, a South Carolina nonprofit that offers adolescent health and sex education classes, got a letter from the Trump administration with crushing news. The government was terminating the organization’s $1.6 million grant from a federal program to reduce teen pregnancies, effective immediately.
The administration’s priorities, it said, do not align with “content that encourages, normalizes or promotes sexual activity for minors.” The move is the latest in a campaign that began in the first Trump administration to defund or overhaul the 16-year-old, $100 million initiative. Courts blocked the effort in 2018, but this time the administration, which abruptly canceled 53 of the program’s 67 grants last month, has been taking steps to be on firmer legal ground. The letter from the assistant secretary for health accused Fact Forward of including lessons with “advice on making condom use more pleasurable” and discussions that normalize “use of pornography.” A video, it said, contained a “scenario of adolescents engaging in sexual activity.”
“That information was just not true,” said Dr. Dixon. The organization had never used the lessons specified, she said. The video “is about one teen telling another that she had had sex, and her friend responding, ‘That’s a big no-no!’”
The video “is about one teen telling another that she had had sex, and her friend responding, ‘That’s a big no-no!’”
Turning sex education into a Mormon values class reduces the likelihood that students will pay attention. Combined with not talking about birth control, that’s a recipe for increased teenage pregnancies, which—knowing that fascists only value women as mothers—is probably the point.