Life News
Planned Parenthood wants taxpayers’ money, and it’s doing everything it can to keep it.
On Friday, it filed another lawsuit against the Trump administration, this time challenging a Department of Health and Human Services decision to prioritize sexual risk avoidance programs instead of the abortion giant’s risky sex education programs, Courthouse News reports.
The Trump administration cut millions of dollars in Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program grants to the abortion chain in 2017 after evidence showed the program was not effective. However, the abortion chain is suing to stop those cuts as well in a separate lawsuit.
The new Planned Parenthood lawsuit claims HHS is wrong to prioritize abstinence-based sex education programs over its own.
Here’s more from the AP:
The lawsuits were filed in federal courts in New York City and Spokane, Washington, by four different Planned Parenthood affiliates covering New York City and the states of Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Nebraska and Washington.
Planned Parenthood says the lawsuits are intended to protect the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program from what they termed ineffective abstinence-only-until-marriage curriculums.
“Young people have the right to the information and skills they need to protect their health,” Dawn Laguens said in a press release, vice president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “The Trump-Pence administration is trying to impose their abstinence-only agenda on young people across the country.”
Health and Human Services Department spokesman Mark Vafiades previously told the New York Times there is very little evidence that the TPP programs are working.
Vafiades said the evidence of a positive impact is “very weak,” and the Trump administration wants to support science-based programs that provide “youth with the information and skills they need to avoid the many risks associated with teen sex.”
In 2017, the Office of Adolescent Health issued two reports evaluating the program. Of the 38 programs examined in the report, only one “reported a long-term reduction in overall rates of teen sexual activity. Nearly all of the evaluations found no long-term difference in sexual activity, use of contraception, or pregnancy rates between students enrolling in these programs and students in control groups,” Dr. Michael New, a professor at Ave Maria University, wrote in 2017.
HHS also pointed to research indicating that 73 percent of the TPP programs under the Obama administration either had a negative impact or none at all.
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