By admin 
Like many millennials, I grew up at the peak of the American abstinence education movement and the American evangelical obsession with virginity. Sex education curriculum across the country compared sexually active women to chewed-up gum, manhandled roses, and cups of spit, often culminating with a teacher holding up a saliva-filled glass or broken flower and asking, “Who would want this?” (“People want to marry a virgin, just like they want a virgin toothbrush or stick of gum,” read one guide). More than 80 percent of programs contained information that was either seriously misleading or straight-up wrong, including that HIV can be contracted by sweat and tears and that condoms are ineffective. Christian youth groups pushed True Love Waits and sold “purity rings” for fathers to buy their daughters to eventually be changed out for a wedding ring, in one of the more literal representations of patriarchal control over women’s bodies I’ve seen to date. Like millions of other teen and adolescent girls in the ’90s and early 2000s, I too took a virginity pledge well before I could even conceptualize why sex might be appealing.
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These should have been left in the dustbin of history as the Bad Old Days of culture-war sex ed. Nearly all Americans have sex before marriage, and fewer are getting married at all. Teen pregnancy rates have hit record lows. It is very, very clear that abstinence-until-marriage programs do not work, and for a while, it seemed that even pro-abstinence conservatives had declared defeat, while victorious liberals with the science on their side could go forth and teach young people that abstinence is a valid choice, but contraception and condoms are useful, too.
This was premature. Those of us who thought abstinence education couldn’t get worse than the “girls are either virgins or used cups full of spit” model couldn’t have imagined that the Republican Party would morph from one in which the Moral Majority had significant sway into one in which the conservative majority ceded morality all together, and “traditional family” sexists would make common cause with aggressive manosphere misogynists. Under Donald Trump, abstinence is back, except this time, it’s not discouraging teen pregnancies—it’s pushing those teens to forgo contraception, get married, and plan their lives around having babies. And they’re stripping money from the programs that sent teen pregnancy rates tumbling to put toward those that tell teens that actually, reproduction is the goal.
Under new Trump administration directives, teen pregnancy prevention programs will not receive federal grants unless they go backward and teach that abstinence is the only way to prevent teen pregnancy. And that isn’t all: The Trump funding guidelines make clear that these programs must effectively discourage hormonal contraception use, and must tell young people (wrongly) that contraceptives are potentially dangerous, cover up underlying health issues, and short-circuit vital bodily functions. And they’ve gotten smarter than the used-gum, spit-cup abstinence proponents of my youth. Instead of explicitly saying what they’re saying, they’re coding their aims—breeding distrust in contraception, pushing teens toward early marriage, enforcing traditional gender roles—in language that is a hybrid of anti-abortion talking points and Make America Healthy Again pseudoscience.
There is a reason that, by the mid-2000s, public support for abstinence education was waning: Researchers were finding that abstinence-only programs didn’t actually lead to more people waiting for marriage to have sex (abstinence-only programs did, however, seem to correlate with and more teen pregnancies). When Republican John McCain chose conservative Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, her 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, was pregnant—and as Bristol raked in six-figure payments for promoting abstinence while simultaneously conceding abstinence was “not really realistic at all,” she and her family became something of an avatar for failed Republican policies on teen sex.
The Obama era seemed to end the pitched battles over teaching abstinence, and only abstinence, in schools. And as sex ed evolved to include abstinence and information about safer sex, and as long-acting contraceptives became much more widely available to teens, teen pregnancy rates plummeted. It was during this era that the federal government began funding teen pregnancy prevention programs, and they have proven remarkably effective. In 1990, 1 in 10 teenage girls got pregnant, and about half of those girls gave birth. Today, the teen birth rate is closer to 1 in 100.
That changed under Trump and the return of conservatives to power. He increased spending on abstinence education during his first term, but it was not a top priority. Now, though, the reality that American women are not reproducing as often as we used to in the past is sending various parts of the MAGA coalition into a tizzy, from the birth-rate-obsessed tech bros to the Heritage Foundation religious conservatives to the men who want the MAHA moms to dedicate even more time to raising even more homeschooled organic-produce-fed babies. The most significant factor driving down American fertility rates? Far fewer American teenagers and early-20s women are getting pregnant.
For all of the vicious debates over sex ed in the ’90 and 2000s, those pushing abstinence and those promoting comprehensive health education could largely agree on one thing: We wanted teen pregnancies to decrease. And while we had different ways of getting to that goal, we sold teenagers on the idea that they should delay pregnancy so that they could accomplish their goals. For conservatives, one of those goals was virginal marriage; not so for liberals. But for liberals and conservatives alike, there were other aims, too, including a high school and maybe even college degree, and a stable job to follow it.
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This was always one of the trickiest parts of the American teen pregnancy crisis: Many teenagers were getting pregnant not just for lack of contraception, but because they didn’t see a particularly good reason to wait. That many girls now do want to wait to have children and act on that isn’t just a public health victory, it’s a feminist one, too—more opportunities for girls and women have translated into more girls and women who take those opportunities, and have children when they’re ready.
But of course, the math on this isn’t so hard to understand: If you have your first child at 16, you have many more years to have additional children, on purpose or by accident or somewhere in between. If you have your first at 27, or 35, there are simply fewer reproductive years to add to your brood. Delayed childbearing typically translates into fewer children per woman. And so while conservative groups once pushed young women to delay childbearing until they found stability and adulthood, now some are changing their tune. If you’re a teenage girl and want to have children someday, they suggest, you should start thinking about it now— and take steps to make it happen, although of course within the confines of early marriage.
You can see this view in the Trump administration’s overhauled on teen pregnancy programs. That guidance suggests that teenage girls in particular are illiterate about their own bodies, and as a result make poor health decisions. “For example,” the report says, “many do not receive comprehensive information about the side effects associated with widely prescribed medications. This leads to a healthcare approach that prioritizes pain relief and symptom suppression over rootcause evaluation and treatment for reproductive health concerns for long-term health.” Which “widely prescribed medications” might the report be talking about? The report does not use the word “contraception” even once, but does say that instruction on women’s health “must also include an overview of approaches to managing menstrual health concerns, including the advantages and disadvantages of ovarian suppression compared to approaches that address root causes.” The medications that cause ovarian suppression and have effectively relieved menstrual pain and helped millions of women to manage endometriosis, polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, and ovarian cysts? Contraception. And while the document nods to the advantages and disadvantages of contraception, it also makes clear that educators must emphasize the disadvantages through the “recognition of ovulation as the central event and primary indicator of hormonal health and fertility.”
While girls under the new Trump directives are taught to forgo contraceptives and warned that using the most effective methods of family planning might compromise their health and their reproductive goals, boys are essentially told to stop jerking off as much (male reproductive health programs should “provide developmentally appropriate strategies for managing spontaneous arousal in ways that support self regulation, health, and future fertility”).
Core to the new guidance is the idea that teenagers should start planning childbearing ASAP. “Recipients must incorporate reproductive goals counseling as a core component of program implementation,” the new guidelines read. “Reproductive goals counseling should be developmentally appropriate and designed to help adolescents reflect on their future aspirations related to relationships, childbearing, and family formation.” The document emphasizes marriage as a requirement for sex, and gives a nod to the “success sequence” of completing school, finding gainful employment, getting married, and then having children. But in recent years, groups like the Heritage Foundation have created proposals that retool the success sequence to incentize young women to marry early, consider forgoing college, and drop out of the workforce to get married and have babies. That proposal notes that “the proliferation of birth control [and] more prospects for women to receive higher education and work outside the home” are among the factors that “conspire to reduce birth rates.” One change, Heritage argues, is to move away from the goal of educating young people (and especially young women), and instead frame education as one path to marriage and childbearing. “While getting an education, establishing a career, and saving money can contribute to stable family life, the culture treats these typically as goals in themselves and not as preparation or assistance for having a happy, healthy marriage and family life,” the Heritage report says. “The resultant message is to focus on oneself and find meaning through career success.” This is eerily similar to the new Trump administration abstinence guidance, which requires reproductive-goals counseling to frame marriage and reproduction as the goal in the service of which all other choices are made.
The first iteration of abstinence-only education was a billion-dollar failure. Its encore under this Trump administration is somehow even worse: A dumb idea that has mutated into a dangerous one.
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