HHS Weighs Next Move in Battle Over Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program

A federal judge in Washington has dealt a setback to the Trump administration’s effort to overhaul the nation’s flagship teen pregnancy prevention program, ruling this month that the government’s push toward an abstinence-focused model is likely unlawful — but offering no immediate relief to more than two dozen states left without funding since their grants were terminated in June.Judge Christopher Cooper of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia granted a preliminary injunction on August 19 halting the Department of Health and Human Services from imposing sweeping new rules on the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, a $101 million initiative that Congress has funded on a bipartisan level for 16 years. The judge found the administration’s approach was likely arbitrary and capricious, two months after HHS abruptly terminated 53 of the program’s 67 active grants.The ruling is the latest turn in a fight pitting the administration and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. against health departments, universities, and advocacy groups who say Washington is dismantling an evidence-based program in favor of one built on ideology.For families and educators in more than two dozen states that lost funding overnight in June, the injunction is only a partial victory. Judge Cooper declined to order the terminated grants reinstated, citing uncertainty over whether his court, rather than the Court of Federal Claims, has the authority to grant that kind of relief. The grants that were canceled stay canceled unless the administration chooses to reinstate them on its own.Take away the politics, and the case turns on something more technical, whether HHS overstepped what Congress authorized when it rewrote the program’s rules.The program’s defenders say the stakes reach beyond a single funding line. For 16 years, they argue, the grants have paid for medically accurate, evidence-based curricula — taught in schools, clinics, and community centers — aimed at cutting teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections, and the risk behaviors that lead to both.“The Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program has provided critical funding to its grantees including nonprofit organizations, state and local health departments, and hospitals to implement evidence-based sexual health education,” the principal federal policy advisor at the Guttmacher Institute, Anna Bernstein, tells The New York Sun. “Rigorous research has demonstrated the program’s effectiveness at reducing sexual risk behaviors, sexually transmitted infections, and pregnancies among adolescents.”If the canceled grants are not restored, Ms. Bernstein maintains, the teenagers those programs would have reached may have nowhere to turn for reliable health information — a gap that she says hits underserved communities the hardest.The June Cuts That Upended a 16-Year-Old ProgramThe Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, housed within the HHS Office of Population Affairs, has funneled competitive grants to state health departments, universities, school districts, and nonprofits since Congress created it in 2010. Public health researchers credit it with helping drive the teen birth rate down 72 percent since 2007 and 81 percent since 1991, according to CDC data.On June 26, however, HHS terminated 53 of the program’s 67 grants, totaling roughly $67 million, two years before they were set to expire, saying the affected curricula were normalizing sexual activity for minors and were not age appropriate.The termination letters cited specific examples: the Maryland Department of Health’s curriculum included a role-play exercise in which two boys weigh whether to use condoms to prevent HIV, while Planned Parenthood California Central Coast used a lesson plan called “Love Notes,” developed by the relationship-education nonprofit the Dibble Institute, that HHS said crossed into age-inappropriate territory.Some grantees have already let staff go and are running programs this fall without the money they’d counted on. Whether or not that changes comes down to two things: what HHS decides to do about the ruling, and how fast the lawsuit moves through Judge Cooper’s courtroom.The affected grantees ranged from Planned Parenthood affiliates and Bethany Christian Services chapters to city and county health departments and university research centers in Texas, New York, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arizona, and West Virginia.In a July court filing, HHS argued that the grantees suing over the cuts had suffered nothing more than “transient economic harms,” not enough to justify blocking anything.But the cuts hit organizations mid-grant without warning.Children’s Aid, a 170-year-old New York City nonprofit, toldStateline that its nearly $1 million grant, which serves 1,200 young people annually, was terminated with no transition period. AccessMatters, a Philadelphia-based reproductive health nonprofit, called the loss extremely detrimental to teenagers who relied on its HIV and pregnancy prevention curriculum, and has since filed a formal appeal. HHS put out two new grant funding notices just days before the terminations. Future applicants would have to teach sexual risk avoidance and cut any mention of sexual orientation or gender identity. The notices also flagged health risks tied to contraception — claims plaintiffs would later dismiss as unsupported.As for where the freed-up money goes, HHS pointed to two new funding tracks: one built around fertility awareness and anatomy education, the other around something the agency is calling “reproductive goals counseling.”The reversal troubles some researchers who have studied the program’s outcomes.“The Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program was responsible for reductions in teen births. The implication is that we would likely see increases in teen fertility were the canceled grants not to be restored,” an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Nicholas Mark, tells the Sun.“The grants funded by TPPP supported evidence-based programming that had been shown in rigorous randomized trials to be effective at improving knowledge of sexual health and risky behavior. Removing that source of trusted information is likely detrimental to teens.”Mr. Mark says the turn toward abstinence-focused curricula marks a return to an earlier era of sex education built on moral rather than empirical arguments.“Unfortunately abstinence-only sex education has been known to be ineffective for some time,” he says. “But for some, moral arguments about whether teens should talk about sex with people other than their parents outweigh the importance of effectiveness.”Not everyone views the fight the same way. Some pediatricians argue the shift toward abstinence-based curricula is a health-focused correction rather than an ideological retreat.“For more than three decades, comprehensive sex education has emphasized contraceptive use while often normalizing or encouraging adolescent sexual activity, yet it has shown a low reported success rate of 15 percent,” the membership chair of the American College of Pediatricians and a member of its Scientific Policy Committee, Dr. Scott Field, tells the Sun.From his viewpoint, “sexual risk avoidance education, which the current administration supports, teaches abstinence as the only 100 percent effective way to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections.”“It also equips young people with skills to establish healthy boundaries, resist sexual pressure, and reduce the risk of victimization,” Dr. Field adds. “With a reported success rate of 47 percent, it offers a more effective, health-focused approach.”The cuts come at a time when teen pregnancy numbers have been falling. Provisional CDC data released in April found the teen birth rate for 15- to 19-year-olds fell another 7 percent in 2025, to 11.7 births per 1,000 — the lowest figure ever recorded.That decline predates the June cuts and gives both sides ammunition. Defenders of the program point to it as evidence that the funding was working; at the same time, the administration has argued the trend shows the country can keep making progress without the curricula it just defunded.A Lawsuit and an Uncertain Road AheadIn July, a coalition led by Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, and the counties of Hennepin in Minnesota and King in Washington State, filed suit, arguing HHS had violated both the appropriations law governing the program and the Administrative Procedure Act.According to the complaint, the new policy struck references to sexual orientation and gender identity and leaned on claims that plaintiffs called scientifically baseless — among them, that masturbation can affect neural development.Judge Cooper’s ruling sided with the plaintiffs on the likelihood of success, blocking the new grant criteria while the case proceeds, though it does not restore the 53 already terminated grants.The president and chief executive officer of Democracy Forward, which represents several of the plaintiffs, Skye Perryman ,said in a statement that the ruling was encouraging but that communities nationwide have yet to recover the programs they relied on for years, and that the fight to hold the administration to Congress’s evidence-based mandate continues.The administration could appeal in the coming weeks, and separate litigation over the terminated grants continues in the same courthouse. This is not the administration’s first attempt to reshape the program.HHS took similar action in 2017 during Mr. Trump’s first term, ending more than 80 grants two years early, only for courts to grant injunctions after finding the move violated federal regulations.The program has always directed the bulk of its money toward replication, with roughly three-quarters of funding under its statutory design going to organizations replicating programs already proven effective through rigorous evaluation. The remainder is reserved for testing new approaches.Congress left that structure untouched when it funded the program for fiscal 2026 in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, signed into law February 3. On the ground, the picture is mixed. Some organizations are already operating without dollars they had counted on this year, and staff have been let go. Whether any of that comes back hinges on what HHS does next and how the lawsuit plays out in the same D.C. courthouse.Parents and educators should be watching closely, Ms. Bernstein says.“If the integrity of the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program is not restored, adolescents across the country will be unable to access quality, comprehensive sexual health education,” she says.

HHS Weighs Next Move in Battle Over Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program

HHS Weighs Next Move in Battle Over Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program

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