The Hormone Dystopia Continues
Right-wing dogma is quietly finding its way into real-time policy choices.
The Trump administration’s hormonal obsession rages on. Last week, The Contrarian covered a new rule about access to testosterone in the military. Now we are on to federal funding recommendations for teen pregnancy prevention and sex education programs — which will now be required to address menstrual tracking, hormonal production, and the MAHA-coined “reproductive goals counseling.”
New grant application terms put forth by the Office of Population Affairs are placing more focus on teaching teens to plan for pregnancy rather than prevent it. The New York Times and an array of local outlets recently reported on several organizations offering evidence-based programming that have lost millions of dollars for failing to align with that goal. One group, Healthy Futures of Texas, reported nearly $2 million of its federally grant-funded programming was cut, including for teens in foster care. Another, Children’s Aid in New York City, said their Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program grant, set to be renewed through 2028, was abruptly canceled. The Times featured Fact Forward, which serves teens in North and South Carolina and lost $1.6 million. It is among 53 grantees out of 67 that have had their federal funding terminated for providing content that “normalizes sexual activity for minors.”
Congress created the $100 million Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program in 2010, which has been renewed with bipartisan support ever since. In the 16 years since its launch, the teen birthrate in the United States plummeted by more than 70 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Much of the drop in the overall national birthrate is because of the dramatic shift in teen birth rates. A report from the Pew Research Center credits a combination of comprehensive sex education, better access to contraception, and general behavioral trends around sex (which Gen Z apparently isn’t all that into).
Most would consider a decline in teen pregnancy good news. Not this pronatalist crew, led by the White House’s own “fertilization president.” Recall in April, when the news broke, Fox News senior medical analyst Marc Siegel remarked on air: “We still have 3.6 million births a year, but the problem is teens and young adults…. We’re telling people that are young not to have babies, to wait until they’re in a more stable life situation, more financially secure.” Katie Miller, spouse of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, complained on social media of “a crisis fueled by delayed motherhood, toxic career-first culture, and the lie pushed by Legacy Media and feminists that kids are a burden.”
All that dogma is quietly finding its way into real-time policy choices. Going forward, to be eligible for federal funding, every applicant must pass an “alignment review” with agency priorities, a process conducted by political appointees and that is part of a government-wide initiative the Office of Management and Budget is attempting to implement.
For teen pregnancy prevention programs, in particular, this means “affirm[ing] marriage and parenthood as meaningful and value components of adult life,” as well as offering counseling on “reproductive goals” and “promot[ing] optimal health through an upstream, preventive approach by emphasizing root-cause understanding of chronic health conditions that may impact overall health and fertility” — both of which are part of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA vision for “restorative reproductive medicine” as an alternative to IVF.
Federal guidelines for body literacy feature sex-segregated modules in anatomy and reproduction that are equally dogmatic: girls’ instruction about phases of the menstrual cycle must recognize ovulation as the “central event and primary indicator of hormonal health and fertility” (hence creating runway for verbiage like “ovarian suppression” to undermine forms of contraception); boys are to be taught about the role of testosterone (but, of course!), as well as “the physiology of arousal and how repeated or artificially stimulated arousal” — a.k.a. masturbation — “may affect neural development and behavior over time.”
Are you there, Judy Blume? We need you more than ever!
Readers, please know that I am among the biggest supporters of hormonal fluency and have long advocated for and written publicly about the value of menstrual cycle education — though I view it as an essential antidote to Dobbs, given the dismal state of knowledge most Americans have about how, when, and why weeks of pregnancy are measured. That ignorance extends exponentially to our public officials; read here how Texas Gov. Greg Abbott grotesquely missed the mark in a public speech when Texas enacted its diabolical abortion bounty hunter law, S.B. 8, in September 2021. Truly, it is a matter of life-saving self-defense to accurately understand the mechanics of the menstrual cycle in this era in which pregnancy is controlled by the state and can be criminalized and when maternal mortality rates remain sky high.
But context and intent surely matter — and these particular teen pregnancy guidelines are a Heritage Foundation fever dream. Among the national organizations suing to stop them are the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) and Democracy Forward. Says Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, “This is a backdoor, ideologically driven effort disguised as education, defying Congress’s clear directive that these grants support medically accurate, age-appropriate, evidence-based programs.” SIECUS further warns that these new funding guidelines are paving the way for crisis pregnancy centers to apply for and receive federal dollars.
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The dystopia continues. Thank goodness for The Contrarian, which keeps sounding the alarm, fueling the fight forward, and creating community in pursuit of democracy. That surely includes all the kids who need fact-based sex education, too.
Jennifer Weiss-Wolf is executive director of the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center at NYU School of Law. She also leads strategy and partnerships at Ms. Magazine.
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