Drew Gibson is a freelance writer and a policy associate at AIDS United in Washington, D.C. You can follow him on Twitter at @SuppressThis or visit his blog "Virally Suppressed," which covers a multitude of issues related to public health and social justice.
During the first 15 months of the Trump administration, HIV advocates have found themselves in a state of perpetual defense, always on guard against the next salvo of attacks on evidence-based and inclusive public health policy from administration officials who are diametrically opposed to the very offices they serve. Being forced to maintain such a position for so extensive a period, the question naturally arises of just how long the center can hold -- at what point the inertia of institutional ignorance will become too much to bear and the hemorrhaging of knowledgeable public health officials and loss of effective, federally funded programs will begin causing irrevocable harm to people living with and affected by HIV.
This question of when exactly the levees will break under the torrent of misinformation and mendacity of the Trump administration and sweep away the health and well-being of vulnerable populations might at first blush seem largely theoretical; however, it is anything but. Take, for instance, the Trump administration's repeated attacks on reproductive and sexual health programs, particularly around family planning and comprehensive sexual education. In a cruel, yet wholly foreseeable irony, our 45th president -- a man who has been accused of sexual assault by more than 20 women, is on his third marriage, and is currently being sued by an adult film actress with whom he likely had an affair shortly after his current wife gave birth to his youngest son -- has appointed a cadre of militant abstinence-only, anti-abortion, anti-contraception crusaders to positions of leadership within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
This group, led by recently appointed acting deputy assistant secretary for population affairs Valerie Huber, has done everything in its power to roll back the objectively successful, evidence-based sexual education and family planning programs implemented by the Obama administration and replace them with programming centered on "sexual risk avoidance," which is essentially a rebranded form of abstinence-only education.
Huber and her pro abstinence-only peers at HHS have already tried -- and fortunately, failed -- to eliminate the Obama-era Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, which played a significant role in reducing teen pregnancy by 41% between 2010 and 2016. However, they have been successful in instituting major changes to the funding process for the Title X Family Planning Program by emphasizing a preference for organizations that do not "normalize sexual risk behaviors," omitting any mention of birth control, and providing Huber with the final say on who receives the $286 million in family planning funding, a frightening prospect given her background. Read more via the Body