Feds Send $2 Million to Planned Parenthood in Iowa for Sex Education

DES MOINES, Iowa – On Tuesday, the Office of Population Affairs (OPA) with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced that Planned Parenthood of the Heartland would receive a three-year sex education grant totaling $2,053,383. 

The grant is part of the first tier of a funding program called “Optimally Changing the Map for Teen Pregnancy through Replication of Programs.”

OPA said funded grantees would aim to significantly impact and improve adolescents’ optimal health and reduce teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. They are to do this through the “saturation of communities with the greatest needs and disparities by using a systems thinking approach to replicate effective programs with fidelity.” 

They awarded a total of $56,300,000 for 49 new grants. The grants start on July 1 for a period of three years.

This is not the first sex-education grant award Planned Parenthood of the Heartland received. They wrapped-up a similar three-year grant through the Office of Adolescent Health (which recently merged into OPA). They recently had a grant funding the same work worth $965,988 a year doing work in Woodbury, Pottawattamie, Mills, and Page counties in Iowa and Dakota and Douglas counties in Nebraska.

This is evidence that while the Trump administration has reduced funding to Planned Parenthood, they have not completely defunded the abortion giant and their funding supports Planned Parenthood’s efforts to target adolescents.

The FAMiLY Leader pointed out in an article today that Planned Parenthood’s track record with sex education is one of failure. Two accessible federal studies demonstrate lackluster results. 

In an HHS-funded report, “Evaluation of the Teen Outreach Program® in The Pacific Northwest,” researchers from Philliber Research & Evaluation in 2016 studied the Northwest Coalition for Adolescent Health’s Teen Outreach Program (TOP), comprised of six Planned Parenthood affiliate partners.

They found that while TOP “had an impact in the desirable direction on males causing pregnancies.” It also “had an impact in the undesirable direction on females becoming pregnant.”

In a 2018 report by Abt Associates prepared for the Office of Adolescent Health and Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at HHS, researchers noted slight short-term positive outcomes, but that they diminished over time. Looking at Planned Parenthood of Greater Orlando’s results in Appendix B of the report, their results were negligible compared to the Hennepin County Department of Public Health in Minnesota. 

“We should recognize the obvious pattern. The last organization government should pay to prevent teen pregnancies is Planned Parenthood,” said Daniel Sunne, policy liaison with The FAMiLY Leader.