This story originally appeared in New York Focus, a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York. Sign up for their newsletter here.
Over the past two and a half years, 17-year-old Ana Ortega has visited dozens of high school classrooms across the South Bronx and Harlem, leading conversations about consent, healthy dating behaviors, and safe sex with students her own age.
“A lot of teenagers don’t want to talk to adults because they don’t want to be judged,” she said.
Ortega is a peer mentor with the teen pregnancy prevention initiative at Children’s Aid, which provides sexual health education to New York City youth in schools, community centers, and foster care facilities. But parts of the initiative will soon come to an end. Earlier this summer, the Trump administration launched an effort to gut and reshape an Obama-era federal program designed to prevent teen pregnancy, which Children’s Aid had relied on for over 10 years to provide sexual education in vulnerable communities.
As part of that overhaul, the federal Department of Health and Human Services notified the nonprofit that it was terminating its grant effective immediately, two years before it was set to expire. “The reason provided was that the initiative no longer aligned with HHS’s priorities,” said Rhonda Braxton, a vice president at Children’s Aid.
The organization is among three New York grantees that are losing over $4.3 million in annual federal funding to support evidence-based sexual health education for over 19,000 young people each year.
The funding cuts come at what reproductive health advocates describe as a critical time. Although the national teen birth rate remains near a historic low, teen pregnancy rates in New York state and New York City rose between 2021 and 2023 — the first increase in two decades, according to the latest available state and city data. (A vast body of research has linked teen pregnancy and birth to difficulty completing high school, pursuing higher education, and getting well-paying jobs.)
Of 67 federal Teen Pregnancy Prevention grants nationwide, all but 14 have been terminated as HHS shifts its focus to abstinence-based initiatives.
Last week, members of New York’s congressional delegation sent a letter to HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. urging him to reinstate funding to the three programs that lost it.
Braxton said Children’s Aid’s initiative relies on building trust with youth, and goes beyond pregnancy prevention to address positive body image, sexually transmitted infections, and healthy decision-making.
Now, Braxton said, “young people are losing those trusted relationships in an era of misinformation and mistrust.”
Children’s Aid is looking for more funding to make up for the loss of the $936,700 annual grant. If it can’t find it, the nonprofit will have to eliminate most of its programming, including many of its peer mentors and sex ed at the city’s Children’s Center, a temporary intake facility for children awaiting placement in foster care. (Youth in foster care experience higher rates of teen pregnancy and childbirth than their peers, research shows.)
In their letter to HHS, lawmakers wrote that Children’s Aid was the only organization providing sexual health education “to a highly vulnerable population that may be at increased risk of trafficking, sexual abuse, and unplanned teen pregnancy.”
HHS also canceled funding for NYC Teens Connection, a city program that partners with schools, foster care agencies, and juvenile justice programs to improve teens’ decision-making skills and connect them with local health clinics. Since 2010, the initiative has worked with over 400 organizations and served nearly 130,000 teenagers across the five boroughs.
It’s now set to lose $3.9 million in funding over the next two years, putting 15 staff members at risk of losing their jobs. New York City Health Department spokesperson Rachel Vick said in a statement that the initiative and others like it have helped contribute to a 79% decrease in teen pregnancies in New York City over the last three decades.
“Teenagers want truth and honesty from the adults in their lives, and programs that center the real-world experience of the young people they serve,” Vick said.
There were over 20,000 fewer teen pregnancies in New York City in 2023 than in 2000. But lawmakers and advocates say that post-pandemic increases in the city’s teen pregnancy rate underscore the need for comprehensive sex ed: Between 2022 and 2023, teen pregnancy rates increased across all boroughs other than Brooklyn. It’s unclear what exactly drove the trend, but the city’s 2023 Youth Risk Behavior survey reflected an increase in the number of sexually active students not using contraception since 2021.
The cuts also eliminate $1.4 million annually for the HOPE Buffalo program, run by health care nonprofit Cicatelli Associates. The program helped drive a 36 percent decline in teen pregnancy rates across high-poverty Buffalo neighborhoods from 2015 to 2020, according to the group.
Cicatelli Associates did not respond to a request for comment.
Meredith Ouderkirk, director of public affairs for Planned Parenthood of Central and Western New York, which partnered with Cicatelli to offer the program, said that because New York is run by Democrats, people may assume that everyone has access to comprehensive sex ed. But the state’s sex ed mandate is limited and gives school districts significant discretion, she said, making a child’s access to evidence-based sex education dependent on where they live.
The state Department of Health, which does not currently receive funding through the Teen Pregnancy Prevention program, said it may be able to fill gaps left by the federal cuts through its own initiatives that fund community-based projects.
Reproductive health organizations are less optimistic.
“If this changes the ability to reach even one young person and that results in an unintended pregnancy, that can be life-changing and devastating,” Ouderkirk said.
