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During his first term, Donald Trump sought to slash hundreds of millions of dollars from federal programs to prevent teenage pregnancy, despite overwhelming evidence of their effectiveness.
Now, Trump’s nominee to serve as assistant Health and Human Services secretary, Dr. Brian Christine, is offering new reasons to worry about the fate of such efforts.
An Alabama urologist who’s promoted “corrective care” for transgender children (a widely decried version of conversion therapy), Christine would fit in with the rest of Trump’s Cabinet, which is already rife with conspiracy theorists and extremists. Christine has claimed masculinity in the U.S. is “being attacked” and that trans people are “pawns” of liberals who want to subvert “traditional gender roles” in a challenge to “traditional theology.” On another podcast he said “society works best when men and women are fulfilling their roles, when they are doing what they’re supposed to do, raising children and propagating the species,” which Christine called “the natural and moral law.”
During Christine’s confirmation hearing Wednesday, Sen. Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland pressed him on his comments about gender roles, as well as his stance on efforts to combat teen pregnancy, which Alsobrooks said have helped curb teen pregnancy in Christine’s home state of Alabama. Alsobrooks said she was asking because, as assistant HHS secretary, Christine would be responsible for “implementing policies that uplift health issues for women in the United States.”
Christine said he supports women or men choosing whatever career path they want “but my main goal is gonna be to make America healthier again by supporting Secretary Kennedy and supporting our president.”
When Alsobrooks pressed Christine on whether he supports federal grants for anti-pregnancy programs, the nominee answered repeatedly that he thinks such efforts should be left to “the purview of the parents.” (Of course, if parental guidance alone were an effective means of curbing teen pregnancy, federal programs wouldn’t be necessary in the first place; not to mention that the position assumes parents are both available and well-equipped to provide such guidance.)
Consider this in light of the federal complaint filed last year by three Republican attorneys general who claimed that allowing minors under state guardianship (such as foster children) to obtain abortion drugs injured the state by “depressing expected birth rates for teenaged mothers,” thus affecting congressional representation and federal funding, as legal blogging website Balls and Strikes reported. This and the urgent anti-immigrant rhetoric from some conservatives about their desire to raise the birthrate — along with remarks from right-wing influencers who have focused on discouraging younger women from using birth control — certainly raises the question of whether Republicans are genuinely invested in curbing teenage pregnancy.
And if Christine is confirmed — despite rhetoric that makes him sound like a character from “The Handmaid’s Tale” — he’ll be in position to undermine the government’s broadly successful prevention efforts.