September 2015
The UUWF responded to and signed onto a letter to chairpersons and ranking members of the House and Senate Committees on Appropriations, urging them to restore or increase spending on key adolescent sexual health programs. We joined dozens of state and national teen pregnancy and AIDS prevention and treatment organizations in asking that funding be restored for the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program (TPP), which has served over half a million young people in the past four years; that funding continue for the Division of Adolescent and Sexual Health (DASH), a school-based program; and that funding be eliminated for Competitive Abstinence Education Programs, as data have found them to be ineffective in helping teens abstain from sexual activity.
The letter pointed out that while the current federal investment in adolescent sexual health promotion programs “is an important step in the right direction, much remains to be done to strengthen, enhance, and expand these efforts.”