When Barack Obama unveiled his Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative back in 2010, it looked fairly benign. According the HHS program description:

A wide range of evidence-based programs are eligible for these funds. Grants are available to funding medically accurate and age appropriate programs that reduce teen pregnancy. Of the $100 million appropriated, $75 million must be used for programs that have been proven effective through rigorous evaluation to reduce teenage pregnancy, behavioral risk factors underlying teenage pregnancy, or other associated risk factors. The remaining $25 million must be used for research and demonstration grants to develop, replicate, refine, and test additional strategies for preventing teenage pregnancy. Funds are to support reasonable program purposes including staffing, travel, supplies, and services. Grant funds may not be used for: Building alterations or renovations; Construction; Fund-raising activities; Job training; Political education and lobbying; Vocational rehabilitation.

There is little here that is truly objectionable. While teen pregnancy is not really a problem, per se, we usually use that term as shorthand for out-of-wedlock teen pregnancy (because we’d never, ever want to insinuate there was anything wrong with having kids out of wedlock) which is a problem in that it virtually guarantees mother and child will be locked in poverty.

To a certain extent this program looks like a metaphor for most actions by the Obama administration: pick out a non-problem, hype it, throw money at it, and claim success if nothing happens or blame Republicans if the trend line changes negatively.

But a funny thing happened on the way to implementation. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is one of the federal partners managing this program and handing out the baksheeh grant money. This is how CDC describes the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative:

The purpose of this program is to demonstrate the effectiveness of innovative, multicomponent, communitywide initiatives in reducing rates of teen pregnancy and births in communities with the highest rates, with a focus on reaching African American and Latino/Hispanic youth aged 15–19 years.

The program model list five “key components” than must exist. This is component number three:

Component 3: Increasing Youth Access to Contraceptive and Reproductive Health Care Services

Ensuring clinical partners are providing teen friendly, culturally competent reproductive health care services that are easily accessible to all youth in the community, and establishing linkages between teen pregnancy prevention program partners and clinics that serve at risk youth from the target community.

See what happened there? A program designed to prevent generic teen pregnancy was subtly mutated to a programed designed to reduce pregnancy AND births focusing on black and Hispanic girls.

Vince Coglianese at the Daily Caller contacted the CDC to be sure he was reading what he thought he was reading:

The Daily Caller discovered the abortion-suggesting language during a routine analysis of government publications.

The CDC says the distinction is one without a difference.

“On the website for the initiative there is no distinction between the two,” CDC spokeswoman Renee Brown-Bryant wrote in an email to TheDC.

The Daily Caller goes on to point out that at least one of the program’s national partners, Advocate for Youth, advocates for abortion and one of the pilot sites, that in Hartford, CT, is run in conjunction with Planned Parenthood. A little digging also draws your attention to the pilot site run by the Family Planning Council of Southeastern Pennsylvania

The Family Planning Council (FPC) aims to reduce teen birth rates 10% by 2015 in the predominately African American West Philadelphia community.

which is clearly in the business of providing abortion referrals.

As CNSNews reported, we’ve already reached the point where abortions among black women in NYC outnumber live births

The numbers show that in 2012, there were 31,328 induced terminations (abortions) among non-Hispanic black women in New York City. That same year, there were 24,758 live births for non-Hispanic black women in New York City. There were 6,570 more abortions than live births of black children.

In total, there were 73,815 abortions, which means the 31,328 black babies aborted comprised 42.4% of the total abortions.

For Hispanic women, there were 22,917 abortions in New York City in 2012, which is 31% of the total abortions.

abortionBlack and Hispanic abortions combined, 54,245 babies, is 73% of the total abortions in the Big Apple in 2012.

If you look at Table 1 of the NYC Health Department report titled Summary of Vital Statistics 2012: Pregnancy Outcomes (page 6) the same applies to Hispanic women younger than 30.

While the goal of reducing unwed pregnancies, in any age group, is laudable, focusing the attention of the federal government on minority communities is fraught with ethical questions. When the goal ceases to be lowering the pregnancy rate and becomes lowering the birth rate and abortion is used as a tool to achieve than end then the program becomes evil on its face and as racist in its impact as anything the KKK ever dreamed of.