Trump Appointee In Office Overseeing Sex Ed Programs Is A Major Abstinence Advocate
Valerie Huber has comprehensive sex education advocates scared.
The Trump administration’s latest Department of Health and Human Services appointee has a long history of working against comprehensive sexual health education.
Valerie Huber was appointed as the chief of staff to Don Wright, the assistant secretary for health, an HHS spokesman confirmed. Wright’s office oversees the Office of Adolescent Health, which funds pregnancy prevention programs across the country.
Huber has spent decades promoting abstinence-based education programs. Until recently, she served as the president and CEO of a group called Ascend, formerly called the National Abstinence Education Association, or NAEA. It describes itself as a “sexual risk avoidance” organization dedicated to encouraging abstinence until marriage.
Huber’s advocacy for this organization flies in the face of research showing that comprehensive sex education is the most effective way to prevent teen pregnancy.
Ascend purports on its website to be inclusive, including of gay teens, and open about the benefits of contraception. But the organization has also promoted curricula that emphasize old-fashioned, sexist ideas.
As executive director of the NAEA in 2012, Huber was quoted in a press release promoting an “abstinence-centered” curriculum from another organization called Choosing the Best. Choosing the Best’s CEO, Bruce Cook, served as chairman of the NAEA at the time.
A passage from the teacher guide for that curriculum, provided to HuffPost, tells the story of a knight who gets upset after the princess he is trying to save instructs him on the best way to save her. It reads:
“He never returned to the princess. Instead, he lived happily ever after in the village, and eventually married the maiden ... Moral of the story: Occasional assistance may be all right, but too much will lessen a man’s confidence or even turn him away from his princess.”
A different abstinence-based curriculum provided to HuffPost ― from an organization Trump Appointee In Office Overseeing Sex Ed Programs Is A Major Abstinence Advocate | HuffPost: