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Like many millennials, I grew up at the peak of the American abstinence education movement and the American evangelical obsession with virginity. Sex education curriculum across the country compared sexually active women to chewed-up gum, manhandled roses, and cups of spit, often culminating with a teacher holding up a saliva-filled glass or broken flower and asking, “Who would want this?” (“People want to marry a virgin, just like they want a virgin toothbrush or stick of gum,” read one guide). More than 80 percent of programs contained information that was either seriously misleading or straight-up wrong, including that HIV can be contracted by sweat and tears and that condoms are ineffective. Christian youth groups pushed True Love Waits and sold “purity rings” for fathers to buy their daughters to eventually be changed out for a wedding ring, in one of the more literal representations of patriarchal control over women’s bodies I’ve seen to date. Like millions of other teen and adolescent girls in the ’90s and early 2000s, I too took a virginity pledge well before I could even conceptualize why sex might be appealing.

These should have been left in the dustbin of history as the Bad Old Days of culture-war sex ed. Nearly all Americans have sex before marriage, and fewer are getting married at all. Teen pregnancy rates have hit record lows. It is very, very clear that abstinence-until-marriage programs do not work, and for a while, it seemed that even pro-abstinence conservatives had declared defeat, while victorious liberals with the science on their side could go forth and teach young people that abstinence is a valid choice, but contraception and condoms are useful, too.

This was premature. Those of us who thought abstinence education couldn’t get worse than the “girls are either virgins or used cups full of spit” model couldn’t have imagined that the Republican Party would morph from one in which the Moral Majority had significant sway into one in which the conservative majority ceded morality all together, and “traditional family” sexists would make common cause with aggressive manosphere misogynists. Under Donald Trump, abstinence is back, except this time, it’s not discouraging teen pregnancies—it’s pushing those teens to forgo contraception, get married, and plan their lives around having babies. And they’re stripping money from the programs that sent teen pregnancy rates tumbling to put toward those that tell teens that actually, reproduction is the goal.

Under new Trump administration directives, teen pregnancy prevention programs will not receive federal grants unless they go backward and teach that abstinence is the only way to prevent teen pregnancy. And that isn’t all: The Trump funding guidelines make........

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