Giving Compass' Take:

• A federal judge has ruled that the Trump Administration's termination of the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, funding for evidence-based interventions to prevent teen pregnancy started under the Obama administration, was illegal and that the funding must be restored.

• How can donors ensure the long-term sustainability of effective teen pregnancy prevention programs? 

• Read about growing disparities between states for reproductive health and rights.

A federal judge in a fifth lawsuit has ruled that the Trump administration illegally terminated the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, restoring grants to all 81 programs nationwide that had their funding abruptly axed last year.

U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s decision on a class-action suit, issued last week, ordered the administration to handle all the applications “as if the agency had not undertaken to shorten these grantees’ federal awards.”

Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting reported in July that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services halted $213.6 million in funding for the last two years of five-year grants awarded to institutions and organizations such as the University of Texas, the city of Baltimore, the Los Angeles County Public Health Department and several Planned Parenthood offices. News of the cuts had come as a surprise to many of the programs.

A high-level appointee at the department, Valerie Huber, advocates abstinence for teens as the only solution, while most of the defunded grant holders were developing scientifically based programs that included contraception and other techniques to reduce pregnancies.

In response to the judge’s ruling, the Department of Health and Human Services sent emails this week to some of the plaintiffs, saying it will provide guidance within two or three weeks “so that the applications from all of the plaintiffs covered as a party to the class action can be processed quickly.”

About 1.2 million teenagers in 39 states now are on track to receive the revived sex education services, mainly through public schools, including immigrant youth in Miami, low-income middle-schoolers in Los Angeles’ Koreatown neighborhood, and teens in coal country in West Virginia and in urban neighborhoods in Chicago and Baltimore.

Read the full article about pregnancy prevention programs win back federal funds by Jane Kay at GOOD Magazine.