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Policy and Advocacy

In partnership with young people, Advocates for Youth champions policies that expand and improve young people’s reproductive and sexual health and rights on Capitol Hill, within the Administration and federal agencies, within state legislatures and local municipalities, in coalitions, and with colleague organizations.

Want to speak to an expert on young people’s reproductive and sexual health and rights? Contact [email protected]

Access to Birth Control and Sexual Health Services

Advocates for Youth works to ensure young people have comprehensive access to a wide range of contraceptive methods and sexual health services.  In addition to helping young people take control of their reproductive futures, birth control can reduce pain and improve quality of life for young people living with certain chronic conditions such as endometriosis and fibroids. Our policy priorities include:

  • Full insurance coverage without a copay or a prescription for birth control pills. i necessary for young people who would not otherwise be able to access birth control.
  • The Right to Contraception Act, which would establish an individual right to access a wide range of contraceptive methods, including pills, implants, sterilization, and more.
  • The Access to Birth Control (ABC) Act specifically addresses the problem of people across the country being refused birth control at a pharmacy due to an employee’s personal beliefs. The ABC Act would establish specific standards of care that require pharmacies to stock and dispense birth control without discrimination or unnecessary delay.
  • Protecting and expanding Title X funding. Title X providers play a critical role in ensuring young people and low-income communities have access to medical treatment and preventive care. Specifically, Title X providers are a major source of confidential access for young people, providing one of few pathways that do not require parental involvement. 
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Abortion Access and Reproductive Justice

Advocates for Youth champions policies which provide young people with access to safe, affordable, and comprehensive reproductive healthcare. Our policy priorities include:

  • State-based abortion policy strategies to advance access to medication abortion on college campuses. Decades of research demonstrate that medication abortion is a safe and effective option for young people, yet access varies state to state due to abortion stigma and lack of information. To combat this, Advocates for Youth has supported young people in California, Massachusetts, and New York in passing legislation which provides public universities with funding to offer medication abortion or support students in seeking off-campus medication abortion. Last year, Advocates for Youth started working with young people in Washington state to pass similar legislation.
  • The Equal Access to Abortion Coverage in Health Insurance (EACH) Act, which would reverse the Hyde Amendment and restore abortion coverage to government employees and other recipients of government health insurance plans.
  • The Abortion Justice Act goes even further to expand abortion access by explicitly protecting peoples’ right to make their own reproductive healthcare decisions, improving the affordability of abortion care, and preventing government actors from creating unnecessary barriers for abortion seekers. 
  • The Health Equity Access Under the Law (HEAL) for Immigrant Families Act, which focuses on expanding access to healthcare, including reproductive healthcare, for immigrants. This bill includes multiple provisions aimed at reducing immigrant-specific barriers to healthcare, such as providing coverage for Deferred Action Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients and allowing undocumented immigrants to purchase health insurance through the Affordable Care Act (ACA). 
  • Advocates for Youth also tracks and intervenes on policies and court cases that impact minors’ rights to abortion access. Pregnant young people face heightened difficulties accessing care, stigma, and privacy violations compared to their adult counterparts. Many policies take specific aim at young peoples’ rights to confidential abortions under judicial bypass regimes, or their ability to travel across state lines for abortion care. These policies significantly undermine young people’s reproductive autonomy and discourage them from seeking necessary care. Young people are in the best position to decide who to involve in their healthcare decisions. Policies such as these expose them to the potential threat of violence at home, or unsafe reproductive care in states with restricted access.
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HIV Prevention, Treatment, and Destigmatizing

Advocates for Youth has a long history of advocacy efforts that support and center young people living with HIV. We are proud to have nominated youth living with HIV to the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV & AIDS (PACHA), with many of them being accepted to the council which provides advice, information, and recommendations to the Secretary of Health and Human Services regarding the development and implementation of the Ending the HIV Epidemic in the U.S. initiative. Our policy priorities include:

  • As the lead organization for National Youth HIV & AIDS Awareness Day (NYHAAD), Advocates supports the drafting and introduction of the Congressional Resolution “supporting the goals and ideals of National Youth HIV/AIDS Awareness Day” and holds roundtables and briefings with federal decision makers from the White House, Health and Human Services, the CDC, and Congress. 
  • Advocates regularly contributes recommendations to the National HIV & AIDS Strategic Plan, a plan that aims to end the HIV epidemic by 2030, and the STI National Strategic Plan, which provides a roadmap to STI prevention, care, and treatment. We are also advocating for a National PrEP Program to make HIV prevention medication accessible to everyone who needs it.
  • As members of the Federal AIDS Policy Partnership and the #SaveHIVFunding campaign, Advocates partners with national HIV & AIDS organizations to protect and propose increased funding for HIV prevention and treatment.
  • On the state level, Advocates for Youth supports the efforts of state-based organizations that are working to modernize outdated laws that criminalize people living with HIV. 
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LGBTQ+ Health and Rights

LGBTQ+ young people should be safe and supported in their homes, schools, communities, and in healthcare. Advocates is working toward protecting LGBTQ+ youth through nondiscrimination protections, safe schools, and inclusive healthcare. This includes:

  • Federal legislation like the Equality Act which would amend the Civil Rights Act to include nondiscrimination protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
  • Nondiscrimination protections in the Affordable Care Act’s Section 1557.
  • The Safe Schools Improvement Act and Stop Bullying Act which seek to enhance bullying protections in public schools.
  • Through the All Students Count Coalition, Advocates for Youth has been a leader in promoting questions related to gender identity and sexual orientation to CDC youth surveys. This advocacy continues as protections for LGBTQI+ data collection are needed across multiple federal agencies.
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Racial Justice

Black, Latino/a/x, Asian and Pacific Islander, Native American, Muslim, immigrant, and refugee youth are disproportionately impacted by harmful reproductive and sexual health and rights policies. Advocates’ believes that all policy efforts and campaigns must go hand in hand with ending racism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, and all forms of structural oppression. Our policy priorities include:

  • The President must rescind racist, homophobic executive orders related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
  • We call for an end to violent immigration enforcement by ICE and Border Patrol.
  • Advocates for Youth supports federal, state, and local policies which would support undocumented young people by easing a path to citizenship, supporting asylum seekers, ending the separation of families, providing education opportunities, and ensuring courts, hospitals, schools, and workplaces are free from harassment and detainment.
  • Advocates for Youth supports the defunding of and divestment from police and the investment in reproductive and sexual health care and education.
  • We call for an end to travel bans that explicitly target individuals from primarily Muslim countries.
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Sex Education in US and Globally

Honest, complete, and inclusive sex education equips young people with the knowledge and skills they need to make informed, responsible, and healthy decisions about their bodies and relationships.

Due to the patchwork of federal funding, state laws, and education standards across the U.S., as well as unprecedented attacks against schools, young people are often increasingly being denied the critical and life-saving information and services they need. 

Much of our country’s federal, state, and local funding for sex education programs is designated for Sexual Risk Avoidance (or, abstinence-only) programs that reinforce shame-based messages, provide medically inaccurate instruction, or even withhold lifesaving information. Even when school districts do invest in more comprehensive approaches to sex education, teacher training is often lacking or nonexistent.  Our policy priorities include:

  • The Real Education and Access for Healthy Youth Act (REAHYA), which authorizes federal grants for comprehensive sex education programs and youth sexual health services, and ends funding for harmful Title V abstinence-only programs.
  • The protection and expansion of federal programs that support more comprehensive approaches to sex education, such as the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health (DASH), and HHS’s Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program.
  • Foreign assistance funding from the U.S. that supports comprehensive sex education and other family planning services, such as the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and oppose foreign assistance funds that promote sexual risk avoidance (or, abstinence-only) internationally. 
  • At the state level, Advocates for Youth advocates for proactive sex education laws, such as the Healthy Youth Act (enacted in many states across the country), and the Know Your Period Act (CA), which mandates the inclusion of menstrual health education within existing sexual health curriculum, among many others. 
  • We also support states and school districts enacting standards and choosing curricula that aligns with The National Sex Education Standards (NSES), which outlines the foundational knowledge and skills students need to navigate sexual development and grow into sexually healthy adults. 
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Support for Sexual Violence Survivors

Advocates for Youth aims to empower young people to end sexual and gender-based violence. We support policies at the federal, state, and local level that expand resources, protections, and support for survivors. Advocates also championsTitle IX, the civil rights law,  as an alternative to the criminal legal system – one that is more just and responsive to the educational, emotional, financial, and stigmatic harms of violence that survivors experience.

We advocate for stronger Title IX rules that hold schools responsible for addressing sex-based harassment in schools, as well as federal legislation to codify civil rights protections for survivors. For example, during the 118th Congress, Advocates for Youth and Know Your IX youth activists co-authored the Students Access to Freedom and Educational Rights (SAFER) Act, which would require schools to provide effective supportive measures and protections against retaliation to student survivors so they can keep learning in the wake of sex-based harassment, as well as invest in Title IX coordinators, training, school climate surveys, and more effective responses to sex-based harassment in schools.

In the absence of stronger Title IX protections at the federal level, Advocates also works with survivors and young people to champion state legislation and school-based policies that bolster resources available to survivors and hold schools accountable to protecting students from gender-based harassment and violence.

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Transgender Youth Health and Rights

Advocates champions policies that expand protections, resources, and support for transgender young people. Due to the increased political attacks on transgender people – including the villainization of trans folks, bans and criminalization of healthcare, and attempts to drive transgender people out of public life – Advocates believes it is crucial to explicitly center the lifesaving impact that these policies have on transgender and gender-expansive youth in healthcare and schools. Our policy priorities include:

  • Protecting and expanding gender affirming care for transgender youth, including through Medicaid.
  • The Transgender Healthcare Access Act which would improve access to gender-affirming care for transgender individuals by enhancing medical education and expanding access in community health centers and rural areas.
  • Advocates for Youth fully supports trans young people’s right to participate in the sports and activities aligned with their gender identity. We have consistently fought back against federal efforts to ban the participation of transgender youth, especially women and girls, in sports.
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