Who Is Valerie Huber? Trump Appoints National Abstinence Education Advocate As Chief Of Staff To HHS

President Donald Trump appointed Valerie Huber, a national abstinence education advocate as the chief of staff in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, reports said Wednesday.

Huber was named as the chief of staff to Don Wright, who is the assistant secretary for health, an HHS spokesman confirmed to Huffington Post. The assistant secretary for health’s office supervises the Office of Adolescent Health that is responsible for funding pregnancy prevention programs throughout the United States.

Read: New York City to Mandate Sex Education in Public Schools

In an email to staff, Wright said Huber's “wealth of professional experience in the field of public policy will serve her well in this position.”

Huber served as the president of Ascend since 2007, earlier known as the National Abstinence Education Association. She also managed Ohio’s abstinence-only education program for three years from 2004 to 2007, according to the Hill.

In an article published in Focus on the Family's Citizen magazine, Huber said she prefers the term “sexual risk avoidance” to abstinence education.

“Sexual risk avoidance is actually a term taken from public health,” she said in the article.

“I bristle at the terminology ‘abstinence only,’ because our programs are so holistic. They contextualize a whole battery of different topics that surround a young person’s decision whether to have sex or not. Rather than someone telling a young person, ‘Do this, don’t do that,’ it’s casting a vision for a young person’s future,” she wrote.

In an NPR article in 2016, about contraception use driving down teen pregnancies, Huber said: “as public health experts and policymakers, we must normalize sexual delay more than we normalize teen sex, even with contraception.”

While serving at Ascend, which advocates itself as a “sexual risk avoidance” organization that is dedicated to encouraging abstinence until marriage, Huber in 2012, was quoted in a press release promoting an “abstinence-centered” curriculum from another organization named "Choosing the Best." Huber had spent decades promoting abstinence-based education programs and thus her post as the chief of staff in HHS raised a lot of questions and concern.

Read: UK Sexual Consent Education: Lessons For 11-Year-Olds And Up Will Keep Youth 'Healthy And Safe'

Debra Hauser, president of the sex education nonprofit organization called Advocates for Youth, described the abstinence education advocate’s appointment as another attack on evidence-based science by the current administration.

“The organization she runs is called Ascend, and it’s the primary national organization that promotes abstinence-only until marriage education, no matter what they call it,” said Hauser, whose organization has been promoting comprehensive sex education.

“It still is education ― and I use that term loosely ― that withholds life saving vital information about the health benefits of contraceptives and condoms,” she added.

Hauser raised concerns about how the programs under the Trump administration would address the topic of sexual assault prevention.

“I think it’s immoral to withhold information to help people become sexually healthy adults. We have not taught young people the information they need about consent and what does a healthy relationship look like,” Hauser said.

During an interview with the Associated Press in 2015, Huber also expressed her discontent with sex education programs that teach affirmative consent. “In the midst of this conversation, are the root causes being addressed? I would argue that they really aren’t,” Huber had said.

“This discussion is getting reduced to a palliation rather than a solution.”