Millions of women will lose access to birth control as a result of Trump aid to lowering

The United States ends its financial support for family planning programs in developing countries, which reduces about 50 million women from access to contraceptives.

This change in politics has only attracted little attention amid the dismantling of the sentence of US foreign aid, but it is important to have huge effects, including more maternal deaths and a total increase in poverty. It hinders the voltage that brought long -acting contraceptives to women in some of the poorest and most isolated parts in the world in recent years.

The United States provided about 40 percent of the funding governments that contributed to family planning programs in 31 developing countries, about 600 million dollars, in 2023, last year, which data is available, according to KFF, a health research organization.

This American financing provided contraceptive and medical services devices to provide them to more than 47 million women and husbands, which are estimated to avoid 17.1 million unintended pregnancy and 5.2 million insecure miscarriages, according to the analysis of the Goette Maters, which is an organization for sexual health research. Without this annual contribution, 34,000 women can die from the mother’s mortality that can be prevented every year, and the Guttmacher account is saved.

“The size of the influence is confusing the mind,” said Mary Ba, who leads the coordination team to the Oajadogo partnership, an initiative to accelerate investments and access family planning in nine West African countries.

Finance has been completed as part of the dismantling of the United States International Development Agency for the Trump Administration. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which has been absorbed by the remains of the US Agency for International Development on Friday, has not been a request to comment on the decision to stop financing family planning. Foreign Minister Marco Rubio described the ending aid projects as a farce and are not in line with the American strategic interest.

The support of the family planning in the poorest and most populated countries in the world was a constant priority in politics for both democratic and republican administrations for decades, which are seen as Blueck against political instability. It also reduces the number of women looking for miscarriage.

Among the countries that will be greatly affected by the decision are Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Yemen and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The necessary funds were allocated to support international family planning programs by Congress and have been extended in the recent draft spending law that keeps the government to operate until September. This step by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to reduce aid and other programs is the issue of multiple lawsuits currently before federal courts.

The Trump administration has also completed the US sexual and reproductive health Agency, UNFPA, which is the world’s largest birth prevention. The United States was the largest donor to the organization.

Although the United States was not the only resource to prevent pregnancy in any country, the sudden end of American financing has created chaos in the system and has already caused clinics to run out of products.

About $ 27 million of family planning products that were already purchased by the United States Agency for International Development are stuck in various points in the delivery system – on boats, in ports, in warehouses – with no programs or employees who left to empty or hand them over to governments, according to a former employee of the United States Agency for International Development that was not authorized to speak to a reporter. One of the plan proposed by the leadership of the US International Development Agency in Washington is for the remaining employees to destroy them.

The supply chain management was a great axis of the US International Development Agency, in all areas of health, and the United States prompted the transfer of birth control supplies such as hormone transplantation, for example, from manufacturers in Thailand to the port in Mombasa, Kenya, from where they were transported by trucks to Warr throughout East Africa, then to local grades.

“Re -Packs together will be very difficult,” said Dr. Natalia Caeim, UNFPA Executive Director, said.

The United States also paid the price of data and information systems that helped governments track what existed and what they needed. None of these systems has been operated since the Trump administration has sent something that stopped to all programs that have received grants to the United States Agency for International Development.

Bellington Fawalica, professor of gynecology at Zambia University, said contraceptive has already begun to move in some parts of the country, as the United States has provided a quarter of the national family planning budget.

He said: “The rich can buy the commodity they want – it is the poor who have to think,” between food and contraceptive means, what should I get? “

Even before the United States withdrew from family planning programs, investigative studies found that at the global level, a billion women of childbearing women wanted to avoid pregnancy but were unable to reach a modern contraceptive method.

At the same time, there was great progress. The demand for contraceptives was steady With long-acting methods that provide women with greater privacy and safe protection-in Africa, the world region with the slightest coverage. The offer improves with a better infrastructure that helped get products to rural areas. And projects “Creating demand”, which the United States was mainly full, used declarations and social media to inform people of a group of available contraceptive options and the benefits of spacing or delaying pregnancy. The levels of women’s education also strengthened the demand.

Thelma Sibanda, a 27 -year -old engineering graduate who lives in a low -income community on the edge of the capital of Zimbabwe, Harry, two weeks ago, has received a five -year hormonal transplant, in a free clinic from the popup -running services, which had multi -year -old grants that provide free family planning services.

Mrs. Sibanda has two years old and says she cannot afford more children: she cannot find a job in the broken Zimbabwe economy, and her husband cannot. They live on $ 150 that earns it every month from the vegetable platform. Mrs. Sibanda said that she was relying on “hope, faith and natural methods” to prevent another pregnancy since the birth of her son.

By financing the American Agency for International Development, the Zimbabwe organization, which it provided for its planting last year, managed to purchase six powerful Toyota vehicles and camping equipment so that the awareness team can travel to most remote areas in the country, providing blood vessels and pile in pop -up clinics. Since Trump’s executive, they had to stop using all this equipment.

The international non -profit reproductive options in MSI intervened with temporary money so that the teams can continue to provide free care for women that can reach them, such as Mrs. Sibanda.

Mrs. Sibanda said that her priority was providing the best possible education for her son, and because school fees are expensive, this does not mean more children. But many African women do not have a way to take this type of choice. In Uganda, while the national fertility rate is 4.5 children for every woman, it is not unusual to meet women in rural areas with limited education and have eight or 10 children, said Dr. Justin Bokinia, a lecturer in community health and behavioral science at the University of Micrri in Kampala. These women carry for the first time as teenagers and have a small space between pregnancy.

“By the time they are 30 years old, they can have their tenth pregnancy – these are women who will be affected,” she said. “We are losing the opportunity to make progress with them. The United States was doing a very strong work here to create demand for contraceptives with these women, and to mobilize young people and women to go to the family planning.”

Some women who rely on free or low -cost service through public health systems now may try to buy contraceptives in the private market. But the prices of birth control pills, pile and other devices are most likely to rise dramatically without large -sized purchases from the United States.

“As a result, women who previously dependent on free or reasonable options through public health systems may now have to resort to private sector sources – at prices they cannot afford,” said Karen Hong, head of the UNFPA supply chain unit unit at UNFPA.

The largest family planning after the United States are the Netherlands, which provided about 17 percent of government donor financing in 2023 and Britain, by 13 percent. Both countries recently announced plans to reduce aid budgets by a third or more.

Ms. Ba said that the focus in West African countries where it was working was expressing local resources and knowing how governments could try to re -customize money to cover what the United States offers. Charitable works such as Gates and Financial Institutions, including the World Bank, which are already important contributors to family planning, may provide additional funding to try to keep products to move to countries.

“We were very optimistic – even with all political instability in our region, we were adding millions of other women who use modern methods in the past few years.” “Now all, support the United States, policies, everything is completely over. The gaps are very huge to fill them.”