A stockpile of $9.7 million worth of contraceptives that were stuck in limbo at a Belgium warehouse for months following the dismantling of the the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) earlier this year has now been destroyed on orders from the Trump administration.
The New York Times confirmed the news on Thursday, citing a spokeswoman for USAID, which is now being closed down by White House budget director Russell Vought. “President Trump is committed to protecting the lives of unborn children all around the world,” the statement said, before falsely implying that the contraceptives induced abortion. “The administration will no longer supply abortifacient birth control under the guise of foreign aid.”
As the Times pointed out, USAID is prohibited by law from obtaining abortifacients and none of the products that were being stored at the warehouse in Belgium were abortifacients, per inventory lists obtained by the newspaper. State Department officials had been made aware of this fact by global health program staff, per the documents. When or where the destruction of the products took place was not immediately clear.
The taxpayer-funded contraceptives had been designated to help people in low-income countries and their expiration dates ranged from 2027 to 2031, according to Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières, or MSF) and the reproductive health care nonprofit MSI United States, NPR previously reported.
The destruction of the pills, IUDs, and hormonal implants cost an estimated $167,000, per reports. According to the Times, several international organizations including the Gates Foundation and the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation had offered to save the products by buying them or accepting them as a donation. Per the publication, this would have been at no cost to the government and possibly would have helped recoup the taxpayer funds.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H) released a statement on Thursday following the Trump administration’s decision to order the destruction of the contraceptives. “Incinerating these life-saving supplies is inhumane, wasteful and out of step with American values,” said Shaheen. “Family planning programs are bipartisan and prevent millions of unintended pregnancies, unsafe abortions and thousands of maternal deaths, especially among women in war zones and refugee camps who have nowhere else to turn.”
The senator said that her staff had witnessed firsthand how the supplies “would have remained viable for years” and that the administration not only “burned critical resources at additional expense to the taxpayer, but also exposed a broader, deeply troubling campaign to roll back women’s rights and access to basic health.”
