Federal officials had already spent nearly $10 million on birth control pills, intrauterine devices and hormonal implants to be sent to low-income nations. As The New York Times reported, however, the products will never reach their intended destination — not because the beneficiaries no longer want the assistance, but because the Trump administration destroyed what U.S. taxpayers had already paid for.
Millions of dollars’ worth of birth control pills and other contraceptives destined for people in low-income countries have been destroyed at the direction of the Trump administration, the United States Agency for International Development said on Thursday.
The destruction of the millions of dollars’ worth of products itself cost roughly $167,000.
The Times’ report noted that several international organizations, including the Gates Foundation and the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, had offered to buy or accept a donation of the contraceptives. “The government would have incurred no costs or might have even been able to recoup taxpayer funds under those scenarios,” the article added.
But the Trump administration refused. It simply didn’t want the contraception to reach struggling communities that would benefit from it, even if that meant wasting American tax dollars.
Why is that? According a statement from USAID (being run by Russell Vought, the far-right head of the White House Office of Management and Budget), “The administration will no longer supply abortifacient birth control under the guise of foreign aid.”
The problem, of course, is that the explanation is at odds with reality: Contraceptives don’t induce abortion. The administration’s suggestion otherwise adds an unsettling wrinkle to already awful circumstances. (It also calls to mind an incident in which Donald Trump last year said that he was “looking at” possible restrictions on access to contraception.)
One of the organizations that had offered to take over the distribution of the supplies was MSI Reproductive Choices. Its director of U.S. external relations, Beth Schlachter, told the Times, “The deliberate destruction of nearly $10 million worth of contraceptives, under the blatantly false pretense that they are abortifacients, is an outrageous act of cruelty.”
Schlachter added, “This decision will cost lives, derail progress in global health and strip millions of people of the basic tools they need to plan their families and protect their health.”
