A woman waits for a contraceptive implant procedure at a clinic in Epworth, Zimbabwe.
A woman waits for a contraceptive implant procedure at a clinic in Epworth, Zimbabwe.
The US is ending its financial support for family planning programmes in developing countries, cutting nearly 50 million women off from access to contraception.
This policy change has attracted little attention amid the wholesale dismantling of American foreign aid, but it stands to have enormous implications, including more maternal deaths and an overall increase in poverty. It derails an effort that had brought long-acting contraceptives to women in some of the poorest and most isolated parts of the world in recent years.
The US provided about 40 per cent of the funding governments contributed to family planning programmes in 31 developing countries, some $600 million, in 2023, the last year for which data is available, according to KFF, a health research organisation.
That American funding provided contraceptive devices and the medical services to deliver them to more than 47 million women and couples, which is estimated to have averted 17.1 million unintended pregnancies and 5.2 million unsafe abortions, according to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, a sexual health research organisation. Without this annual contribution, 34,000 women could die from preventable maternal deaths each year, the Guttmacher calculation concluded.
“The magnitude of the impact is mind-boggling,” said Marie Ba, who leads the coordination team for the Ouagadougou Partnership, an initiative to accelerate investments and access to family planning in nine West African countries.
The funding has been terminated as part of the Trump administration’s disassembling of the United States Agency for International Development. The state department, into which the skeletal remains of USAID was absorbed on Friday, did not reply to a request for comment on the decision to stop funding family planning. Secretary of state Marco Rubio has described the terminated aid projects as wasteful and not aligned with American strategic interest.
Support for family planning in the world’s poorest and most populous countries has been a consistent policy priority for both Democratic and Republican administrations for decades, seen as a bulwark against political instability. It also lowered the number of women seeking abortions.
Among the countries that will be significantly affected by the decision are Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Yemen and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The money to support international family planning programmes is appropriated by Congress and was extended in the most recent spending bill that keeps the government operating through September. The move by the state department to cut these and other aid programmes is the subject of multiple lawsuits currently before federal courts.
The Trump administration has also terminated American funding for the United Nations’ sexual and reproductive health agency, UNFPA, which is the world’s largest procurer of contraceptives. The US was the organisation’s largest donor.
New York Times News Service