The Trump administration is allowing a stockpile of nearly $10 million worth of contraceptives to expire in a Belgian warehouse — despite pleas from nonprofit organizations to allow them to deliver the life-saving aid intended for low-income women primarily in sub-Saharan Africa.
Earlier this year, the State Department announced plans to incinerate the contraceptives, which were originally intended for distribution by the U.S. Agency for International Development before Trump dismantled it. The medication includes $9.7 million worth of IUDs, implants, and birth control pills, some of which will get too old to deliver starting in December.
An estimate from the Guttmacher Institute found that the contraceptives could provide pregnancy prevention to roughly 1.6 million women.
The Trump administration isn’t just wasting money, said Jennifer Driver, senior director of reproductive rights at the State Innovation Exchange, “it’s wasting lives.” Because of high rates of maternal mortality, she said the undelivered aid could result in “millions of unintended pregnancies, thousands of preventable deaths.”
The Belgian government initially foiled the Trump administration’s plans to destroy the contraceptives by intervening to block the incineration. Now, the U.S. is using another weapon to destroy the medical aid: time.
The U.S. is using another weapon to destroy the medical aid: time.
Tanzania, which was supposed to receive the largest bulk of the contraceptive haul, requires that these medical products have 60 percent of their remaining shelf life when they enter customs, said Marcel van Valen, head of supply chain for the International Planned Parenthood Federation.
“That threshold is actually being reached for some of the products by the end of December,” he said, “and for most products towards mid-2026.”
Experts in reproductive health and supply chains told The Intercept that the Trump administration is attempting to “run out the clock” on the contraceptives’ shelf life, wasting millions of taxpayer dollars and putting countless lives at risk.
“The U.S. government is waiting to run out the clock on this, which is basically the same thing as lighting them on fire,” said Beth Schlachter, senior director of U.S. external relations for MSI Reproductive Choices, one of the organizations offering to distribute the contraceptives.
Over the last several months, the Trump administration has provided a litany of excuses for leaving the contraceptives in storage.
One explanation has been the cost. “Their claim is that incinerating the full stock would cost them approximately $167,000 and they hold that against distributing the stocks to their intended destination,” said van Valen. International Planned Parenthood estimates distribution would cost between $1 million and $1.5 million.
Multiple reputable international nonprofit organizations, including the United Nations Population Fund, the Gates Foundation, the International Planned Parenthood Foundation, and the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, have offered to purchase, re-label, and distribute the products themselves — at no cost to the Trump administration.
While her organization, MSI Reproductive Choices, also placed a bid to distribute the contraceptives, Schlachter said the work could have easily been done by the United Nations Population Fund, also known as UNFPA.
“UNFPA already had a supplies process that was able to move large volumes,” she said, “and it could have easily absorbed these commodities because it was already doing that, and is already still doing this for many countries.”
The problem here isn’t money, argued Schlacter — it’s ideology. She pointed to an extremist right-wing ethos that views contraception as an extension of abortion.
The State Department did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. However, in statements to other news outlets, the administration has claimed that the contraceptives were abortifacients, and that they couldn’t find an “eligible buyer” because their internal policies prohibit them from providing funds to organizations that provide abortion care or offer information on abortion.
“President Trump is committed to protecting the lives of unborn children all around the world,” a spokesperson for USAID told The New York Times in September. “The administration will no longer supply abortifacient birth control under the guise of foreign aid.”
The Intercept obtained the manifest for the contraceptives, which includes the intended recipient countries as well as the products being warehoused, and none of them are abortion drugs. Additionally, experts told The Intercept that multiple organizations that would not have violated that policy stepped forward to offer to distribute the contraceptives.
“There are some very religious conservative folks who are now the skeleton [crew] of the global health team,” said Schlacter, who previously served as a senior policy adviser on sexual and reproductive health and rights at the State Department. “Many of them were blocking this contraception because they want to cut off all contraception, because they believe anything other than a barrier method is actually tantamount to abortion, which is outrageous.”
Access to contraceptives in sub-Saharan Africa is a matter of life or death, said Saifuddin Ahmed, a professor in the Department of Population, Family, and Reproductive Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Despite making up roughly 16 percent of the global population, sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 70 percent of maternal deaths globally, according to the World Health Organization.
“In family planning literature, there’s something called too early, too late, too many,” Ahmed explained. “Basically it’s simply saying that if a woman has a birth, let’s say before their pelvic organs develop, that is too young, in an adolescent period, they’re likely to die more. If they have too many children spaced very narrowly — we call it a short birth interval — they will die at a higher rate.”
The same goes for older women, he said.
Access to birth control can disrupt that deadly cycle. “Our research has shown family planning is probably the most cost-effective tool for reducing maternal mortality,” said Ahmed. “Not providing this type of commodity to the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa means that their maternal mortality rate will go much, much higher. Child death will also go higher.”
According to UNFPA, in 2022, contraceptive use averted more than 141 million unintended pregnancies, 29 million unsafe abortions, and nearly 150,000 maternal deaths.
Elizabeth Sully, director of international research for The Guttmacher Institute, said while it’s worth focusing on saving the contraceptives stored in Belgium, this is just the beginning of the impact the Trump administration is having on family planning and maternal mortality efforts globally.
The United States’ family planning programs accounted for 40 percent of all donor funding for family planning globally. But earlier this year, the Trump administration ended their financial support for global family planning programs.
An estimate from the Guttmacher Institute found that the cuts to family planning grants will result in 34,000 more maternal deaths just this year.
Mallah Tabot, lead sexual and reproductive health architect of cooperation at the International Planned Parenthood Federation’s Africa regional office, described the Trump administration’s move as pure “wickedness.”
“Life-saving drugs are sitting somewhere withheld from those who need them the most, and rather than just doing the decent thing … they would rather play the waiting game until the products are no longer viable,” said Tabot. “What can the government say that would justify this level of wickedness?”
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