Public health experts are blasting a U.S. State Department plan to burn nearly $10 million worth of contraceptives intended for women in poor nations rather than dole them out or sell to someone who will.
Outrage peaked this week as the Trump administration’s self-imposed end-of-July deadline loomed for incinerating a stockpile of IUDs, implants, injectable contraceptives and birth control pills. The supplies — meant for women in low-income nations, conflict zones, refugee camps and other fragile regions — have been sitting in a warehouse in Geel, Belgium, since the Trump administration began dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Despite urging from humanitarian groups, the United Nations’ UNFPA, legislators and diplomats, a State Department spokesperson confirmed to The Washington Post that “a preliminary decision was made to destroy certain abortifacient birth control commodities from terminated Biden-era USAID contracts,” though HIV medications and condoms will be spared.
Belgium “explored all possible options to prevent the destruction,” a foreign ministry spokesperson told Reuters, but “no viable alternative could be secured,” though the Belgian government “continues to actively seek solutions to avoid this regrettable outcome.”
UNFPA’s offer to buy the supplies went nowhere. They will be destroyed at a private medical-waste facility in France, prompting French lawmakers to speak out against complicity, according to CNN. Earlier this month U.S. lawmakers introduced the “Saving Lives and Taxpayer Dollars Act” to forbid the destruction of that and other types of imperiled aid.
“These supplies do not include support for abortion services and are in full compliance with all U.S. foreign assistance laws,” U.S. Senators Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) wrote in a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose agency has absorbed USAID.
Burning the supplies will cost $167,000, which a congressional aide told CNN, means “the Trump administration is quite literally burning taxpayer money.”
With News Wire Services
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