The State Department has confirmed plans to destroy millions of dollars' worth of taxpayer-funded contraceptives meant for women in low-income countries. The controversial move comes as the Trump administration continues to scale back foreign aid.
A stockpile of family planning products — including IUDs, implants and pills — worth $9.7 million has been stuck at a warehouse in Belgium since the administration dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and froze foreign aid earlier this year, according to statements from multiple humanitarian groups and U.S. lawmakers.
The products' expiration dates range from 2027 to 2031, according to Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières, or MSF) and the reproductive health care nonprofit MSI United States.
The contraceptives were intended for girls and women in low-income countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. But instead of going to crisis zones and refugee camps, they will be incinerated in Europe.
In a statement shared with NPR, the State Department confirmed that the U.S. will spend $167,000 to destroy the contraceptives at a French facility that handles medical waste.
"Only a limited number of commodities have been approved for disposal," it said, adding that no HIV medications or condoms are being destroyed.
Several international humanitarian organizations, including MSI, Doctors Without Borders and UNFPA — the United Nations' sexual and reproductive health agency — say they tried to buy the supplies from the U.S. but were rejected.
Critics of the plan — including some lawmakers in the U.S. and France — are now hoping they can push for a last-minute change before the stocks are due to be destroyed at the end of July.
If not, they say, the lives of millions of people will be at risk of complications from unwanted or mistimed pregnancies.
Chelsea Polis, principal research scientist at the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights, told NPR that the $9.7 million worth of contraceptives could have provided pregnancy prevention for more than 650,000 people for up to one year, and for 950,000 people for three to 10 years, depending on the method.
"These are essential, lifesaving supplies that would have supported reproductive autonomy and prevented unsafe abortions and maternal deaths — being wasted and destroyed at U.S. taxpayers' expense, despite offers from global partners to distribute them to women and families in need," she added.
In a typical year, family planning assistance from the U.S. government — one of the biggest global donors to such programs — prevents 8.1 million unintended pregnancies, 5.2 million unsafe abortions and 34,000 maternal deaths, according to the office of Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H, who sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio this month asking him to reverse course.
The Trump administration's withdrawal of funds has created gaps that are "disrupting the entire global system for these services," says MSF, which notes that it is against the backdrop of this heightened demand that the contraceptives are due to be incinerated.
"Destroying valuable medical items that were already paid for by U.S. taxpayers does nothing to combat waste or improve efficiency," said Avril Benoît, CEO of the U.S. offices of Doctors Without Borders. "This administration is willing to burn birth control and let food supplies rot, risking people's health and lives to push a political agenda."
Why didn't the U.S. sell the contraceptives?
The kinds of products in the stockpile — like birth control pills and implantable birth control — are meant to work before fertilization to prevent a pregnancy from occurring in the first place.
But in its statement to NPR, the State Department referred to them as "abortifacient birth control commodities" — referring to substances that cause the termination of a pregnancy.
A U.S. policy called the "Mexico City Policy," instituted by President Ronald Reagan during a 1984 conference in that city, restricts foreign nongovernmental organizations from using U.S. federal funds to provide abortion services or related information. Presidents have alternately rescinded and reinstated the policy since its creation; most recently, President Trump brought it back at the start of his second term.
One of the several humanitarian groups that tried to buy the contraceptives says the U.S. government cited that policy as grounds for rejecting their offers.
MSI Reproductive Choices said in a statement that it offered to "purchase, repackage and manage logistics at our expense" to get the products to people in need.
But it said those efforts were repeatedly rejected, "with the U.S. government citing the Mexico City policy" among other concerns.
Shaheen told the BBC last week that the products in question have "nothing to do with abortion."
"That is, again, another excuse that the administration is using to try and provide some sort of an explanation for why they're incinerating over $10 million in family planning supplies that women need around the world," she said.
What's being done to try to save the stockpile?
The government of Belgium, where the products are currently sitting in a warehouse in the city of Geel, says it has appealed to the U.S. Embassy in Brussels in hopes of protecting them.
"[The ministry of] Foreign Affairs is exploring all possible avenues to prevent the destruction of these stocks, including their temporary relocation," foreign ministry spokesperson Florinda Baleci told NPR on Monday, declining to elaborate "in order not to prejudge the outcome of the discussions."
And some left-wing lawmakers in France, where the products are due to be shipped for destruction, are lobbying their own government not to participate in their destruction.
Several female lawmakers have signed an open letter to French President Emmanuel Macron, saying the country "cannot become complicit, even indirectly, in retrograde policies, nor tolerate that vital medical resources be destroyed."
"As this incineration is to take place on French soil, we have the means to oppose it," French Green party leader Marine Tondelier, one of the signatories, wrote on X. "We refuse to let France become the trash bin for American ultraconservatives."
The lawmakers are urging Macron to request the suspension of the plan "as part of a joint diplomatic initiative with the European Commission" and to back humanitarian organizations that are willing to redistribute the products.
Ultimately, MSF says, the best path forward would be for the contraceptives to get to ministries of health in the countries that need them as soon as possible.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., two Democrats — Sens. Shaheen and Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii — have introduced legislation that would prevent foreign assistance commodities like food and medical devices from being destroyed or wasted.
The Saving Lives and Taxpayer Dollars Act would prohibit the destruction of such items — including the $9.7 million contraceptives stockpile — "unless all efforts to sell or donate them have been exhausted."
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