Setting fire to women's health

The Trump administration would rather burn contraceptives than help women and girls in developing nations.

According to congressional Republicans and President Donald Trump, the “big, beautiful bill” is all about eliminating fiscal waste and preventing fraud. Yet the State Department is poised to burn millions of dollars—quite literally, in a French incinerator—paying $167,000 to set ablaze a $9.7 million stockpile of U.S. taxpayer-funded contraceptives.

For the past few weeks, global reporting has revealed a collection of IUDs, birth control pills, and implants—all viable for usage for several more years—stored in a warehouse in Belgium. Intended for distribution to women around the world—people living in refugee camps, war zones, and under fragile health systems—these supplies were purchased by the U.S. government before the Trump administration’s order freezing foreign aid, shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and reinstating the Global Gag Rule (a.k.a. the “Mexico City Policy,” which requires foreign non-governmental organizations to certify they will not perform or promote abortion using funding from any source. A damning trifecta, indeed.

Once the story broke, the State Department claimed no HIV medications or condoms were to be destroyed and that its focus was on eliminating “abortifacients”—drugs or devices that induce abortion. However, none of the contraceptives stored in the Belgian warehouse fit that definition. (USAID was already prohibited by law from purchasing products that induce abortion.)

Beyond the outrageous fiscal and material waste, the tangible harms are equally massive:

• Over 1.4 million girls and women in Africa will be impacted, according to the Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition, as reported by the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IFFP), which estimates the loss of these contraceptives is projected to result in 362,000 unintended pregnancies and 110,000 unsafe abortions, primarily in Kenya, Mali, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Zambia, the nations that will be hardest hit, with Tanzania alone accounting for 40% of these supplies.

  “This decision to destroy ready-to-use commodities is appalling and extremely wasteful,” said Marie-Evelyne Petrus-Barry, Africa regional director of the IPPF.

• Doctors Without Borders-Medecins Sans Fronties (MSF) details how communities impacted by conflict, disease outbreaks, natural and human-made disasters, and exclusion from health care are also at grave risk.

  According to MSF CEO Avril Benoît, “The U.S. government manufactured this problem. Destroying valuable medical items that were already paid for by U.S. taxpayers does nothing to combat waste or improve efficiency. This administration is willing to burn birth control, risking people’s health and lives to push a political agenda.” And Kathy Spillar, executive director of the U.S.-based Feminist Majority Foundation and executive editor of Ms. magazine, points to the related crises of “sexual violence, maternal mortality, and forced pregnancies rising around the world.”

A perfect storm.

The birth control blaze was set to take place in July, but there is no evidence it has happened yet. Reports indicate that there is another warehouse of USAID-purchased contraceptives in the United Arab Emirates, which is why I am writing this today—and why we need to get loud and stay loud.

Clearly the economical, rational, and humane thing to have done would be to simply turn the stockpile over to the United Nations Population Fund or a qualified global nonprofit such as MSI Reproductive Choices, organizations ready to act at no cost to the U.S. government. But Secretary of State Marco Rubio has not authorized their release.

Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) have introduced the Saving Lives and Taxpayer Dollars Act, which would require the contraceptives to be released for their intended humanitarian use and prohibit incineration of still-viable medical supplies.

Meanwhile in Belgium, lawmakers have appealed to the U.S. Embassy in Brussels. In France, lawmakers and advocates are lobbying to refuse to participate in the incineration, signing an open letter saying the country “cannot become complicit, even indirectly, in retrograde policies, nor tolerate that vital medical resources be destroyed.” One of the letter’s signers posted on X, “We refuse to let France become the trash bin for American ultraconservatives.”

As my colleagues over at Ms. magazine wrote, “Every blister pack of pills, every unopened IUD, was meant to offer a woman a sliver of agency—a way to survive and build a future in places where those options are often stolen from her. To burn them is to declare that her future was never the priority.”

We must stop this administration from burning it all down, quite literally, so that women around the globe get a fighting chance.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf is executive director of the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center at NYU School of Law. She also leads strategy and partnerships at Ms. Magazine.

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