The Trump administration has decided to destroy contraceptives worth $9.7m rather than send them abroad to women in need, reports The Guardian, in a move that will cost American taxpayers $167 000.
The contraceptives are mainly long-acting, such as IUDs and birth control implants, and were almost certainly intended for women in Africa, according to two senior congressional aides, one of whom visited a warehouse in Belgium that housed the contraceptives.
It is not clear to the aides whether the destruction has already been carried out, but said they had been told that it was to take place by the end of July.
“It is unacceptable that the State Department would … destroy more than $9m in taxpayer-funded family planning commodities purchased to support women in crisis settings, including war zones and refugee camps,” said Jeanne Shaheen, a Democratic senator, in a statement. Shaheen and Brian Schatz, a Democratic senator from Hawaii, have introduced legislation to stop the destruction.
Shaheen labelled the move not just as a waste of US taxpayer dollars but “an abdication of US global leadership in preventing unintended pregnancies, unsafe abortions and maternal death”.
A State Department spokesperson said it was decided to destroy the products because it could not sell them to any “eligible buyers”, in part because of US laws and rules that prohibit sending the country from sending aid to organisations that provide abortion services, counsel people about the procedure or advocate for the right to it overseas.
Most of the contraceptives have less than 70% of their shelf life left before they expire, the spokesperson added, and rebranding and selling them could cost several million dollars.
However, the aide who had visited the warehouse said that the earliest expiration date they saw on the contraceptives was 2027, and that two-thirds of the contraceptives did not have any USAID labels that would need to be rebranded.
“If you have an unintended pregnancy and you end up having to seek unsafe abortion, it’s quite likely that you will die,” said Sarah Shaw, the associate director of advocacy at MSI Reproductive Choices, a global family planning organisation that works in nearly 40 countries.
“If you’re not given the means to space or limit your births, you’re putting your life at risk or your child’s life at risk.”
MSI had tried to buy the contraceptives from the US, Shaw added. But the government would only accept full price – which Shaw said the agency could not afford, given that MSI would also have to shoulder the expense of transporting the products, and the fact that they are inching closer to their expiration date, which could affect MSI’s ability to distribute them.
The State Department spokesperson did not specifically respond to a request for comment on Shaw’s allegation, but MSI does provide abortions as part of its global work, which may have led the department to rule it out as an “eligible buyer”.
In an internal survey, MSI programmes in 10 countries reported that, within the next month, they expect to be out of stock or be on the brink of being out of stock of at least one contraceptive method.
The countries include Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Timor-Leste, Senegal, Kenya and Sierra Leone.
Shaw expects the stock to be incinerated. “The fact that the contraceptives are going to be burned when there’s so much need – it’s just egregious,” she said. “It’s disgusting.”.
She added that USAID funding is threaded through so much of the global supply chain of family planning aid that, without its money, the chain has come apart. In Mali, USAID helped pay for the fuel used by the vehicles that transport contraceptives from a warehouse.
Without the fuel money, the vehicles were stuck – and so were the contraceptives.
“I’ve worked in this sector for over 20 years and I’ve never seen anything on this scale,” Shaw said. “The speed at which they’ve managed to dismantle excellent work and really great progress – I mean, it’s just vanished in weeks.”
Other kinds of assistance are also reportedly being wasted. This week, almost 500 metric tons of emergency food were expiring and would be incinerated, rather than being used to feed about 1.5m children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, while almost 800 000 mpox vaccines that were supposed to be sent to Africa are now unusable because they are too close to their expiration date, according to Politico.
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