A stock of $9.7m (£7.2m) worth of contraceptives, purchased by the US for use in low-income countries is now in transit to France to be burnt rather than distributed as aid.
Governments and family planning providers in France and Belgium – where the items were held in a warehouse – have been scrambling to block the US from destroying the supplies.
The products, which include contraceptive pills, implants and IUDs (intrauterine devices or coils) and have already been paid for by US taxpayers, are being sent to a specialist facility to be incinerated, at an additional cost of $167,000 (£124,000).
That’s despite offers from charities including MSI Reproductive Choices and the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) to take on the costs of donating the contraception.
The Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs had also said it was, “exploring all possible avenues to prevent the destruction of these stocks, including their temporary relocation.”
A ministry spokesperson said the department had acted as soon as the plans to destroy stocks of contraception, held in Geel in the north of the country, came to its attention – including sending formal diplomatic representations to the US embassy.
French member of parliament Soumya Bourouaha asked in an official question on Monday for the prime minister to, “do everything possible to save these contraceptive stocks and deliver them to the populations who need them”.
However, the negotiations faltered, The Independent understands. The supplies are understood to now be in the process of being transferred between the two countries.
Access to contraception can be life-saving: unintended pregnancies in countries with high maternal mortality and no access to safe abortion can be a death sentence. Research by the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights research group, has found roughly the $600m spent on family planning overseas by the US government in 2024 prevented 34,000 maternal deaths and over five million unsafe abortions.
The contraception was purchased under a contract managed by development firm Chemonics, which has been partly cancelled as part of the Donald Trump’s deep cuts to foreign aid. Chemonics said it was unable to comment on the programme.
Two family planning charities said they had been told by representatives of the project that the destruction of contraceptives was part of an effort to save money, despite the fact the supplies have already been paid for.
Marcel Van Valen, IPPF’s head of supply chain said the argument that the destruction of these products would come in at a lower cost was, “utter nonsense” adding that the charity had offered to “go and collect the products, to repack them [at] our cost and to do the distribution throughout the globe with our partners and even competitors in this space”.
MSI’s associate advocacy director Sarah Shaw said, “This isn’t about government efficiencies. This is about exporting an ideology that’s harmful to women.”
To give one example, she said, “the annual contraceptive bill for Senegal for the entire country is $3 million dollars a year. So the contents of that warehouse could have met all of Senegal’s contraceptive needs for three years. And instead we’re going to see massive shortages.
“We’re going to see Senegalese women dying of unsafe abortion, girls having to drop out of school”.
A bill has been introduced by Democratic senators Jeanne Shaheen and Brian Schatz to prevent the destruction of the $9.7 of contraceptives specifically, as well as other medicines and food. It’s not expected to pass however, as it would need Republican support.
IPPF had previously raised concerns that an additional $2 million worth of condoms housed in a warehouse in Dubai were also in line to be destroyed. These were purchased under the HIV programme the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar).
A State Department spokesperson described the birth control currently earmarked for destruction as “abortifacient”, and said it did not include condoms. They added that the Mexico City Policy, also known as the Global Gag Rule – first introduced in 1984 and brought back in by every Republican president since – prohibits providing assistance to foreign nongovernmental organizations that perform or promote abortion.
It’s not clear what the administration means by birth control that is abortifacient (an agent that causes abortions).
A Democratic congressional aide whose team has visited the warehouse told The Independent their team who had visited the Belgian warehouse had seen only contraceptives, not abortion pills.
The stocks they had seen were not approaching their expiry date.
“Contraceptives are saving tons of women from things like pregnancy after sexual assault or rape and saving millions…of abortions too,” the aide said.
“It’s just not true that mifepristone or any of these abortion pills are in these warehouses. That’s completely false.”
In the past, conservative and religious groups in the US have falsely claimed contraceptives count as abortion agents.
Dr Janet Barter, president of UK clinical membership body the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare, explained an abortion was defined by when, “there is a pregnancy and the abortion tablets or medications cause that pregnancy to be lost.” On the other hand, “when contraception is used properly, there is no pregnancy.
“It’s very straightforward with pills, implants, injections. They all work by stopping you from producing an egg. If there is no egg, there is no pregnancy,” she said, while in the case of the copper coil, it largely works by killing sperm before an egg could be fertilised.
While family planning has come into the firing line, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) pointed out this was the latest in a series of destructions including 500 tons of emergency food aid and almost 800,000 mpox vaccines which had been allowed to expire while active outbreaks rage.
“The US government manufactured this problem,” said Avril Benoît, CEO of MSF USA. “Destroying valuable medical items that were already paid for by US taxpayers does nothing to combat waste or improve efficiency. This administration is willing to burn birth control and let food supplies rot, risking people’s health and lives to push a political agenda.”
This article was produced as part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project
