How $9.7M in lost US contraceptives disrupted family planning globally

For weeks, Dr. Bakari Omary has been hearing the same refrain. Contraceptives are needed — and in many cases, they’re needed desperately. But across Omary’s native Tanzania, those contraceptives are becoming harder to find. That’s due to not just the unraveling of USAID, but from the U.S. government’s slated incineration of $9.7 million in contraceptives. The State Department has declined to provide an update on whether those contraceptives have actually been torched. And as a result, it’s unclear whether Tanzania’s share — which accounts for nearly 30% of the country’s annual need — will ever reach the women who depend on them. “Women are saying, doctors, if you don’t give us a contraceptive, we are going to get pregnant,” said Omary, a project coordinator at UMATI, a reproductive health-focused organization in Tanzania. “[They say] we have no choice. We can’t stop our husbands.” Women in Tanzania have an average of 4.8 children in their lifetime, one of the highest fertility rates in the world. But for years, women’s access to contraceptives had been climbing — in large part, due to donations from the U.S. government. In 2023, USAID contributed $7 million in contraceptives to Tanzania, the second-largest shipment that year. But in 2025, those distributions came to a halt. Hours after President Donald Trump returned to office, foreign aid was frozen across the world — and in the months that followed, an analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 85% of USAID’s family planning and reproductive health programs have been terminated. In May, Trump’s 2026 budget proposal recommended eliminating family planning funding entirely. And in July, the State Department told Devex it had made the “preliminary decision” to destroy $9.7 million in “certain abortifacient birth control commodities from terminated Biden-era USAID contracts.” “The destruction of existing abortifacient commodities purchased under the Biden Administration will cost $167,000,” the spokesperson added. But according to several sources familiar with the commodities, including one congressional aide who visited the warehouse, those supplies are not abortifacients. For decades, the U.S. government has restricted its foreign aid money from being used to perform abortions through the Helms Amendment, which was passed into law in 1973. Those familiar with the commodities said they were made up mainly of condoms and long-acting contraceptives, such as implants and injectables. Some 40% of those contraceptives were supposed to go to Tanzania alone, according to the International Planned Parenthood Federation, or IPPF, along with several other African countries — such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Niger — where women have an average of more than six children each. “What we know is that for Tanzania alone, these commodities included just over 1 million injectables and just over 365,000 contraceptive implants,” said Mallah Tabot, the sexual and reproductive health and rights lead at IPPF Africa. “The U.S. government claims that this destruction is about abortion, but the facts say otherwise.” IPPF also estimated that the loss of those commodities will strip Mali of 1.1 million expected oral contraceptives and 95,800 implants, while Zambia will lose 48,400 expected implants and 295,000 injectables. The Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition found that the result of the incineration — not just in Tanzania, but across the several other countries those commodities were meant to reach — will result in 362,000 unintended pregnancies, 161,000 unplanned births, 110,000 unsafe abortions, and 718 preventable maternal deaths. “Just when we are trying to make sense of the sweeping USAID cuts, now we have to face another man-made act,” said Tabot. It’s something that Omary, who works in Tanzania’s western region of Kigoma, is seeing every day. In several of the clinics UMATI supports, there have been stockouts of implants, female condoms, and injectables. In others, Omary is seeing supplies dwindle, with one clinic maintaining contraceptives for just 1 in 5 women who need it. “There are many cases in Kigoma where there is maternal death related to multiparity,” said Omary, referring to when women have two or more children in quick succession. “Women come [into the clinic with complications from] pregnancy, severe eclampsia or hemorrhage, or severe anemia. When you cut down their history, you find that their last baby is just one year old, or nine months old.” And now, Omary warned, that situation is likely to be exacerbated. Last month, the U.S. Congress cleared a $9 billion clawback in previously approved foreign aid, including $500 million for activities the White House’s budget chief, Russell Vought, claimed “worsen[ed] the lives of women and children, like ‘family planning] and ‘reproductive health.’” “This proposal would not reduce treatment but would eliminate programs that are antithetical to American interests,” Vought wrote, adding that such a cut “best serves the American taxpayer.” It wasn’t the first time Vought — or other officials in the Trump administration — had targeted family planning. Critiques of these programs have been central to both the first and second Trump administrations, which have aligned themselves with the Republican Party’s pro-life ideology. During both terms, Trump began his first week in office by reinstating the Mexico City Policy, a piece of legislation that, for years, Democratic presidents have rescinded and Republican presidents have put back in place. When in effect, the policy requires foreign nonprofits to certify that they would not “perform or actively promote abortion” through funds from any source — including those not related to the U.S. government — as a condition for receiving family-planning funds from the U.S. In 2017, Trump expanded that policy further, making that pledge a condition for receiving any U.S. global health assistance. He reinstated that version of the policy again on Jan. 24, the same day that his administration’s stop-work order reverberated across the world. Soon after, the program cancellations began. By February, the United Nations’ family planning agency, UNFPA, reported that all 48 of its funding agreements with the U.S. government had been canceled, including those for women across 25 conflict zones. “This devastating decision will force thousands of health clinics to close,” UNFPA Executive Director Natalia Kanem wrote in a statement after the initial round of cuts. “Women in crisis zones will be forced to give birth without medicines, midwives or equipment, putting their lives and their babies’ lives in jeopardy. Rape survivors will be denied counselling and medical care.” Those grants totaled $337 million, the agency said — and while seven of those termination notices were rescinded days later, by early April, two of those seven programs in Syria and Afghanistan were terminated once again. And now, the family planning component of USAID’s Global Health Supply Chain Program — through which the $9.7 million of commodities were purchased during the Biden administration — remains in flux, hollowing out a program that in 2023, delivered $60.8 million in oral contractives, condoms, intrauterine devices, injectable contractives, and contraceptive implants across the world, according to the program’s latest contraceptive report. Contrary to the State Department’s claims, abortifacients aren’t listed anywhere in the report. “This is about unmet need,” said Tabot. “This is about women planning their families and planning their pregnancies. It has nothing to do with abortions.” The State Department declined to comment on this story.