Trump officials falsely reported to The New York Times that $9.7 million worth of birth control pills, intrauterine devices (IUDs), and hormonal implants meant to be given to women in low-income countries had been destroyed on Sept. 11. The contraceptives had been purchased by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) earlier this year, prior to Trump’s freeze and 90-day review on foreign aid in January. USAID is a government organization tasked with administering humanitarian care globally on behalf of the United States. The agency has since been effectively dismantled by the president for being cited as wasted expenditure, and has had 83% of their programs terminated.
For months, the medicines and devices had been essentially abandoned in a Belgian warehouse after the State Department said that methods of birth control were not considered to be lifesaving and that the U.S. would no longer be supplying contraceptives to developing nations, cutting off nearly 50 million women from access to birth control methods. The State Department then claimed that they would be incinerating the birth control by the end of July, an operation that would cost over $100,000 in taxpayer money. The statement was met with outrage from several international humanitarian organizations, many of which offered to buy and distribute the products themselves.
With the July deadline having come and gone, a reporter for the Times reached out to the State Department to ask what had become of the contraceptives. A USAID spokesperson named Rachel Cauley replied, “Yes. I can confirm they were destroyed.” However, when Belgian authorities, in response to The New York Times report, received clearance on Sept. 12 to enter the warehouse where the contraceptives were being held, they were able to confirm that the supply was still there. Gross misconduct aside, a particularly alarming piece of this situation is the assertion that birth control induces abortions, as found in USAID’s original statement. Cauley wrote to the Times reporter, “President Trump is committed to protecting the lives of unborn children all around the world. The administration will no longer supply abortifacient birth control under the guise of foreign aid.”
THE FACTS
This notion is unequivocally false. To clarify, birth control prevents pregnancy by delaying ovulation, fertilization, or implantation. Abortions are medical procedures that terminate an existing pregnancy by stopping the growth of the fetus and/or expelling the fetus from the uterus. And for the record, even emergency contraceptives, like Plan B, do not induce abortions. They are meant to prevent pregnancy in the event of having sexual intercourse without a method of birth control or the method of birth control has failed.
This is the latest in several attempts to restrict, with the ultimate goal of banning, abortions by the Trump administration. In January, Trump signed an executive order expanding the enforcement of the Hyde Amendment to end the use of federal funds to “promote” abortion in government programs. In June, the administration rescinded federal guidance that specified, under the Emergency Medical Treatment Labor Act (EMTLA), patients should be able to receive an abortion if it were medically necessary, even in states with abortion restrictions or bans. Not to mention the withholding of Title X funding to Planned Parenthood, pardoning of 23 anti-abortion activists, the taking down of the federal website for reproductive rights, and of course, gutting USAID.
It should be noted that the director for the Office of Management and Budget, which runs USAID, is Russell Vought. He was the chief architect of Project 2025 and seeks to eliminate access to abortion as well as comprehensive sexuality education. He has gone on record saying that he believes there should be more Christianity embedded in the government and public life. Seeing as it was under his oversight that this conflation of contraceptives and abortions was stated by the USAID spokesperson, access to birth control could now very well be at risk.
In fact, the crackdown on contraceptives is imminent. In a study published by JAMA Network Open in 2024, in the 16 months following the Supreme Court’s reversal of the landmark case Roe v. Wade, fewer prescriptions for birth control pills and emergency contraceptives were filled in states with the highest restrictions on abortion. Earlier this month, South Carolina introduced sweeping legislation to ban not only abortions, but also certain forms of birth control and restriction on in-vitro fertilization (IVF).
The Trump administration did not just lie about destroying nearly $10 million worth of birth control, it lied to advance a dangerous narrative. By deliberately blurring the lines between contraceptives and abortions, they are laying the rhetorical groundwork for policies that could make access to birth control as precarious as abortion rights have already become.