In 2023, during a speech at a Washington, DC, gala for the far-right Faith & Freedom Coalition, Donald Trump declared that he was proud to be “the most pro-life president” in US history. Yet with the war on the federal government that he and his billionaire sidekick Elon Musk are now waging, one probable result will likely not please his conservative Christian allies: an increase in the number of abortions, perhaps by over 1 million.
The first target of the Trump-Musk crusade has been the US Agency for International Development, the federal agency that distributes foreign aid through programs that help millions of people defend against deadly diseases (such as malaria, AIDS, tuberculosis, Covid, and ebola), obtain clean water, gain access to health care, bolster democratic institutions, and build more productive local economies. Of its $23.4 billion budget for 2024, the agency earmarked $2.2 billion for health initiatives. About one-quarter of that was to be spent on clean-water programs. Two-hundred-and-forty-seven million dollars was committed to maternal and child health. Programs for family planning and reproductive health received $191 million. (Including other government programs, Congress in recent years has annually appropriated about $600 million in total for overseas family planning.)
President Trump’s executive order freezing most US foreign aid for 90 days has led to chaos within USAID and around the world, causing the suspension of programs that conduct clinical trials, provide food assistance, and aid war refugees. For some bizarre reason, Musk has venomously attacked USAID, spreading a baseless and vicious conspiracy theory that it is a diabolical and corrupt outfit covertly financing the media, Democrats, academia, and assorted components of the left in the United States. He has, of course, provided no evidence of this bunk, and boasted of “feeding U.S.A.I.D. into the wood chipper.”
The Trump administration also proclaimed it wants to gut the agency’s staff from about 10,000 to a few hundred. Last week, a federal judge temporarily blocked pieces of the Trump-Musk plan to shutter most of the agency, but the stop-work order regarding its programs and all foreign aid remained.
With everything else, family planning and reproductive health programs were halted. In one instance, a health clinic in Vulindlela, South Africa, called in women who were participating in the testing of a new device to prevent pregnancy and HIV infection. The USAID-funded program had lost its financial support and now had to remove the device, a silicone ring inserted into a vagina, from all the women in the program.
Since the 1973 passage of the Helms Amendment—named after ultra-right Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina—US foreign aid cannot be used to fund abortion. Instead, the United States has focused on supporting contraceptive services overseas that decrease unintended pregnancies, as well as abortions, which are unsafe in many regions.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research outfit that studies reproductive health issues, Trump’s stop-work order will over three months deny 11.7 million women and girls in low- and middle-income countries contraceptive care and lead to a rise in unintended pregnancies and abortions. “Of the estimated 4.2 million unintended pregnancies, there would be 1.3 million unsafe abortions,” the group estimates in a statement provided to Mother Jones. Guttmacher focuses on unsafe abortions—which include those performed using a non-recommended method or by an untrained provider—not all abortions. The total number of abortions will be higher than the 1.3 million figure.
Here’s one example of the freeze’s impact. Ben Bellows, a former researcher at the Population Council, runs a company called Nivi Inc. It had a six-figure contract for a program to help about 300,000 women in India receive reproductive health care information, digital counseling, and referrals to nearby pharmacies and clinics. With the loss of USAID funding, he says, “projects like ours are closing. He adds, “Fewer contraceptive options mean women stay on a method they don’t like but can’t quit or don’t take up any protection against unintended pregnancy. The end of our project and others like it will lead to more unintended pregnancies and more abortions.”
So far, there have been no big howls from the anti-abortion movement about the Trump-Musk assault on USAID and foreign aid and the resulting rise in abortions. This week, the website of the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America has featured multiple posts praising Trump for anti-abortion measures he has taken since returning to the White House. There was no mention of the USAID shutdown. Ditto for the National Right to Life Committee.
Four anti-abortion advocates did write a piece for the New York Times criticizing Trump’s foreign aid freeze for halting the work of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a multibillion-dollar global health initiative known as PEPFAR started under President George W. Bush, which funds HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment in Africa. It has saved an estimated 25 million lives and prevented mother-to-child transmission of the virus, allowing nearly eight million babies to be born free of the disease. They did not address the cut-off in family-planning assistance.
At his recent confirmation hearings, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theory-monger whom Trump has tapped to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, said over and over that Trump considers every abortion “a tragedy.” By this measure, Trump and Musk, with their assault on USAID and foreign aid, will generate more than a million new tragedies.
