The U.S. Agency for International Development confirms: contraceptive pills, IUDs, and hormonal implants, worth about $9.7 million, intended for low-income countries, are to be destroyed at the direction of officials from the Trump administration. This is reported by The New York Times, writes UNN.
Details
According to NYT materials, the supplies were stuck in a warehouse in Belgium – proposals from international organizations to distribute or sell them were rejected, and liquidation was chosen as the "cheapest option."
USAID purchased the batch of contraceptives before the agency's large-scale transformation this year. After decisions made in Washington, the supplies ended up "in limbo" at a Belgian warehouse – partly due to the State Department's position that contraception is allegedly not "life-saving," and the U.S. would no longer fund its procurement for poor countries.
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Internal documents and correspondence between USAID and the State Department, released in the media, indicate that several international organizations – including the Gates Foundation and others – offered to either buy or gratuitously accept these supplies. Such options would have allowed avoiding losses for taxpayers or even returning part of the funds to the budget. Instead, administration representatives ordered their destruction; the operation was estimated to cost about $167,000.
As the NYT writes, the decision to proceed with destruction was motivated by the desire for "the cheapest option that best reflects the administration's significant concerns about funding this activity." One of the initiators of the order was Jeremy Levin, a high-ranking State Department official responsible for foreign aid and humanitarian issues.
The Belgian government, in turn, tried through diplomatic channels to prevent the incineration – Belgian and Flemish authorities negotiated, sought ways to resell or redistribute the supplies, and even considered legislative prohibitions on the destruction of usable medical products.
Tom Demeyer from the Flemish Minister of Environment's staff reported:
"We have not received an official request for permission to incinerate." A USAID memorandum estimated the cost of resource loss at $9.9 million, plus an approximate $167,000 in destruction costs."
The deliberate destruction of nearly $10 million worth of contraceptives under the frankly false pretext that they are abortifacients is an outrageous act of cruelty
The exact dates and location of the final destruction have not yet been officially confirmed, and administration representatives have not provided detailed comments on further specifics.
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