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Only three weeks into the Trump administration’s suspension of money for foreign aid, those who work in women’s health say the impact has already been devastating.
Feb. 13, 2025, 3:32 p.m. ET
Women are being turned away at clinics that provided maternity and reproductive care and cancer and H.I.V. treatment. Doctors and nurses have been placed on leave and told to go home. Across the globe, aid agencies say, decades of female-focused health care work has been “decimated overnight.”
Three weeks into President Trump’s suspension of all foreign aid, and already the impact on millions of women and girls is catastrophic and health care systems are “crumbling,” according to the United Nations and other women-focused global aid agencies.
“You can’t get treatment and you can’t get care because America has decided on a whim that you are not worthy, that is unfathomable,” said Elisha Dunn-Georgiou, president and chief executive of the Global Health Council. “We are in the fight for everybody’s lives.”
For example, as of Wednesday, about 2.5 million women and girls have been denied contraceptive care, said Dr. Elizabeth Sully, the principal research scientist at the Guttmacher Institute. That number will balloon to 11.7 million by the end of the Trump administration’s 90-day review process for foreign aid.
The Trump administration has frozen nearly all foreign aid pending a review “to identify programs that work and continue them and to identify programs that are not aligned with our national interest,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio last week during a visit to the Dominican Republic. The United States Agency for International Development, or U.S.A.I.D., through which much of aid for the women’s groups was distributed, has been essentially gutted and what remains will now be run out of the State Department.
At a panel organized by the United Nations, representatives from the United Nations Population Fund, the Global Health Council, MSI Reproductive Choices, the Guttmacher Institute, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and the Universal Access Project at the U.N. Foundation said they had come together to sound the alarm.
