When the Trump administration ended most of USAID’s population control programs, $10 million in abortifacient contraceptives and condoms were in transit to Africa.
The drugs and devices, now marooned in a warehouse in Belgium, constitute an acid test of the Trump administration’s commitment to ending America’s decades-long promotion of abortion and coercive population control programs overseas.
The huge stockpiles of birth control pills, implants, shots, and IUDs in storage are all abortifacient in nature. In other words, they can and do cause early-term abortions. So, sending them on to Africa would violate the Mexico City Policy which forbids abortifacients.
And then there is the problem of coercion—a violation of the Kemp-Kasten Amendment—since some governments still force drugs and devices like these on women to drive down the birth rate.
The question in my mind was: Would the few surviving USAID functionaries, now hanging out at the State Department, find a way to ship this massive supply to Africa anyway? Would, perhaps, they find a way to quietly pass the deadly devices on to their “friends” at the IPPF or Marie Stopes International (MSI), who have been eager to get their hands on the stockpile? Or would they find some European government, perhaps Belgium or Sweden, to continue their decades-long project to contracept, sterilize and abort as many women as possible in the name of stopping “overpopulation”, mitigating “climate change,” or, most absurdly of all, promoting “reproductive health”?
Or would the deadly stockpile simply be destroyed?
The State Department confirmed in late July 2025 that a “preliminary decision was made to destroy certain abortifacient birth control commodities from terminated Biden-era USAID contracts.”
Some reports say that the destruction is already underway, with contraceptives being transported by the truckload from Belgium to a medical waste facility in France, where they will be incinerated. The cost is reportedly $167,000 but is well worth it, given how many lives will be saved.
Of course, the abortion/population control groups, who sought to rescue the contraceptives from the incinerators, are appalled at the destruction of the “ammunition” they were using in their war on population.
And a number of dying European countries were unhappy that they would not be allowed to re-export death.
But Africans in the targeted countries, which included Kenya, Congo, Tanzania, Mali, and Zambia, are delighted. Who wouldn’t be, to learn that their wife and daughters would not be targeted for abortifacient contraceptives like Depo-Provera?
And so is the rapidly growing Catholic Church in Africa, which has long protested what it calls the ideological colonization of Africa by Americans and Europeans.
As Archbishop Gerard Lerotholi of Lesotho told our investigators last year, he could not “vouch for” the activities of one of USAID’s major clients, Catholic Relief Services, because of its involvement in such questionable programs. Archbishop Lerotholi complained that CRS “neither informs him about its activities in his archdiocese nor takes the views of the local Church into account.”
But, above all, it is those who support PRI’s work, and the work of other pro-life groups, who should be delighted that this administration is taking real action against the death peddlers, not merely spouting rhetoric for political gain as we have so often seen in the past.
Compare this action with those of the previous “pro-life” administrations. (We can ignore Democrats, who have been zealously exporting abortion in the form of anti-life pills, injections, and sterilizations, all neatly wrapped in latex, for decades.)
Even the “pro-life” administration of President George Bush was content with half measures.
To be sure, it defunded the UNFPA when we presented evidence of its involvement in China’s forced abortion and sterilization program. But it then “reprogrammed” the funds to go to other population control groups.
The Bush administration enforced the Mexico City Policy, defunding Marie Stopes when PRI presented evidence that MSI was promoting and performing abortions in violation of the policy. But then it turned around and sent the funds to other groups doing more or less the same thing.
In other words, the pro-life movement received lots of feel-good rhetoric from the Bush administration, but only occasional action, and this only when we loudly and publicly demanded it.
In fact, I am 100% certain that if the $10 million worth of contraceptives sitting in a warehouse in Belgium had been denied to UNFPA or MSI under Bush, the population controllers at the old USAID, supported by Bush’s pro-abortion Secretary of State, Colin Powell, would have quickly found a way to hand them over to another group—which would have gone on to do exactly the same thing: Use them to abort, sterilize and contracept as many people as possible.
Many people in Washington, D.C. are upset that the Trump administration is deadly serious about protecting Life, and ending programs designed to abort, sterilize, and contracept the world.
But we at PRI are delighted.
Because that fact is, as the Director of our Latin American office, Carlos Polo, quipped, “If something belongs in the trash, sometimes it deserves to go up in smoke.”
