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USAID’s reproductive health funding has saved millions of lives. Now it’s gone. • Alabama Reflector

Published

4 months ago

February 9, 2025

Staff Editor

alabamareflector.com – Jessica Kutz, The 19th – 2025-02-09 07:01:00

USAID’s reproductive health funding has saved millions of lives. Now it’s gone.

by Jessica Kutz, The 19th, Alabama Reflector
February 9, 2025

This story was originally reported by Jessica Kutz of The 19th. Meet Jessica and read more of her reporting on gender, politics and policy.

On Sunday, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, boasted that he was gutting the federal agency tasked with providing foreign aid to its poorest.

“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk, the tech billionaire head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, posted on his social media platform, X.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was established in 1961 to provide foreign assistance to impoverished countries around the world through food aid and humanitarian and economic development work. It is also one of the world’s largest providers of contraception through its family planning program. According to the Congressional Research Service, the agency’s funding in 2023 was about $40 billion, which represented less than 1 percent of the federal budget.

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Beth Schlachter, senior director of U.S. engagement for MSI Reproductive Choices, a global non-governmental organization (NGO) that provides contraception and abortion care, said Musk’s comment made her feel sick.

“You can just hear the cavalier, malicious, cruel approach to it as they’re laughing,” she said, referring to a conversation Musk broadcast earlier in the day on his platform about the cuts. “I can’t get past it. It’s so malicious and disgusting. You have to believe that the cruelty is the point.”

MSI Reproductive Choices doesn’t receive USAID funding, but Schlachter has worked for decades at both the State Department and with NGOs on programs that build up support for sexual and reproductive health rights, maternal care and access to contraception globally. She’s seen the ways USAID funding has saved lives through its family planning initiatives. Now she worries about the immediate fallout for people across the world. She and other experts say women and LGBTQ+ people will face significant and deadly consequences because of an abrupt pause in aid.

“There will be maternal deaths, and there will be unintended pregnancies,” she said.

USAID started its family planning program in 1965 as an anti-population growth initiative, Schlachter said. “[It was] really a racist program to ensure that Black and Brown people had less babies. But it morphed over time into being the backbone of the reproductive health sector within global health.”

Experts say the family planning work, which ranges from sexual education, access to contraceptives, and maternal and infant health, have all been implemented as a way to bolster the human rights of women and girls around the world. By giving people the ability to delay pregnancy into adulthood, and the choice to go to school or have fewer children, they and their families are healthier.

“Ultimately, in planning their families, their children are more prosperous. They themselves are able to work now,” said Onikepe Owolabi, director of international research at the Guttmacher Institute, a Washington-based organization that tracks reproductive health policy.

USAID has been rocked by the Trump administration after an executive order signed on his first day in office halted all foreign funding for 90 days and a stop work order issued on January 24 for all existing foreign assistance awards. While a waiver was issued a week later to continue funding for “life-saving humanitarian assistance,” family planning was specifically excluded from the action. Separate from the executive orders, it was reported by the New York Times on Thursday that nearly all staff from the agency of about 10,000 employees would be let go.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been announced as the acting administrator for the agency — signaling a potential, though according to legal experts not constitutional, move to dissolve the agency’s functions into his department. The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.

For over a decade, USAID has spent about $600 million annually for its family planning work.

“The good that money has done is unquantifiable,” Owolabi said. She received training through a USAID-funded program for HIV prevention and treatment and family planning while she was a medical student in Nigeria.

She’s seen how that money has led to better maternal health outcomes and helped combat HIV in places like Rwanda and Uganda through training doctors and providing supplies and antiretrovirals to clinics. Now she’s hearing accounts of how that work has been affected.

“Imagine a rural area in Uganda, a small health outpost where women will come with their babies for care, or their pregnancy, or [where a] child can receive immunization, or for family planning counseling,” she said. “The staff can’t work because of the stop work order, the drugs, the medications, the commodities … are no longer available because USAID is one of the largest procurers and suppliers of commodities in this country. So you handicap health workers, you handicap the health system. You hold the logistics and supply chain ransom.”

Demonstrators gathered on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2025, to protest the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)

As of 2023, 67 percent of contraceptives supplied through USAID went to Africa, where some of the leading causes of death for girls and women are related to pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections like HIV. According to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, if no contraceptive care is provided by USAID in 2025, that will lead to about 4.2 million unintended pregnancies and over 8,000 deaths related to pregnancy and childbirth complications.

“Women will die as a result of this decision,” said Rachel Clement, senior director of government relations at PAI, a global advocacy group. “Those people will die from preventable maternal mortality causes.”

Owolabi said even Momentum, a program implemented during the first Trump administration to help women survive childbirth in places like India, Senegal and Nigeria, has been shut down. One of the initiatives under the program was created to reduce maternal and infant mortality by training doctors on how to perform cesarean sections and other types of lifesaving procedures, as well as how to insert and take out intrauterine devices. Without that critical care, “they are exposing women with complicated pregnancies, a majority of who are low income, to die simply because they can’t access it,” she said.

The pause on family planning work has also impacted the United Nations Population Fund, the UN’s sexual and reproductive health agency. USAID provides between 40 to 50 percent of the funding that goes to humanitarian work at the UN.

This includes maternal health programs in Afghanistan, where the UN has had a presence for about 40 years. Up until the funding pause, the UN was able to continue providing that care through midwives that worked in rural health clinics in mountainous regions of the country.

“We try to have a midwife in every single one of [the clinics], and we have over 1,700 midwives that are supported by U.S. funds that are mostly frozen right now,” a UN official said.

Prevention and care for HIV is another concern for advocates. While the State Department issued a waiver to continue providing funding for HIV treatment, experts say it’s still not reaching clinics on the ground through programs like the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. The global program, known as PEPFAR, has been credited with saving more than 26 million lives through providing access to antiretrovirals, which suppress the virus, and preventing the spread of HIV in 5 million children, according to UNAIDS, the United Nations program on AIDS.

While the State Department funds the program, much of the work is implemented by USAID. According to reporting from The New York Times, no money has been distributed from USAID since the initial freeze on foreign assistance, and stop work orders are still in effect. Groups on the ground are waiting for instructions to restart work, but so far none have been issued. As a result, hundreds of organizations had to halt services, according to The New York Times.

Once someone stops taking antiretrovirals, the virus can become detectable again within a few weeks, making people more likely to transmit it to others. A temporary disruption to the medication can also lead to drug resistance for someone with HIV, making their regimen less effective. PEPFAR also pays for PrEP, a medication that protects those at high risk of contracting HIV. According to the State Department, PEPFAR accounts for 90 percent of PrEP treatment initiations globally.

While advocates say HIV treatments could resume under the State Department program, new executive orders aimed at weeding out “gender ideology” and DEI in the department mean it may not serve those most at risk of exposure to HIV.

“Are they going to allow men who have sex with men? Are they going to include female sex workers, who have the highest risk of HIV transmission, in programming?” Owolabi asked. “Or are they going to impose their values on programming, and thus not going to protect the most at risk?”

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Alabama Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com.

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News from the South - Alabama News Feed

In polluted Birmingham community, Trump terminates funding for air monitoring

Published

1 day ago

June 15, 2025

Staff Editor

alabamareflector.com – Lee Hedgepeth, Inside Climate News – 2025-06-15 07:01:00

by Lee Hedgepeth, Inside Climate News, Alabama Reflector
June 15, 2025

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

BIRMINGHAM — When Jilisa Milton received the grant termination letter, she wasn’t surprised. She suspected this day would come.

The language the Greater Birmingham Alliance to Stop Pollution (GASP) had used in its application to the Environmental Protection Agency had been clear. “We’re talking about helping a community,” Milton, GASP’s executive director, said last week, “where Black people have been disproportionately impacted.”

Black residents had breathed heavily polluted air from a nearby coke plant for decades, and their neighborhoods had been declared a federal hazardous waste Superfund site after it was determined that waste soil laced with arsenic, lead and benzo(a)pyrene, a human carcinogen, from several nearby coke plants had been spread around their homes as yard fill.

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In light of this history and continued industrial pollution, GASP had obtained a $75,000 air monitoring grant from the Biden EPA in 2023.

Milton received the letter earlier this month from officials in President Donald Trump’s EPA terminating the grant because it no longer aligned with the agency’s priorities.

“I knew at some point they would notice the language of our grant,” Milton said, in that it made reference to services intended to help Black people.

Still, she said she doesn’t regret the way GASP characterized the situation on the ground in north Birmingham—that the need for air monitoring stemmed from the city’s history of corporate exploitation of majority-Black workers and residents.

Growing up in Birmingham, Milton said her grandparents often discussed the legacy of workers in the Magic City—so-nicknamed because of the seemingly supernatural economic boom spurred by steel production following the end of the Civil War.

“The majority of these workers were Black, and we can see the disparate impact that still has today,” Milton said. “And it’s really important for Birmingham to talk about our legacy and our history.”

Sanitizing that history, then, to comply with the Trump administration’s stated opposition to all things DEI and environmental justice—as if they were the same thing, just because they both often involve Black people—doesn’t sit well with her.

“I think the narrative work is gone then,” Milton said. “And we have to think about history so we don’t live it again.”

The grant, awarded through EPA’s small grants program, was set to fund GASP’s efforts to train residents in using air monitoring equipment to help establish a community air monitoring program, allowing those in north Birmingham access to critical information about the pollutants filling their lungs every day.

In addition to what is now the 35th Avenue Superfund site, encompassing the neighborhoods of Collegeville, Harriman Park and Fairmont, north Birmingham remains home to several polluters, leaving its residents in the 90th percentile for particulate matter, according to EJ Screen, a government tool also recently shuttered by the Trump administration.

That context of present and past pollution was what made securing funds for air monitoring so important, Milton said, giving residents an opportunity to learn more about the continued impact of industry on their health.

“For decades, residents of North Birmingham and other historically marginalized communities have been forced to live in the shadow of toxic industries with little support or transparency,” Milton wrote in a statement after receiving the termination letter. “The grant made it possible for us to monitor and document the pollution people live with everyday. Revoking this support sends a message that the health of Black, Brown, and low-income communities in Alabama is disposable.”

In its letter, EPA officials said the agency no longer supported the grant’s objectives.

“The purpose of this communication is to notify you that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is hereby terminating Assistance Agreement No. EQ-02D22522 awarded to GASP,” the letter said. “This EPA Assistance Agreement is terminated in its entirety effective immediately on the grounds that the award no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities. The objectives of the award are no longer consistent with EPA funding priorities.”

Piles of coal and coke waste remain on the ground at the Bluestone Coke in Birmingham nearly three years after the plant closed. (Lee Hedgepeth/Inside Climate News)

GASP’s isn’t the only environmental justice effort in Alabama nixed by federal officials. In April, Trump announced the termination of what the administration termed an “illegal DEI” settlement aimed at addressing sewage issues in the state’s black belt that have left its majority-Black residents sometimes unable to flush their own toilets.

The agreement, reached under the Biden Administration, required the state’s Department of Public Health to improve sanitation efforts in the region. It’s still unclear what that termination will ultimately mean on the ground.

In the end, Milton said the impact of the administration’s decision to terminate the north Birmingham air monitoring grant is racist.

“Look at the way they talk about environmental justice,” she said of administration officials. “They say it’s illegal to address these issues. So you hear the things they say, and it’s reasonable to discern from that that the impact is racist, and that what they’re doing is intentional.”

People of all races are forced to face the consequences of polluted air and water, Milton emphasized, but ignoring the reality that people of color have borne and continue to bear the brunt of industrial exploitation isn’t helpful. In fact, she explained, doing so could undermine the relationship organizations like hers have built with residents of color living through the impacts of pollution every single day.

“I don’t want to sacrifice the trust we have in communities that want to be heard because they notice that we start to change the way we talk about these issues,” she said. “Because they are the most important stakeholders. They’re who we’re here to serve.”

Moving forward, GASP plans to appeal the termination with EPA officials, Milton said, though she suspects the agency is unlikely to change its mind. If that’s the case, the nonprofit will do what they’ve always done—look to individual donors to fill in the gaps. It’s work that can’t be abandoned, Milton said. Not if she can help it.

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The post In polluted Birmingham community, Trump terminates funding for air monitoring appeared first on alabamareflector.com

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Left-Leaning

This article exhibits a Left-Leaning political bias through its framing, language, and emphasis on environmental justice, racial disparities, and criticism of the Trump administration’s policy decisions. While it is presented under the banner of a nonprofit, non-partisan outlet, the narrative foregrounds the disproportionate impact on Black communities and casts recent Republican-led actions—particularly the termination of air monitoring and civil rights-related initiatives—in a negative light. It frames these decisions as racially motivated and harmful, aligning with progressive values on environmental equity and systemic injustice, without offering counterarguments or perspectives from the opposing side.

News from the South - Alabama News Feed

Faith Time: Challenges to faith Part I

Published

1 day ago

June 15, 2025

Staff Editor

www.youtube.com – WKRG – 2025-06-15 06:40:01

SUMMARY: Rabbi Steven Silberman of Congregation Ahavas Chesed discussed challenges to faith on Faith Time, emphasizing how global instability prompts deep spiritual questioning, such as “Where is God?” He highlighted the importance of community in Judaism, tracing its roots from Abraham to modern Jewish identity as an extended family. In today’s mobile society, he stressed the need for individuals to find belonging in local Jewish communities. Healthy questioning includes seeking purpose, understanding suffering, and connecting with God. Silberman encouraged engagement through prayer, charitable acts, activism, study, Hebrew language, and ties to Israel as essential ways to navigate and strengthen faith.

We talk about facing challenges to fundamental beliefs.

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News from the South - Alabama News Feed

Scattered summer storms in Alabama for Father's Day.

Published

1 day ago

June 15, 2025

Staff Editor

www.youtube.com – WVTM 13 News – 2025-06-15 06:35:38

SUMMARY: Alabama will experience scattered heavy storms on Father’s Day afternoon, following a cloudy and foggy morning with improving visibility. There’s no severe weather threat, but storms may bring frequent lightning, heavy downpours, and localized flooding, especially in areas like Walker and Winston counties affected by previous heavy rain. Temperatures will be in the mid to upper 80s with hot, steamy conditions. Storm coverage is expected to be more widely scattered than yesterday, but outdoor plans should account for possible rain. Summer storms will continue throughout the week, with decreasing storm activity later, leading to higher heat indices and approaching triple-digit feels-like temperatures by week’s end.