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Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jun 6, 2025 / 17:27 pm (CNA).
The U.S. Department of State (DOS) plans to destroy a reserve of artificial contraceptives that was previously set aside for distribution in developing countries through foreign aid programs.
The stockpile, including birth control pills, condoms, and long-term implantable contraceptives, is worth more than $12 million.
A senior State Department official confirmed to CNA that officials had concerns that some of the nongovernmental organizations previously contracted to distribute contraceptives may have participated in programs that performed coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.
According to the official, the DOS is destroying the products to comply with President Donald Trump's executive order to reinstate the Mexico City Policy, which bans taxpayer funding of organizations that promote abortion and forced sterilization abroad.
Destroying the products will cost DOS about $167,000, but rebranding the products to resell them would have cost taxpayers several million dollars, according to the official.
"There is no reason that U.S. taxpayers should be footing the bill for contraception domestically or abroad," the official added.
Rebecca Oas, the director of research for the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam) told CNA that funding of "the international family planning movement" has been "inextricably tied to the abortion lobby" ever since the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) formed the Office of Population in 1969.
"There are a lot of reasons why we should want to support global maternal health separately from family planning in order to ensure a pro-life foreign policy," said Oas, whose organization lobbies for pro-life policies in the United States' international relations.
Oas said the movement has also had a "coercion" problem for the last half-century even though current advocates of international contraception funding "insist that contraceptive use must be voluntary."
"Their metrics unfortunately lay the groundwork for potential coercion by regarding contraceptive uptake and continuation as an unfettered good by falsely conflating a purported 'need' for contraceptives with lack of access, and by regarding things like concern about side effects, openness to having more children, and religious and moral objections as 'barriers' to increased contraceptive use," Oas added. "Family planning groups will admit that their problem is not a lack of supply but a lack of demand."
In one recent example of coercion, Oas noted that several Rohingya Muslim women who are refugees in Bangladesh reported they were forced to get long-term contraceptive implantations if they wanted to receive food rations for their newborn children. These accounts were reported by The New Humanitarian last month, which also cited sources complaining that such coercion against refugees is widespread throughout the country.
Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk, a senior ethicist at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, referred to the prior U.S.-backed international family planning programs as "pro-abortion and anti-family imperialism."
"If those countries want to obtain contraceptives, let their own governments set up contracts directly with the manufacturers of these morally-problematic items and drugs, and pay for them on their own," he told CNA. "The U.S., and U.S. aid agencies, should not be serving as middle men, underwriters, or imperialist brokers for any of this."
The moral problems of contraception
Although the Trump administration is preventing tax money from funding contraceptives abroad, it has not taken any actions to discourage or restrict contraceptive use. The administration, along with an overwhelming majority of Americans across the ideological spectrum, support access to contraception.
The Catholic Church, however, opposes artificial contraception when used to prevent pregnancy as intrinsically immoral. Pacholczyk said contraceptives do not "heal or restore any broken system of the human body" but rather break the reproductive system "often by means of disrupting the delicate balance of hormonal cycles regulating a woman's reproductive well-being and fecundity."
"Unspoken ideological agendas which propagate permissiveness and various other false notions regarding our human sexuality should not be allowed to undermine the duty to exercise moral responsibility and to develop the discipline needed to live in a state of sexual restraint and order," Pacholczyk added.
In the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, St. Paul VI notes that "each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life," adding that one cannot take "any action which either before, at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse is specifically intended to prevent procreation."
"The fundamental nature of the marriage act, while uniting husband and wife in the closest intimacy, also renders them capable of generating new life — and this as a result of laws written into the actual nature of man and of woman," the Holy Father wrote. "And if each of these essential qualities, the unitive and the procreative, is preserved, the use of marriage fully retains its sense of true mutual love and its ordination to the supreme responsibility of parenthood to which man is called."
The Church permits natural family planning (NFP), which uses the body's natural cycle to know when the wife will be fertile and when she will not be fertile, which can assist a married couple in family planning.
