UNITED NATIONS - The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has faced budget cuts before, but the impact of President Donald Trump’s policies has been even more “devastating” for reproductive health worldwide, chief Natalia Kanem told AFP. The agency has been targeted by US conservatives since the Kemp-Kasten Amendment’s enactment in 1985 by Congress, when the administration of then president Ronald Reagan rallied against China’s population policies, accusing Beijing of promoting forced abortions and sterilizations. All subsequent Republican presidencies have cut US funding to UNFPA, and the second Trump administration is no exception. “We’ve had over $330 million worth of projects ended,” virtually overnight, in “some of the hardest hit regions of the world” like Afghanistan, Kanem said in an interview coinciding with the release of the UNFPA’s annual report Tuesday. “So yes, we are suffering.” Kanem pointed to the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan as an example, where over the years more than 18,000 pregnancies were delivered by “heroic midwives” who “conducted these over 18,000 deliveries without a single maternal death, which you know, in a crisis situation is extraordinary.”
“Those maternity wards today have closed. The funding cuts immediately have meant that those midwives are no longer able to do their jobs,” Kanem said.
Although it is too soon to estimate the precise impacts of the US cuts, they will inevitably result in increased maternal mortality and more unintended pregnancies, according to Kanem. “What’s different this time for UNFPA is that our ecosystem of other reproductive health actors who might be able to fill in for us,” Kanem said, adding they are “reeling from huge impact of having their funding denied.”
The Trump administration has slashed many such external aid programs. “So it is very lamentable that this year, to me, has been drastically worse than ever before, precisely because now everybody is caught up in the whirlwind.”
“The withdrawal of the United States from the funding arena for reproductive health has been devastating,” Kanem said.
