Women and Girls Are Paying the Price With Cuts to Foreign Aid

Human beings have a strong ability to ignore things they don’t like or find unpleasant. For example, who wants to hear awful news about people suffering in countries far away?

This seems to be the case with cuts to foreign aid and the dismantling of the U.S.

Agency for International Development in early 2025. Perhaps people are ignoring it, or maybe it’s not even being covered in the mainstream news. Or it's just happening far away.

Family Planning Saves Lives

The Guardian recently reported that cuts to US aid funding have directly led to the closure of more than 1,000 family planning clinics, and millions of people have been left without access to contraceptives or care. This includes those who have suffered sexual assault, as part of a “radical shift towards conservative ideologies that deliberately block human rights”, according to the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF).

An independent, peer-reviewed analysis in The Lancet estimated that U.S.A.I.D. assistance had saved ninety-two million lives over two decades.

Last month, The New Yorker noted the human toll is “appalling and will continue to grow. But these losses will be harder to see than those of war. For one, they unfold slowly.”

Cutting Crucial Reproductive Health Surveys

A side effect of all of this is the loss of Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS).  These are crucial in understanding the impact of and need for family planning services and collecting information from individuals, families and communities in numerous areas, from reproductive health to economic development.

Per the United Nations:

In February 2025, the United States Government announced plans to terminate the DHS Program as a part of its larger cuts to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which funded the program (The New York Times, 2025), leading to immediate calls for action concerning the completion of surveys in the field, restoration of access to existing data and a transformation of how population surveys will be collected, shared and funded going forward.

The UN went on to say that the surveys allowed for the estimation of demographic and health indicators where and when it would otherwise have been impossible. 

Is This What the World Wants?

As global conflicts intensify and the impacts of climate change worsen, daily life is becoming harder for millions of people. Cutting foreign aid at this moment puts countless lives at risk.

Meanwhile, the world’s population is expected to grow by a further 2 billion by the end of the century.  This is the time to increase investment in reproductive health, maternal and child health, community development and education. It is not the time to make drastic cuts.

Per the Guttmacher Institute, to fully meet the need for global sexual and reproductive health would cost $104 billion and reduce maternal deaths by two-thirds and avert 1.5 million newborn deaths each year.  Contrast that with global military spending, which reached an unprecedented $2.7 trillion in 2024.

Will the world avert its eyes and allow vast levels of pain and suffering that could have been avoided?  Time will tell.

Suzanne York is Director of Transition Earth.

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash