In Africa, Babies Are Being Born With HIV After Trump Gutted PEPFAR

A new report reveals Trump’s funding cuts are ruining decades’ worth of progress.

By Danielle Han | September 3, 2025 | 6:18pm

Photo: Getty Images Politics

In Africa, Babies Are Being Born With HIV After Trump Gutted PEPFAR

When George W. Bush first launched PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) in 2003, he called it “a work of mercy.” Since then, the health initiative has saved over twenty-six million lives, improved maternal and infant health, and enjoyed bipartisan support. In 2024, Brookings named it “possibly the single most successful policy to date in U.S.-Africa relations.” But according to a new report by a health and human-rights watchdog, Donald Trump’s funding cuts are ruining decades’ worth of progress.

The research brief, published by Physicians for Human Rights and reported by the Guardian on Wednesday, references 39 interviews from healthcare workers, patients, experts, and NGO staff in Tanzania and Uganda throughout April 2025—four months after the Trump administration froze operations in January. Examining the 100-day fallout, the data reveals that amid a growing shortage of drugs to control HIV, babies are being born with the virus, and some mothers are mulling unwanted abortions. (In other words, Trump is not only violating bodily autonomy by sentencing people to die as human incubator s—but by also forcing mothers to choose the same procedure his administration so adamantly stands against.)

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“By late April 2025, one clinic reported seeing 25 percent of a cohort of HIV positive women give birth to children infected with HIV,” the report reads. “Fears of losing a steady supply of antiretrovirals are [influencing] people’s decisions about having children.” In one case, the briefing continues, one mother had “an unwanted abortion due to fear of transmitting HIV to her baby because she might be unable to access her own ARV medication that prevents mother-to-child transmission.”

The rollbacks have also had devastating effects on the stigma around HIV/AIDS, and many LGBTQ+ communities are being caught in the crossfire. In one instance, a trans woman living with HIV reported that after the funding cuts, a hospital worker told her: “Trump has made changes; because of that, what’s left for you is death, so you should repent.” Another testimony reports: “The Tanzanians have this [saying: If the] president of the world has denied you…what are you going to be now?”

In an accompanying press release, health expert and one of the report’s authors, Emily Bass, urged Congress to stabilize remaining services while it still can: “While the damage to date has been acute, there is still a narrow window to salvage PEPFAR and save lives. Congress must act now to preserve what has been the most impactful global health program in history.”

Unfortunately, Bass’s recommendations are sure to fall on ignorant ears. According to the New York Times, the Trump administration is still withholding about $2.9 billion allocated by Congress for PEPFAR in the fiscal year 2025 (unlawfully so, as it agreed to exempt the initiative from cuts in July), and wants to quietly–and completely–shut down the program.

On Tuesday, the Heritage Foundation tweeted: “PEPFAR has spent $125 billion and morphed into a leftwing foreign aid entitlement program, yet the House Appropriations Committee wants to spend another $7 billion on it for FY 2026. That’s counterproductive toward the goal of defunding the Left.” (Ironically, the group was the same one to rail against the initiative in 2023 because it was worried the program was funding abortions abroad.)

The report concludes, “ominously, more than one respondent explicitly used the word ‘darkness’ to describe how they saw the future.” As one counselor and network leader living with HIV predicts: “People will become traumatized, psychologically stressed. Some will commit suicide. [There will be] a mental health crisis followed by fear and uncertainty and the reduced access to care. Then, of course, [there will be] increased gender-based violence, especially intimate partner violence. Disruptions of HIV prevention programs, particularly for adolescent girls, boys, women. Shortage[s] of professional personnel and physical space for HIV care [and] related services, even the major supply of drugs and medicine. Of course, [there] will also be increased workloads associated with implementing integrated care.”

On Tuesday, Atul Gawande, a former USAID senior and public-health advocate, marched alongside other HIV-AIDS activists in Washington, D.C., to bring attention to the withholding of funds. “The administration [is continuing] to deny that dismantling assistance for health and public health systems costs lives,” he said at the protest, according to the Guardian. “They believe these lives won’t matter to anybody.”

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