Trump’s Foreign Aid Cuts Are Ruining Ethiopia’s Progress on Maternal Mortality

And enabling the country's anti-abortion movement.

Politics
Trump’s Foreign Aid Cuts Are Ruining Ethiopia’s Progress on Maternal Mortality

Since January, Donald Trump has–surprise!–inflicted an innumerable amount of devastation on reproductive rights and maternal health. If you’re a regular Jezebel reader, you know this is nothing new. But a new report by the Independent reveals the wickedness isn’t just barbaric–it’s global.

The article focuses on Ethiopia, how it once “won the battle against its maternal deaths crisis,” and well, how Trump’s foreign aid cuts might just ruin the progress. In 2005, the country repealed its draconian abortion ban, which only permitted the procedure to save the mother’s life or her health (sound familiar?). In the two decades since, abortion has been legal in cases of rape, incest, fetal abnormalities, among other exceptions. The progress thereafter was significant. A paper published in May 2024 revealed that during the first 20 years of the 21st century, the country had slashed its maternal death rate by 72% and neonatal death rate by 44%—an impressive feat compared to other governments in sub-Saharan Africa.

But between canceling 83% of USAID programs in March and slashing away billions of aid through the One Big Beautiful (I-am-so-sick-and-tired-of-this) Bill, legislators have essentially deserted aid organizations around the world and left thousands to cope without life-saving treatments. For Ethiopia, one of the largest beneficiaries of U.S. aid dollars, it has also meant shutting down healthcare providers.

Funding cuts have “significantly affected accessibility of services including family planning, maternal health services, even newborn, child health, adolescent, and youth health services,” Dr. Hailemariam Segni, the president of the Ethiopian Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology, explained to the outlet. Still, he predicts that “the number of pregnancies will increase”—and with it, so will the complications. The Independent writes:

With the dust settling after Trump ordered all foreign aid work to stop in January of this year, Ethiopia has come out as one of the biggest losers in the cuts. By March, the country had seen the second biggest cut by dollar amount, tied with the Democratic Republic of Congo and exceeded only by funding cuts to Ukraine, according to the Center for Global Development. Dr Shibru says 85 per cent of NGOs, crucial in the delivery of many of the country’s health services, had stopped work or were shuttered.

A quick refresher that foreign aid cuts aren’t just sadistic and cruel, they’re unnecessary. It’s not about “fiscal conservatism”: the federal government spends just a paltry 1% of its budget on foreign aid—a literal drip in the bucket. It’s not “America First”: it’s a huge erosion of U.S. influence and a huge shake-up to the very institutions it set up in the first place (not that any said institutions are perfect–but that’s a fight for another time). And any reproductive health or family planning organization abroad that so much as whispers the word “abortion” gets its funding slashed by Trump’s global gag rule. So much for the party of “family values.

Unfortunately, funding cuts are just the tip of the iceberg. Conceringly, there’s a growing “resurgent anti-rights movement” that wants to roll back the country’s 2005 law–and with it, access to safe abortion. Because of this, fewer Ethiopians are accessing abortions through public facilities, according to data collected by the country’s Ministry of Health,

That’s right, anti-abortionists in America are enabling a global ripple effect. And because aid cuts are creating a vacuum, another doctor explains, anti-abortion groups are getting new energy—and the opportunity—to step in. 

Even if Ethiopia manages to stave off its anti-abortionists, none of the cuts bode well for a country whose maternal mortality rate was steadily decreasing up until now. So well done, America. You’ve not just managed to up your own maternal death crisis–but you’ve sabotaged others’, too. Yay.


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