By LORNE COOK and JOHN LEICESTER
BRUSSELS (AP) — President Donald Trump’s administration says it is weighing what to do with family planning supplies stockpiled in Europe that campaigners and two U.S. senators are fighting to save from destruction.
Concerns that the Trump administration plans to incinerate the stockpile have angered family planning advocates on both sides of the Atlantic. Campaigners say the supplies stored in a U.S.-funded warehouse in Geel, Belgium, include contraceptive pills, contraceptive implants and IUDs that could spare women in war zones and elsewhere the hardship of unwanted pregnancies.
U.S. State Department deputy spokesman Tommy Pigott said Thursday in response to a question about the contraceptives that “we’re still in the process here in terms of determining the way forward.”
“When we have an update, we’ll provide it,” he said.
Belgium says it has been talking with U.S. diplomats about trying to spare the supplies from destruction, including possibly moving them out of the warehouse. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Florinda Baleci told The Associated Press that she couldn’t comment further “to avoid influencing the outcome of the discussions.”
The Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which managed foreign aid programs, left the supplies’ fate uncertain.
Pigott didn’t detail the types of contraceptives that make up the stockpile. He said some of the supplies, bought by the previous administration, could “potentially be” drugs designed to induce abortions. Pigott didn’t detail how that might impact Trump administration thinking about how to deal with the drugs or the entire stockpile.
Costing more than $9 million and funded by U.S taxpayers, the family planning supplies were intended for women in war zones, refugee camps and elsewhere, according to a bipartisan letter of protest to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio from U.S. senators Jeanne Shaheen, a New Hampshire Democrat, and Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski.
They said destroying the stockpile “would be a waste of U.S. taxpayer dollars as well as an abdication of U.S. global leadership in preventing unintended pregnancies, unsafe abortions and maternal deaths — key goals of U.S. foreign assistance.”
They urged Rubio to allow another country or partner to distribute the contraceptives.
Concerns voiced by European campaigners and lawmakers that the supplies could be transported to France for incineration have led to mounting pressure on government officials to intervene and save them.
The executive branch of the European Union, through spokesman Guillaume Mercier, said Friday that “we continue to monitor the situation closely to explore the most effective solutions.”
The U.S. branch of family planning aid group MSI Reproductive Choices said it offered to purchase, repackage and distribute the stock at its own expense but “these efforts were repeatedly rejected.” The group said the supplies included long-acting IUDs, contraceptive implants and pills, and that they have long shelf-lives, extending as far as 2031.
Aid group Doctors Without Borders said incineration would be “an intentionally reckless and harmful act against women and girls everywhere.”
Charles Dallara, the grandson of a French former lawmaker who was a contraception pioneer in France, urged President Emmanuel Macron to not let France “become an accomplice to this scandal.”
“Do not allow France to take part in the destruction of essential health tools for millions of women,” Dallara wrote in an appeal to the French leader. “We have a moral and historical responsibility.”
Leicester reported from Paris. Matthew Lee contributed from Washington, D.C.
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