U.S. cuts funding for U.N. agency that offers women's health care

(Image credit: David Ramos/Getty Images)

last updated 5 April 2017

The United States will no longer provide money to the U.N. Population Fund, which provides contraception, family planning, and reproductive health services to women around the world.

Last year, the U.S. gave $69 million to the U.N. Population Fund, making it the organization's fourth-biggest donor. The International Women's Health Coalition said Tuesday that those funds "prevented an estimated 320,000 pregnancies and averted 100,000 unsafe abortions, while ensuring 800,000 people had access to contraception."

Republican presidents have previously stopped funding the agency, while Democrats have kept it funded, NBC News reports. Seema Jalan, executive director of the Universal Access Project at the U.N. Foundation, told reporters the U.S. pulling its money will "directly impact the poorest girls and women on the planet. They have no recourse." Jalan argued that women's health care should not be a partisan issue, and both sides should support the U.N. Population Fund's clinics, including the only one in Iraq that takes care of women and girls harmed by ISIS. "I can't think of a better use of U.S. taxpayer dollars than ensuring that a woman fleeing violence can have a safe birth and that her child can survive delivery or that a woman who has been raped by an [ISIS] terrorist can actually have some care and support, and that's what this funding provides," Jalan said.

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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