U.S. government funding for UNFPA’s lifesaving care is officially suspended by the Trump Administration’s recent 90-day stop work order.

While we were already bracing for losing new U.S. funding for future work through defunding, this freeze completely suspends already-approved funds for lifesaving care for women and girls around the world.

To give you a little more context on what’s going on, I want to share some excerpts from a recent article by Devex:

Perhaps no one prepared better for the Trump administration’s assault on foreign aid than the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency, UNFPA. Every Republican president since Ronald Reagan has stopped funding the agency, while Democratic presidents have restored it, forcing the agency to hunt for other sources of money.

The scope of the Trump administration’s sweeping freeze on foreign aid has caught them off guard. The last time Trump was in the White House, he moved swiftly to end funding for the agency [...] He is expected to do the same now.

But the freeze has done more to disrupt its operations because, [in his first term], Trump permitted UNFPA to spend money that was already appropriated and in the pipeline, granting it some fiscal runway before the money ran out.

No such luck this time around. That has placed several U.S.-funded projects in jeopardy, including a program that employs more than 1,700 female health workers — mostly midwives — in Afghanistan, a country with one of the world’s highest maternal mortality rates. Under the terms of the freeze, they will have to be let go.

“We were prepared for a defunding as best as any agency could,” said Rachel Moynihan, a Washington-based UNFPA official. “We were defunded under the first Trump administration. To their credit, they honored every grant that the U.S. had signed with us.”

So far, the Trump administration has yet to announce a formal decision on defunding UNFPA, as well as other U.N. agencies, but the pause has had a more crippling effect on its operations, stopping funded programs from being implemented.

Many of our operations that women and girls count on — like assembling and distributing Dignity Kits and Emergency Birth Kits, training midwives, and establishing safe spaces for victims of violence — will feel the impact of this complete suspension.

In just 90 days, experts estimate that a total of 11.7 million women and girls will lose access to crucial care, 4.2 million more unintended pregnancies will occur, and nearly 10,000 women will die from maternal causes as a result of this freeze of programs from UNFPA and other organizations delivering reproductive healthcare.

Quite simply, this is a matter of life or death for so many pregnant mothers, newborns, and women and girls. In this time of extreme uncertainty, we are turning to YOU to help us be there for every woman or girl, no matter what. Over the next 90 days, your emergency gift can help sustain lifesaving care for the most vulnerable in crisis-stricken countries. Will you make a generous gift today?

MAKE AN EMERGENCY GIFT

It is heartbreaking that within all these political twists and turns, it is women and girls who will suffer.

With your support, we can do everything we can in this period of chaos and uncertainty.

With gratitude,

Anu