Defunding USAID: Trump’s Biggest Gift to Pro-Lifers After Dobbs
by Hayden Ludwig | RodMartin.org | April 13, 2025
Axing USAID was never about balancing the budget, as critics allege, but dealing a mortal blow to Washington’s woke export machine — especially on abortion.
Many pro-life Christians were skeptical of Donald Trump’s soft abortion stance during the 2024 campaign. They should take note. With a single stroke, Trump has done more to protect unborn lives overseas than any other leader in the world and deserves credit as America’s most pro-life president. Here’s why.
The Helms Amendment
The 1973 Helms Amendment, passed immediately after the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, banned the use of foreign aid to pay for abortions. Democrats have tried for years to overturn this important law to make every American complicit in their war on the unborn, regardless of individual conscience. Those congressional efforts failed, so they turned to America’s foreign aid spigot: USAID.
Across its four-year span, the Biden administration funneled at least $1.23 billion through USAID into pro-abortion groups operating in destitute foreign countries. Many, if not all of them, abuse this largesse by lobbying to overturn the Helms Amendment. In other words, hardline leftists force pro-lifers to spend billions of dollars aborting black and brown babies despite Congress’s clear 52-year-old prohibition on exactly that. Then they use taxpayer money to try to legalize it.
Abortion Organizations Benefiting From U.S. Taxpayers
How many Americans realize that abortion is illegal across much of Africa? Or that Kenya’s constitution enshrines the right to life at conception? Yet American taxpayers gifted $113 million from USAID to Marie Stopes International (MSI), Britain’s own Planned Parenthood originally named after one of Adolf Hitler’s eugenicist admirers.
Nearly all of MSI’s clinics are based in Africa and southern Asia, in countries that (rightly) restrict abortion. In 2020, Kenyan police caught MSI abortionists dumping the decomposing corpses of 10 babies they’d illegally aborted in a dumpster. Police later arrested two unregistered medical practitioners for performing unlawful abortions in MSI’s Nairobi facility after the government kicked them out.
In the U.K., government inquiries discovered thousands of “serious incidents” at MSI clinics, including “botched abortions,” the result of failing to follow “basic safety procedures.” Disturbingly, MSI’s British staff linked performance bonuses to the number of abortions their doctors performed.
MSI isn’t an American group; almost all money raised by its U.S. arm goes overseas. Yet this foreign organization complains it’ll lose $14 million in funding and fail to abort 2.4 million African babies due to Trump’s Mexico City Policy, a ban on funding any group that performs overseas abortions. Naturally, the group demands the White House reverse its “Global Gag Rule.”
Then there’s Pathfinder International — a Massachusetts “charity” rooted in 1930s white supremacy — which lobbies to legalize abortion in Kenya, the Congo, and Burkina Faso, where the average person lives on less than $1.90 per day.
If you’ve paid taxes, you contributed to the more than $1 billion in government funding funneled to Pathfinder International alone through USAID. That group — which works to “chang[e] the policies, structures, and systems that hold women, girls, and people of all genders back” in poor nations — is part of a U.S. coalition to overturn the Helms Amendment.
At least some of Pathfinder’s money was passed through to Gynuity Health Projects, a company that performed grisly experiments with 2nd-trimester abortion drugs on black women in Burkina Faso, inducing miscarriages at the risk of bleeding to death.
But Pathfinder also subsists on a fortune dating back to one of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger’s closest — and vilest — allies, Clarence Gamble, heir to the Procter & Gamble soap fortune. Gamble helped architect Sanger’s infamous “Negro Project of the South,” which aimed to reduce the black population with birth control clinics heavily concentrated across the South, a form of eugenics (“beautifying” the races).
Leftists swore off eugenics after the Nazis put their ideas into practice in the 1930s. Yet those racist policies remain alive today through the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which the Biden administration lavished with $563 million from U.S. taxpayers — in just four years more than twice what the Obama administration provided over 8 years.
UNFPA works to loosen poor countries’ abortion laws while encouraging birth control and girls’ education, which liberals believe will reduce overall population growth. It also spreads hateful Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies and transgender ideology to children as young as 10.
In April, UNFPA asked the U.S. — its biggest funder — for another $70 million earmarked for “global LGBTQI+ rights” to ward off threats from “anti-rights groups, including those in the United States, [which] are pouring money into advancing global homophobia and transphobia.”
That appeal was backed by Pathfinder International, Planned Parenthood, and other radical abortion rights recipients of American “foreign aid.”
DOGE’s Next Target?
Slaying the USAID hydra was courageous. But President Trump and Elon Musk should go further — say, by targeting grants from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Under Biden, HHS gave $88 million to Essential Access Health, accounting for a stunning 87 percent of its revenues in 2021 alone. The group believes that “reproductive health care, including abortion, is essential” for families’ “health and well-being.”
In December, Essential Health Access lobbied for a California bill to route money from the Medi-Cal health insurance program to subsidize “over-the-counter birth control access” while blasting the Republican Congress as “hostile to reproductive freedom.”
These groups’ goal of depopulating non-white countries through infanticide is an ugly demonstration of racist progressive imperialism. That they do it with taxpayer money makes us all complicit in America’s national sin. That God has put pro-lifers back in the driver’s seat is an unbelievable mercy for a nation under judgment. There is no excuse for Christian inaction anymore.
For the first time, Americans are waking up to the horrors that their government has perpetuated under the control of the Washington elite and woke activists. Voters put President Trump and his misfit band of heroes in charge of smashing that corrupt machine, and they’re only getting started.
Pro-life Christians, it’s time to give credit where it’s due and give Trump the support he needs to restore America’s greatness — and goodness.
— This article also appeared at The American Spectator.