KISUMU, Kenya (AP) – For decades, U.S. anti-abortion groups have lobbied domestically and abroad for restricting access to abortion. In the U.S., their biggest success was the reversal of Roe v. Wade. Now, the Trump administration is delivering new momentum to the movement exporting “family values” to nations overseas.
At anti-abortion activists’ annual March for Life demonstration in Washington, Vice President JD Vance announced sweeping new restrictions on U.S. funding for nongovernmental organizations, foreign governments and U.N. agencies that promote access to abortion, gender-affirming care and diversity initiatives overseas.
“We’re going to start blocking every international NGO that performs or promotes abortion abroad from receiving a dollar of U.S. money,” Vance told the crowd in January.
The expanded restrictions build on the anti-abortion advocacy work carried out by conservative U.S. nonprofits abroad – especially in Africa, where healthcare is highly dependent on foreign aid. The region has the world’s highest estimated proportion of unsafe abortions and highest maternal mortality rates – including the highest number of maternal deaths per 100,000 abortions.
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This is part of a series on maternal mortality in sub-Saharan Africa, which has the world’s fastest-growing population and accounts for 70% of global maternal deaths. Around 180,000 pregnancy deaths are recorded every year across the continent.
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The new rules represent a radical expansion of earlier U.S. policy that cut assistance to overseas groups providing abortion-related services. Experts say at least $30 billion in U.S. aid could be affected, reshaping health policies worldwide.
“We’re seeing opportunity here to have a consistently pro-life ethic,” Nicole Hunt of Colorado-based Focus on the Family, a conservative Christian evangelical group, told The Associated Press. “We’ve been influencing health policies for a long time with our foreign aid. This is just a new direction.”
In the crosshairs is an international convention signed by African countries two decades ago declaring safe abortion a human right. Known as the Maputo Protocol, it obliges signatory nations to legalize abortion in cases of rape, incest, fetal malformation or risk to a woman’s health. But implementation has been spotty, forcing women to seek illicit procedures. Every year, sub-Saharan Africa records over 6 million unsafe abortions, according to the African Institute for Development Policy.
Emboldened by President Donald Trump’s policies, U.S. anti-abortion groups now aim to overturn even this limited access to safe abortion.
In Nairobi, Nardos Hagos of the International Planned Parenthood Federation said she is deeply worried for the future.
“We’ve now moved into a new era where we are the ones who are in opposition because the most powerful and influential supporters of reproductive health – the U.S. and a lot of Europe – are now more aligned with anti-rights groups,” she said.
“We’re gonna see more women dying from unsafe abortions.”
It’s difficult to track the full scope of the funding U.S. anti-abortion charitable groups send to Africa.
Publicly available information from nonprofit tax filings of 17 such groups show money sent to Africa jumped 50% between 2019 and 2022, to over $16 million, according to an analysis by the Institute for Journalism and Social Change, a research group.
And the funding kept growing: The organizations spent almost $9.4 million in Africa during 2023 and 2024, previously unreported data analyzed by the institute shows.
That’s “just the tip of the iceberg,” said the institute’s Claire Provost.
“What we’re seeing here is just a fraction of what the real investment on the continent is,” Provost said, noting that unlike other tax-exempt charitable organizations, U.S.-based churches and some religious groups are not required to complete annual financial disclosures detailing revenue, contributions and expenses.
It’s not possible to see “even limited information” about how much money The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, among others, funnel to Africa, she said.
Widely known as the Mormon church, the Salt Lake City-based church is “increasingly active on the continent, including opposing sexual and reproductive rights issues,” Provost said. With over 1 million followers in Africa, it has held “Strengthening Families” conferences throughout the continent over the past eight years.
Sean E.R. Donnelly, the church’s communications manager for Africa, said in an AP interview that about a quarter of the $1.5 billion the church spent overseas last year was in Africa, for development projects “with the goal of helping people, especially families,” including in healthcare, education and emergency relief.
Asked about women’s reproductive rights and abortion, he said the church was “not really active” in those areas, but noted the issues may be discussed by its African partners during church-sponsored conferences.
“We have the deputy prime minister, we have the ministries of gender, we have all the ministers who are relevant to family, and we’re helping them … as they craft policy and strategy to make sure that we protect the family,” Donnelly said of the conferences.
Asked about the church’s position on abortion, he sent a statement outlining that it generally opposes elective abortion in most cases but allows exceptions for rape, incest or danger to a woman’s health in counseling its members. He said via email that the church conducts no activities related to abortion and reproductive rights.
Last year’s church-sponsored conference took place in Sierra Leone at a time when the country was close to decriminalizing abortion. But pressure from local religious lobbies stalled the process, local rights groups said. Activists and rights groups have raised the alarm over the influence of local religious groups, whose strategies mirror those of some conservative U.S. Christian groups. In response to AP’s questions about the conference and any pressures around abortion and other reproductive rights issues, Donnelly said, “This is not how the church operates in Africa or globally.”
He also referred AP to the church’s Caring Report, which outlines its humanitarian work globally and does not mention the conference.
It’s tricky to determine how the U.S. money is spent once it reaches Africa because of loose requirements on disclosing financial data in African countries.
Focus on the Family spent $370,000 in Africa between 2019 and 2023, according to the Institute for Journalism and Social Change, which says that likely does not fully capture the scope of the group’s influence or work. Focus on the Family’s Hunt said its mission is “to change hearts and minds on abortion” globally, but she declined to provide details of activities in Africa.
Hannah Ruguru vowed to help women get abortions safely after losing her sister to a backstreet procedure. But her work at a reproductive health clinic in Kisumu in rural western Kenya has proven increasingly hazardous.
She’s been screamed at by protesters and encountered so much abuse on Facebook that she deleted her account, she said.
“Sometimes you can get scared,” Ruguru said. But “at the end of the day, I’m helping women.”
Marie Stopes International, which runs the clinic where Ruguru works, said in a 2024 report that staff in several African countries described online and legal attacks from U.S.-based groups and U.S.-funded local organizations. In Congo, it said, health workers have been detained for days for providing legally permissible services before being released without charge.
“The extent of the opposition has made abortion providers fearful of coming into work,” the report said.
In Ethiopia, the group said, the head of the local office of U.S.-based Family Watch International has “targeted and trolled members of our senior leadership team on social media,” and released YouTube videos promoting anti-abortion misinformation.
In Kenya, the names and addresses of staff at reproductive rights organizations have been published online, accusing them of murder.
The owner of a private abortion clinic in Nairobi said staff members have been harassed by police and detained. Officials demand bribes, threatening charges if they don’t pay up, the owner said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions.
Musoba Kitui, regional director of Ipas Africa Alliance, which promotes reproductive rights and access to safe abortion care, said the changes in U.S. foreign aid policy combined with “this advancing American interest in ideology in Africa is really concerning.”
“We think the consequences are going to be dire,” Kitui said, especially for women and marginalized communities such as LGBTQ+ people.
Last year, anti-abortion Christian groups from the U.S., Europe and Africa and high-ranking Kenyan officials gathered in Nairobi for a conference on “Promoting and Protecting Family Values in Challenging Times.” Poland-based anti-abortion group Ordo Iuris handed out a guide in four languages, including Swahili, with tips on lobbying international organizations, including the United Nations, European Union and African Union.
Travis Weber, vice president of the Family Research Council, a Washington-based evangelical group active in anti-abortion advocacy, said he traveled to Nairobi to “defend the family as God designed it.”
Charles Kanjama, vice chairman of African Christian Professionals Forum, the conference organizer, said that previously international aid often supported reproductive rights – but times have changed.
“We are hoping that … we can start attracting money from people who think like us,” said Kanjama, among Africa’s most prominent anti-abortion figures. “It’s a culture war, really.”
Indeed, the anti-abortion agenda is gaining momentum. In June, representatives of 20 African countries finalized a draft charter at a conference in Ghana that calls for rejecting sexual and reproductive health rights. It will be voted on by the African Union next year. Family Watch International’s co-founder, Sharon Slater, was among those fundraising for the charter’s passage at the European Parliament in Brussels this year.
In Kenya, one of Africa’s richest countries, seven women die every day on average from complications of unsafe abortions, according to the African Population and Health Research Center.
The 2010 Kenyan Constitution permits abortion when a woman’s health or life is threatened. Subsequent court decisions have also allowed abortions in cases of rape, incest or serious threat to a woman’s mental health.
But there’s a major legal gray area. Kenya’s penal code, which dates to the colonial era, continues to criminalize abortion providers and women seeking the procedure, who can face up to 14 years in prison.
Most public hospitals don’t perform abortions, leaving women the option of pricey private clinic procedures or risky illicit methods, healthcare officials said.
In May, an appeals court in Kenya overturned a ruling that affirmed access to abortion is a fundamental right – a case led by Kanjama, who said the decision “restored constitutional balance.”
The Kenyan Health Ministry, Justice Ministry and the government spokesperson’s office did not reply to repeated AP requests for comment, including detailed questions sent via email.
The U.S. State Department, in response to an AP request for comment on the Trump administration’s new rules governing American aid overseas, said: “The American people expect their tax dollars to support programs that save lives … and reflect American values, not fund abortion-related activities, left-wing social agendas, or wasteful overseas bureaucracies.”
“U.S. assistance continues to support a wide range of maternal and child health services as part of the America First Global Health Strategy,” it said in a statement.
In Kenya, doctors are obligated to treat women suffering from post-abortion complications, often from underground procedures, including bleeding, infections and the loss of their wombs – and it’s those cases that often end up in public hospitals.
“By the time the women come, we are often dealing with a life-threatening situation,” said Dominic Omollo, the reproductive health coordinator in Bondo, western Kenya.
Even as the stated aim of U.S., international and Africa-based anti-abortion groups is to protect life, activists and healthcare providers say that on the ground, the result is more unsafe abortions and more women dying.
In Karabok, a village in rural Kenya, two trees were planted at the site where Mary Olouch is buried, just feet (meters) from where the 25-year-old bled to death after an illicit abortion.
“She did not open up to anyone,” said Loice Ochieng, a community health volunteer in charge of family planning in the village.
Olouch already had a young child when she realized she was pregnant. She didn’t tell her husband. When he came home one evening, he found her bleeding and rushed her to the hospital, but it was too late.
Olouch did not qualify for an abortion in a public hospital and couldn’t afford a private clinic on her meager income selling fish. Abortion carries enormous stigma in rural communities, and husbands often don’t allow women to use contraceptives, Ochieng said.
After Olouch’s death, women started to talk more openly about abortion in Karabok, where for many even uttering the word had been taboo, Ochieng said.
Now, she said, if women “have a problem, they come to me, they ask. Because they have seen that this thing can cause death.”
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Beaty reported from New York. AP writers Evelyne Musambi in Nairobi and Caitlin Kelly in Freetown, Sierra Leone, contributed to this report.
___ For more on Africa and development: https://apnews.com/hub/africa-pulse ___ The Associated Press receives financial support for global health and development coverage in Africa from the Gates Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
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