When the Mothers & Babies Started Dying

_{Photo credit: Diana Ankunda https://www.urc-chs.com/news/usaids-donation-of-maternal-health-equipment-saves-preterm-triplets-in-uganda/}

In rural Nepal, 20-year-old Kabita Mukhiya died just a day after her unborn child. This was one of many deaths that followed the destruction of essential programs for pregnant women around the world when America’s foreign assistance agency, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was shut down in 2025.

According to the Associated Press, USAID funded health workers that visited pregnant women in Kabita’s village, but when its work was halted last year, the program stopped along with it. The village in Nepal’s Rautahat district is one of the poorest and least literate parts of the country, and without the help of aid workers, many pregnant women find it difficult to access even simple medical care from the system.

USAID had also funded a nutritional program that provided supplements Kabita took during her previous pregnancy, but after the program was cut, she began suffering nutritional deficiencies. Her nurse recommended she take a blood test to check her hemoglobin levels. According to her nurse, Kabita was unable to understand its importance and returned home, where she would experience excruciating pain for weeks until she could not walk on her own.

Kabita’s aunt rushed her to the hospital, where she received the news that her unborn child was dead. The hospital was unable to remove the baby’s remains from her body and urged Kabita to go to another hospital. Lacking both the money and the comprehension of how dire her situation was, she returned home. Kabita died the next day of complications of eclampsia and severe anemia, two conditions that would have been identified with proper prenatal care.

Kabita’s husband had been working in India at the time of his wife and child’s death. He was alerted by neighbors and took the bus home, but the ride took so long he arrived three days after Kabita’s funeral. Since his wife’s death, he has been crying in the dark for days at a time, only working to keep himself and the rest of his children alive.

Interventions protecting mothers and babies are relatively cheap but have a significant impact on maternal and newborn death rates. The Gates Foundation estimates that 2025 will show an increase in child deaths for the first time this century, as a result of the abrupt cessation of foreign assistance.

Support the Return of Foreign Assistance

Despite the Trump administration’s insistence that the USAID shutdown has not caused any deaths, the AP and other non-partisan sources have documented the deaths of multiple mothers and children due to the suspension of health programming. We may never know most of their names, but we can invest in the only solution: reinstating the foreign aid programs like the one that had been working in Kabita’s village. These programs were successfully saving lives before the shutdown while providing priceless soft power and influence for the United States around the world.

The average American thinks the government spends 25% of its budget on foreign aid programs, but the real number was actually less than 1%. Even before the shutdown of USAID, as a percentage of gross national income, the United States was one of the lowest contributors to foreign assistance, spending only 0.23% of GNI. As of 2025 that number is 0.09%, significantly less than most European countries as well as Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.

The Alliance for American Leadership believes 2% of our budget should fund life-saving international assistance, bringing funding back to its level under the Reagan administration.

Tell Congress to Restore Foreign Aid

Foreign assistance is a crucial tool for the national security, safety, and global influence of the United States. But when we zoom in, what becomes visible is a more personal, but profound story: were it not for the abrupt cessation of foreign aid, Kabita and her baby would likely be alive today.

Additional Sources:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/foreign-aid-given-as-a-share-of-national-income

https://features.csis.org/the-ground-has-shifted/

https://apnews.com/article/gates-foundation-annual-letter-8f2c7fe520986786a11a33b2cfce2fcd