8,000 pregnant women may die in just 90 days because of US aid cuts

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8,000 pregnant women may die in just 90 days because of US aid cuts

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. Yesterday marks a month since the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th US president. And what a month it has been. The Trump administration wasted no time in delivering a slew of executive orders, memos, and work notices to federal employees. On February 18, Trump signed an executive order that seeks to make IVF more accessible to people in the US. In some ways, the move isn’t surprising—Trump has expressed his support for the technology in the past, and even called himself “the father of IVF” while on the campaign trail last year. Making IVF more affordable and accessible should give people more options when it comes to family planning and reproductive freedom more generally. But the move comes after a barrage of actions by the new administration that are hitting reproductive care hard for people around the world. On January 20, his first day in office, Trump ordered a “90-day pause in United States foreign development assistance” for such programs to be assessed. By January 24, a “stop work” memo issued by the State Department brought US-funded aid programs around the world to a halt. Recent estimates suggest that more than 8,000 women will die from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth over the next 90 days if the funding is not reinstated. On January 24 Trump also reinstated the global gag rule—a policy that requires nongovernmental organizations receiving US health funding to agree that they will not offer abortion counseling and care. This move alone immediately stripped organizations of the funding they need to perform their work. MSI Reproductive Choices, which offers support for reproductive health care in 36 countries, lost $14 million as a result, says Anna Mackay, who manages donor-funded programs at the organization. “Over 2 million women and girls would have received contraceptive services with that money,” she says. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) had a 2025 budget of $42.8 billion to spend on foreign assistance, which covers everything from humanitarian aid and sanitation to programs promoting gender equality and economic growth in countries around the world. But the “stop work” memo froze that funding for 90 days. The impacts were felt immediately and are still rippling out. Clinical trials were halted. Jobs were lost. Health programs were shut down. “I think this is going to have a devastating impact on the global health architecture,” says Thoai Ngo at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “USAID is the major foreign funder for global health … I’m afraid that there isn’t [another government] that can fill the gap.” Reproductive health care is likely to lose out as affected governments and health organizations try to reorganize their resources, says Ngo: “In times of crisis … women and girls tend to be deprioritized in terms of access to health and social services.” Without information on and access to a range of contraceptive options, unintended pregnancies result. These have the potential to limit the freedoms of people who become pregnant. And they can have far-reaching economic impacts, since access to contraception can improve education rates and career outcomes. And the health consequences can be devastating. Unintended pregnancies are more likely to be ended with abortions—potentially unsafe ones. Maternal death rates are high in regions that lack adequate resources. A maternal death occurred every two minutes in 2020. “It’s difficult to overstate how catastrophic this freeze has been over the last several weeks,” says Amy Friedrich-Karnik, director of federal policy at the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization focused on global sexual and reproductive health and rights. “Every single day that the freeze is in place, there are 130,000 women who are being denied contraceptive care,” she says. The Guttmacher Institute estimates that should USAID funding be frozen for the full 90 days, around 11.7 million women and girls would lose access to contraceptive care, and 4.2 million of them would experience unintended pregnancies. Of those, “8,340 will die from complications during pregnancy and childbirth,” says Friedrich-Karnik. “By denying people access to contraception, not only are you denying them tools for their bodily autonomy—you are really risking their lives,” she says. “Thousands more women will die down the road.” “USAID plays such a central role in supporting these life-saving programs,” says Ngo. “The picture is bleak.” Even online sources of information on contraceptives are being affected by the funding freeze. Ben Bellows is a chief business officer at Nivi, a digital health company that develops chatbots to deliver health information to people via WhatsApp. “Two million users have used the bot,” he says. He and his team have been working on a project to deliver information on contraceptive options and family planning to women in India, and they have been looking to incorporate AI into their bot. The project was funded by a company that, in turn, is funded by USAID. Like the funding, the work is “frozen,” says Bellows. “We’ve slowed [hiring] and we’ve slowed some of the tech development because of the freeze [on USAID],” he says. “It’s bad [for] the individuals, it’s bad [for] the companies that are trying to operate in these markets, and it’s bad [for] public health outcomes.” Reproductive health and freedoms are also likely to be affected by the Trump administration’s cuts to federal agencies. The National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been in the administration’s crosshairs, as has the Food and Drug Administration. After all, the FDA regulates drugs and medical devices in the US, including contraceptives. The CDC collects and shares important data on sexual and reproductive health. And the NIH supports vital research on reproductive health and contraception. The CDC also funds health programs in low-income countries like Ethiopia. Following Trump’s executive order, the country’s ministry of health terminated the contracts of more than 5,000 health workers whose salaries were supported by the CDC as well as USAID. “That’s midwives and nurses working in rural health posts,” says Mackay. “We’re turning up to support these staff and provide them with sexual reproductive health training and make sure they’ve got the contraceptives, and there’s just no one at the facility.” So, yes, it is great news if the Trump administration can find a way to make IVF more accessible. But, as Mackay points out, “it’s increasing reproductive choice in one direction.” Now read the rest of The Checkup Read more from MIT Technology Review’s archive Last November, two years after Roe v. Wade was overturned, 10 US states voted on abortion rights. Seven of them voted to extend and protect access. My colleague Rhiannon Williams reported on the immediate aftermath of the decision that reversed Roe v. Wade. Fertility rates are falling around the world, in almost every country. IVF is great, but it won’t save us from a looming fertility crisis. Gender equality and family-friendly policies are much more likely to be effective. Decades of increasingly successful IVF treatments have caused millions of embryos to be stored in cryopreservation tanks around the world. In some cases, they can’t be donated, used, or destroyed and appear to be stuck in limbo “forever.” Ever come across the term “women of childbearing age”? The insidious idea that women’s bodies are, above all else, vessels for growing children has plenty of negative consequences for us all. But it has also set back scientific research and health policy. There are other WhatsApp-based approaches to improving access to health information in India. Accredited social health activists in the country are using the platform to counter medical misinformation and superstitions around pregnancy. From around the web The US Food and Drug Administration assesses the efficacy and toxicity of experimental medicines before they are approved. It should also consider their “financial toxicity,” given that medical bills can fall on the shoulders of patients themselves, argue a group of US doctors. (The New England Journal of Medicine) Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new US secretary of health and human services, has vowed to investigate the country’s childhood vaccination schedule. During his confirmation hearing a couple of weeks ago, he promised not to change the schedule. (Associated Press) Some scientists have been altering their published work without telling anyone. Such “stealth corrections” threaten scientific integrity, say a group of researchers from Europe and the US. (Learned Publishing) The US Department of Agriculture said it accidentally fired several people who were working on the federal response to the bird flu outbreak. Apparently the agency is now trying to hire them back. (NBC News) Could your next pet be a glowing rabbit? This startup is using CRISPR to “level up” pets. Their goal is to eventually create a real-life unicorn. (Wired)

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

Yesterday marks a month since the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th US president. And what a month it has been. The Trump administration wasted no time in delivering a slew of executive orders, memos, and work notices to federal employees.

On February 18, Trump signed an executive order that seeks to make IVF more accessible to people in the US. In some ways, the move isn’t surprising—Trump has expressed his support for the technology in the past, and even called himself “the father of IVF” while on the campaign trail last year.

Making IVF more affordable and accessible should give people more options when it comes to family planning and reproductive freedom more generally. But the move comes after a barrage of actions by the new administration that are hitting reproductive care hard for people around the world. On January 20, his first day in office, Trump ordered a “90-day pause in United States foreign development assistance” for such programs to be assessed. By January 24, a “stop work” memo issued by the State Department brought US-funded aid programs around the world to a halt.

Recent estimates suggest that more than 8,000 women will die from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth over the next 90 days if the funding is not reinstated.

On January 24 Trump also reinstated the global gag rule—a policy that requires nongovernmental organizations receiving US health funding to agree that they will not offer abortion counseling and care. This move alone immediately stripped organizations of the funding they need to perform their work. MSI Reproductive Choices, which offers support for reproductive health care in 36 countries, lost $14 million as a result, says Anna Mackay, who manages donor-funded programs at the organization. “Over 2 million women and girls would have received contraceptive services with that money,” she says.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) had a 2025 budget of $42.8 billion to spend on foreign assistance, which covers everything from humanitarian aid and sanitation to programs promoting gender equality and economic growth in countries around the world. But the “stop work” memo froze that funding for 90 days.

The impacts were felt immediately and are still rippling out. Clinical trials were halted. Jobs were lost. Health programs were shut down.

“I think this is going to have a devastating impact on the global health architecture,” says Thoai Ngo at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “USAID is the major foreign funder for global health … I’m afraid that there isn’t [another government] that can fill the gap.”

Reproductive health care is likely to lose out as affected governments and health organizations try to reorganize their resources, says Ngo: “In times of crisis … women and girls tend to be deprioritized in terms of access to health and social services.”

Without information on and access to a range of contraceptive options, unintended pregnancies result. These have the potential to limit the freedoms of people who become pregnant. And they can have far-reaching economic impacts, since access to contraception can improve education rates and career outcomes.

And the health consequences can be devastating. Unintended pregnancies are more likely to be ended with abortions—potentially unsafe ones. Maternal death rates are high in regions that lack adequate resources. A maternal death occurred every two minutes in 2020.

“It’s difficult to overstate how catastrophic this freeze has been over the last several weeks,” says Amy Friedrich-Karnik, director of federal policy at the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization focused on global sexual and reproductive health and rights. “Every single day that the freeze is in place, there are 130,000 women who are being denied contraceptive care,” she says.

The Guttmacher Institute estimates that should USAID funding be frozen for the full 90 days, around 11.7 million women and girls would lose access to contraceptive care, and 4.2 million of them would experience unintended pregnancies. Of those, “8,340 will die from complications during pregnancy and childbirth,” says Friedrich-Karnik.

“By denying people access to contraception, not only are you denying them tools for their bodily autonomy—you are really risking their lives,” she says. “Thousands more women will die down the road.”

“USAID plays such a central role in supporting these life-saving programs,” says Ngo. “The picture is bleak.”

Even online sources of information on contraceptives are being affected by the funding freeze. Ben Bellows is a chief business officer at Nivi, a digital health company that develops chatbots to deliver health information to people via WhatsApp. “Two million users have used the bot,” he says.

He and his team have been working on a project to deliver information on contraceptive options and family planning to women in India, and they have been looking to incorporate AI into their bot. The project was funded by a company that, in turn, is funded by USAID. Like the funding, the work is “frozen,” says Bellows.

“We’ve slowed [hiring] and we’ve slowed some of the tech development because of the freeze [on USAID],” he says. “It’s bad [for] the individuals, it’s bad [for] the companies that are trying to operate in these markets, and it’s bad [for] public health outcomes.”

Reproductive health and freedoms are also likely to be affected by the Trump administration’s cuts to federal agencies. The National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been in the administration’s crosshairs, as has the Food and Drug Administration.

After all, the FDA regulates drugs and medical devices in the US, including contraceptives. The CDC collects and shares important data on sexual and reproductive health. And the NIH supports vital research on reproductive health and contraception.

The CDC also funds health programs in low-income countries like Ethiopia. Following Trump’s executive order, the country’s ministry of health terminated the contracts of more than 5,000 health workers whose salaries were supported by the CDC as well as USAID.

“That’s midwives and nurses working in rural health posts,” says Mackay. “We’re turning up to support these staff and provide them with sexual reproductive health training and make sure they’ve got the contraceptives, and there’s just no one at the facility.”

So, yes, it is great news if the Trump administration can find a way to make IVF more accessible. But, as Mackay points out, “it’s increasing reproductive choice in one direction.”

Now read the rest of The Checkup

From around the web

The US Food and Drug Administration assesses the efficacy and toxicity of experimental medicines before they are approved. It should also consider their “financial toxicity,” given that medical bills can fall on the shoulders of patients themselves, argue a group of US doctors. (The New England Journal of Medicine)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new US secretary of health and human services, has vowed to investigate the country’s childhood vaccination schedule. During his confirmation hearing a couple of weeks ago, he promised not to change the schedule. (Associated Press)

Some scientists have been altering their published work without telling anyone. Such “stealth corrections” threaten scientific integrity, say a group of researchers from Europe and the US. (Learned Publishing)

The US Department of Agriculture said it accidentally fired several people who were working on the federal response to the bird flu outbreak. Apparently the agency is now trying to hire them back. (NBC News)

Could your next pet be a glowing rabbit? This startup is using CRISPR to “level up” pets. Their goal is to eventually create a real-life unicorn. (Wired)

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Iron Mountain Northern Virginia Overview Iron Mountain’s Northern Virginia data centers VA-1 through VA-7 are situated on a 142-acre highly secure campus in Prince William County, Virginia. Located at 11680 Hayden Road in Manassas, Iron Mountain VA-1 spans 167,958 sq. ft. and harbors 12.4 MW of total capacity to meet colocation needs. The 36 MW VA-2 facility stands nearby. The total campus features a mixture of single and multi-tenant facilities which together provide more than 2,000,000 SF of highly efficient green colocation space for enterprises, federal agencies, service providers and hyperscale clouds. The company notes that its Manassas campus offers tax savings compared to Ashburn and exceptional levels of energy-efficiency as well as a diverse and accessible ecosystem of cloud, network and other service providers. Iron Mountain’s Virginia campus has 9 total planned data centers, with 5 operational facilities to date and two more data centers coming soon. VA-2 recently became the first data center in the United States to achieve DCOS Maturity Level 3. As we continued the tour, Kinra led the way toward the break room, an area where customers can grab coffee or catch up on work. Unlike the high-end aesthetic of some other colocation providers, Iron Mountain’s approach is more practical and focused on functionality. At the secure shipping and receiving area, Kinra explained the process for handling customer equipment. “This is where our customers ship their equipment into,” he said. “They submit a ticket, send their shipments in, and we’ll take it, put it aside for them, and let them know when it’s here. Sometimes they ask us to take it to their environment, which we’ll do for them via a smart hands ticket.” Power Infrastructure and Security Measures The VA-1 campus is supported by a single substation, providing the necessary power for its growing

Land and Expand: DPO, Microsoft, JLL and BlackChamber, Prologis, Core Scientific, Overwatch Capital

Land and Expand is a periodic feature at Data Center Frontier highlighting the latest data center development news, including new sites, land acquisitions and campus expansions. Here are some of the new and notable developments from hyperscale and colocation data center developers and operators about which we’ve been reading lately. DPO to Develop $200 Million AI Data Center in Wisconsin Rapids; Strategic Partnership with Billerud’s CWPCo Unlocks Hydroelectric Power for High-Density AI Compute Digital Power Optimization (DPO) is moving forward with plans to build a $200 million high-performance computing (HPC) data center in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin. The project, designed to support up to 20 megawatts (MW) of artificial intelligence (AI) computing, leverages an innovative partnership with Consolidated Water Power Company (CWPCo), a subsidiary of global packaging leader Billerud. DPO specializes in developing and operating data centers optimized for power-dense computing. By partnering with utilities and independent power producers, DPO colocates its facilities at energy generation sites, ensuring direct access to sustainable power for AI, HPC, and blockchain computing. The company is privately held. Leveraging Power Infrastructure for Speed-to-Energization CWPCo, a regulated utility subsidiary, has operated hydroelectric generation assets since 1894, reliably serving industrial and commercial customers in Wisconsin Rapids, Biron, and Stevens Point. Parent company Billerud is a global leader in high-performance packaging materials, committed to sustainability and innovation. The company operates nine production facilities across Sweden, the USA, and Finland, employing 5,800 people in over 19 countries. The data center will be powered by CWPCo’s renewable hydroelectric assets, tapping into the utility’s existing 32 megawatts of generation capacity. The partnership grants DPO a long-term land lease—extending up to 50 years—alongside interconnection rights to an already-energized substation and a firm, reliable power supply. “AI infrastructure is evolving at an unprecedented pace, and access to power-dense sites is critical,” said Andrew

Data center spending to top $1 trillion by 2029 as AI transforms infrastructure

His projections account for recent advances in AI and data center efficiency, he says. For example, the open-source AI model from Chinese company DeepSeek seems to have shown that an LLM can produce very high-quality results at a very low cost with some clever architectural changes to how the models work. These improvements are likely to be quickly replicated by other AI companies. “A lot of these companies are trying to push out more efficient models,” says Fung. “There’s a lot of effort to reduce costs and to make it more efficient.” In addition, hyperscalers are designing and building their own chips, optimized for their AI workloads. Just the accelerator market alone is projected to reach $392 billion by 2029, Dell’Oro predicts. By that time, custom accelerators will outpace commercially available accelerators such as GPUs. The deployment of dedicated AI servers also has an impact on networking, power and cooling. As a result, spending on data center physical infrastructure (DCPI) will also increase, though at a more moderate pace, growing by 14% annually to $61 billion in 2029. “DCPI deployments are a prerequisite to support AI workloads,” says Tam Dell’Oro, founder of Dell’Oro Group, in the report. The research firm raised its outlook in this area due to the fact that actual 2024 results exceeded its expectations, and demand is spreading from tier one to tier two cloud service providers. In addition, governments and tier one telecom operators are getting involved in data center expansion, making it a long-term trend.

Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

And Microsoft isn’t the only one that is ramping up its investments into AI-enabled data centers. Rival cloud service providers are all investing in either upgrading or opening new data centers to capture a larger chunk of business from developers and users of large language models (LLMs). In a report published in October 2024, Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that demand for generative AI would push Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle, Meta, and Apple would between them devote $200 billion to capex in 2025, up from $110 billion in 2023. Microsoft is one of the biggest spenders, followed closely by Google and AWS, Bloomberg Intelligence said. Its estimate of Microsoft’s capital spending on AI, at $62.4 billion for calendar 2025, is lower than Smith’s claim that the company will invest $80 billion in the fiscal year to June 30, 2025. Both figures, though, are way higher than Microsoft’s 2020 capital expenditure of “just” $17.6 billion. The majority of the increased spending is tied to cloud services and the expansion of AI infrastructure needed to provide compute capacity for OpenAI workloads. Separately, last October Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said his company planned total capex spend of $75 billion in 2024 and even more in 2025, with much of it going to AWS, its cloud computing division.

John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Self-driving tractors might be the path to self-driving cars. John Deere has revealed a new line of autonomous machines and tech across agriculture, construction and commercial landscaping. The Moline, Illinois-based John Deere has been in business for 187 years, yet it’s been a regular as a non-tech company showing off technology at the big tech trade show in Las Vegas and is back at CES 2025 with more autonomous tractors and other vehicles. This is not something we usually cover, but John Deere has a lot of data that is interesting in the big picture of tech. The message from the company is that there aren’t enough skilled farm laborers to do the work that its customers need. It’s been a challenge for most of the last two decades, said Jahmy Hindman, CTO at John Deere, in a briefing. Much of the tech will come this fall and after that. He noted that the average farmer in the U.S. is over 58 and works 12 to 18 hours a day to grow food for us. And he said the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates there are roughly 2.4 million farm jobs that need to be filled annually; and the agricultural work force continues to shrink. (This is my hint to the anti-immigration crowd). John Deere’s autonomous 9RX Tractor. Farmers can oversee it using an app. While each of these industries experiences their own set of challenges, a commonality across all is skilled labor availability. In construction, about 80% percent of contractors struggle to find skilled labor. And in commercial landscaping, 86% of landscaping business owners can’t find labor to fill open positions, he said. “They have to figure out how to do

2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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