Quote:Internal State Department and U.S.A.I.D. documents and correspondence obtained by The New York Times show that several international organizations, including the Gates Foundation and the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, had offered to buy or accept a donation of the contraceptives. The government would have incurred no costs or might have even been able to recoup taxpayer funds under those scenarios.

Quote:The Belgian government staged a wide-ranging diplomatic effort to prevent the contraceptives from being incinerated at a medical waste facility. The foreign minister, Maxime Prévot, wrote to Mr. Rubio to try to prevent it, according to a Belgian foreign ministry official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the diplomatic matter.
More recently, authorities in Flanders, the region where the warehouse is, had been trying to invoke a legal ban on incinerating still-usable medical products to prevent the destruction.
Those overtures seemed at least to delay the planned incineration. The stockpile did not appear to have been burned by the end of July, as earlier reports had suggested that it would be.

Quote:In the list of potential arguments against a sale, officials invoked policies preventing the U.S. government from providing aid to overseas nongovernmental organizations that provide or help with access to abortions, based on a rule that the Trump administration reinstated. U.S.A.I.D. staff members offered solutions to donate the supply that they argued did not conflict with this policy.

Quote: The Trump administration told The New York Times on Thursday that it had destroyed millions of dollars’ worth of birth control pills and other contraceptives destined for people in low-income countries.
But when the authorities in Belgium, responding to the report in The Times, obtained authorization to enter the warehouse that had been holding the supplies on Friday morning, the stockpile was still there, an official in the Flanders region said.
Local authorities “carried out on-site inspections this morning and found that no cargoes had been diverted for incineration,” said Tom Demeyer, a spokesman for the Flemish minister with jurisdiction over the issue.