What The Hell America!

When the U.S. cuts foreign aid, women and children in crisis zones pay the ultimate price—with their safety, their futures and their lives.

Judith wakes up in Uganda with a familiar sense of dread. A victim of domestic violence, she could feel her depression slowly creeping back. Until recently, she had a place to go for reprieve—a safe space where women like her could heal, manage the trauma, and find support for their experience with violence. But today, the doors are closed. The humanitarian workers who fought for women’s protection have disappeared. The resources that once helped survivors rebuild their lives have been ripped away. And so she stays where she is, trapped in a home that is not safe, with nowhere left to turn.

This is what life looks like without foreign aid: women, children, entire families are left to navigate trauma alone. And it is women and girls who suffer the most. More than 70 percent of women experience gender-based violence in crisis settings, compared to the global average of 35 percent. Safe spaces like the one Judith relied on are often survivors’ only source of protection. 

We are quick to debate the cost of aid, but rarely do we discuss the cost of its absence. … When aid disappears, people die. Not theoretically. Not eventually. Immediately.

Judith had only just found the courage to seek help. She attended two therapy sessions before the program was shut down without warning. The sessions weren’t classified as “life-saving.” A few days later, the humanitarian workers who’d been dismissed received a report of a suicide.

The justification is always the same: fiscal responsibility, foreign policy recalibrations, shifting political winds. But on the ground, the reality is much more cutting. When aid disappears, people die. Not theoretically. Not eventually. Immediately.

Judith is not alone. Women in crisis zones across the world are experiencing the same devastating reality.

In Sudan, a mother brings her severely malnourished child to a stabilization center—their last hope for survival. The mother watches as a nurse adjusts the feeding tube, her child’s fragile ribs rising and falling with shallow breaths. The war here has been brutal and relentless. The hospitals have been bombed, the infrastructure gutted, the supply chains severed. And now, after weeks of chaos and uncertainty, this center is on the brink of closing. The staff could be forced to leave. And within six hours, the children left inside could die.

In South Sudan, a woman named Nyamal flees her abusive husband, searching for safety at a women’s and girls’ shelter. But the shelter is closed. The humanitarian workers are gone. With nowhere else to go, she walks back to the home she fought to escape.

On the Myanmar-Thailand border, a mother wakes up to the sound of her child’s fevered cries. Malaria is spreading fast, with drug-resistant strains rising by 1,000 percent. The healthcare workers who once fought alongside the community are unemployed, and the funding that had once kept clinics running has disappeared. She gathers her child in her arms, only to realize she has nowhere to take her child for treatment.

We are quick to debate the cost of aid, but rarely do we discuss the cost of its absence. The cost of losing foreign aid is not measured in dollars. It is measured in lost lives, in abandoned futures, in the irreversible undoing of progress painstakingly built over decades. It is measured by the moral stain of knowing that we could have helped and chose not to.

Aid is not a line item to be slashed when convenient. It is a commitment: to humanity, to protecting women, to the belief that no life is worth less simply because it exists beyond our borders. It is the difference between Judith finding safety and Nyamal being forced to return to her abuser. It is, quite literally, life or death.

The question is not whether we can afford to sustain foreign aid, but rather: How do we justify the lives lost when we choose not to?