The Price of Birth: When Foreign Aid Dies, So Does Healthcare

A woman in Zimbabwe clutched her swollen belly, each contraction more urgent than the last. She was being transfered from a rural clinic to a better equipped facility. At 35, this should have been a routine transfer—the kind the hospital had handled countless times when USAID funding still arrived. Before it was a facility that ensured emergencies like hers were met with swift, free care.

But January had changed everything.

Workers announced to everyone in the waiting room that they needed to phone their families and ask for money. “If they don't have it, they must sell the cow or a goat so that they can get the money for you.”

The mother in active, distressing labor was made to pay 100 USD cash in exchange for an emergency caesarean. The money was required to buy scissors, razor, needles, and injections.

Her son was born healthy except for an eye infection, a simple condition that once would have been treated immediately with antibiotics that cost mere cents.

Instead, she found herself clutching her newborn, being told to leave. "Buy the medicine at the pharmacy," she was told. To stay longer would mean selling livestock, their livelihood. And no payment means no birth certificate.

As she walked out of this Zimbabwean hospital—the same hospital that had been a beacon of hope when American aid sustained it—she carried more than her sick newborn. She carried the weight of a system that doesn’t have the funding it needs to provide simple healthcare. Where once there had been dignity in healthcare, now there was only the marketplace, and she could not afford a place in it.

The building remained the same, but everything that had made it truly a hospital—the commitment to heal regardless of ability to pay—had vanished with the aid that once made such compassion possible.

—Zimbabwe