A Quintet of Key Moments in the Rollback of the Freedoms of Women and Girls in This Past Year.
This time last year, feminist advocacy groups were steeling themselves against a Trump presidency sequel. Hardly anyone anticipated. The torrent and swiftness of executive orders originating in the White House were regarded as a calculated strategy to overwhelm and create panic. This strategy had its intended impact – there was bewilderment, fury, and fatigue as organisations scrambled to fill the gap left by a major funding freeze. But this merely marked the opening act.
The American government has been the primary force, bolstered by fervent lobbying efforts by religious fundamentalist networks exploiting the situation to forge international alliances with political allies.
The anti-rights movement refers to a global network of political leaders, religious institutions, civil society groups as well as affluent financiers and clans that work to dismantle forward movement on multiple topics. These include reproductive choice, queer and transgender freedoms, diverse family models, and honest sex ed.
They do this by advocating to officials, financing legal challenges, sabotaging multilateral work to advance equality, spreading disinformation, and funding non-profit organisations.
We examine five instances that shaped the welfare, autonomy, and survival of women and girls.
USAID Dismantled
In the month of March, six weeks after a major US aid agency is frozen, causing global disruption, a senior US official reveals that nearly all of the organization's initiatives will be axed. Career diplomats, ex-presidents and aid and medical specialists criticize the move, stating that lives will be lost. Rights defenders say that the dismantling of this institution is greater than a budgetary issue, it is a savage attack on human rights and family planning and reproductive care. Numerous groups say women and girls will be disproportionately affected by waning support, especially in war zones. As the year ends, reports confirm how hundreds of thousands of people have already died from disease, starvation, lack of access to maternal care and gender-based violence, with many more millions at risk. Additional key contributing countries follow with their own cuts. A head of a worldwide campaign network says a choice to reduce international development funding is a move to appease a political ally.
Christian-Right Groups Raise Voices During UN Women Summit
In the same month, several conservative religious groups meet in an high-end hotel in NYC for a two-day conference held alongside the international conference on women's rights. It is an forum to discuss methods on how to oppose what they term a UN overreach. They are in optimistic frame of mind as they applaud shifts in US policy on LGBTQ issues, inclusion, and reproductive rights. Meanwhile, the head of the United Nations opens the global conference with a somber alert that “the toxin of gendered hierarchy” is returning, after a study indicates that groups opposing progressive rights are deliberately weakening established norms on core aspects of gender equality around the world.
Summits Promoting Conservative Norms
Over the warmer months, a series of conferences in Africa centered on the conventional household and state autonomy triggers anxiety among equality campaigners. In early May, a president and first lady open a major forum to push back on what they label overseas agendas corrupting societal morals. A shortly thereafter, another regional summit on traditional morals is held. Both events are graced by leading US and European anti-rights figures, including heads of influential networks. One speaker urges African NGOs to push back against “worldwide progressive social restructuring” of global institutions. In the following month, a major religious institution hosts a event focused on reinforcing families in an African nation, an event that pro-choice campaigners say has become an anti-LGBTQ, anti-gender platform. Activists observe that the extent of foreign involvement has increased markedly.
Contraceptive Destruction Order
As clinics in sub-Saharan Africa report they are facing shortages of birth control, including post-rape care packages, the US announces in July plans to dispose of a significant cache of reproductive health commodities held in a warehouse in Europe. A major reproductive health federation states that their elimination will deprive a huge female population from contraceptive supplies, and lead to a public health crisis of unwanted pregnancies. The organization labels the plan an dogmatic choice “about exporting a regressive policy worldwide” and “a deliberate form of reproductive oppression”. A international emergency medical charity calls it “cruel and irresponsible”. Aid groups propose purchasing the contraceptives so they can fulfill their original purpose, but the US rejects each bid. The situation remains at a standstill as host nation officials are blocking the destruction of viable medicines.
Widening of the Anti-Abortion Policy
Reinstating the Mexico City Policy, which prohibits Washington's support for groups that offer, promote, or give information about abortion services overseas, is typical of certain US administrations. It came as no surprise when the ban was reimposed in January. The administration also signed onto a conservative consensus document. But in the autumn, the US announces it intends to broaden the scope of the policy to include national governments and international bodies in addition to NGOs, and to include DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) projects. More details on the broader enforcement are likely forthcoming. A leader in global maternal health says extending the reach will have “catastrophic impacts”. Advocates for bodily autonomy fear that new US aid packages being arranged with states on the continent will become conditional on accepting the expanded global gag.