Five Critical Pivotal Events in the Assault on the Rights of Females in the Past Year.
This time last year, feminist advocacy groups were steeling themselves against a new Trump administration. The ensuing chaos was largely unforeseen. The torrent and swiftness of White House mandates coming out of the White House were interpreted as a calculated strategy to induce a state of shock. To a large extent, it succeeded – there was bewilderment, fury, and fatigue as organisations scrambled to fill the gap left by a abrupt cessation of financial support. But that was just the beginning.
The Trump administration has been the primary force, supported by fervent lobbying efforts by religious fundamentalist networks seizing the opportunity to build worldwide connections with sympathetic regimes.
This opposition to progressive rights denotes an international coalition of government figures, churches, and advocacy collectives as well as affluent financiers and clans that strive to weaken advances on numerous fronts. This encompasses reproductive choice, queer and transgender freedoms, diverse family models, and honest sex ed.
They pursue this agenda via influencing policymakers, funding litigation, undermining global initiatives to advance equality, spreading disinformation, and funding non-profit organisations.
We examine five junctures that affected the protection, honor, and existence of the female population.
USAID Dismantled
In early spring, shortly after a key American development organization is halted, causing widespread distress, a top American diplomat announces that the lion's share of the body's projects will be terminated. Career diplomats, past leaders and aid and medical specialists decry the decision, predicting that mortality will increase. Activists say that the closure of the organization is not just a financial shortfall, it is a savage attack on human rights and birth control and maternal healthcare. Many organisations say women and girls will be disproportionately affected by diminishing aid, especially in conflict areas. As the year ends, statistics reveal how a significant mortality toll has been exacted from illness, famine, inadequate obstetric services, and violence against women, with millions more to come. Another pair of leading funders follow with their own cuts. A director of a global justice organization says a decision to slash billions in overseas assistance is an attempt to placate a powerful partner.
Conservative Religious Groups Lobby at UN Women Meeting
In March, several Christian-right organisations meet in an upmarket New York hotel for a two-day conference held concurrently with the UN's flagship gender equality meeting. It is an chance to exchange strategies on how to defeat the UN’s “radical agenda”. They are in high spirits as they applaud shifts in US policy on LGBTQ issues, inclusion, and reproductive rights. Meanwhile, the UN secretary general opens the global conference with a stark warning that “the venom of male dominance” is resurgent, after a analysis demonstrates that opponents of gender equality are actively undermining longstanding consensus on core aspects of gender equality around the world.
African ‘Family Values’ Conferences
Over the summer, a series of conferences in Africa centered on the conventional household and state autonomy triggers anxiety among human rights defenders. In early May, a head of state and partner open a significant conference to push back on what they label overseas agendas corrupting societal morals. A soon after, another Pan-African conference on family values is held. Both events are participated in by leading Western campaigners against gender ideology, including leaders of well-known groups. One speaker exhorts African NGOs to stand up to “international liberal agenda” of global institutions. In June, a prominent church hosts a event focused on reinforcing families in an African nation, an event that health activists say has become an anti-LGBTQ, anti-gender platform. Campaigners note that the scale of their presence has increased markedly.
Contraceptive Destruction Order
As clinics in sub-Saharan Africa report they are running out of contraceptives, including emergency kits for survivors of sexual violence, the US announces in July plans to incinerate a significant cache of reproductive health commodities held in a European depot. A global sexual health network states that their incineration will prevent millions of women and girls from contraceptive supplies, and lead to hundreds of thousands of unintended pregnancies and unsafe abortions. The organization labels the plan an dogmatic choice “about imposing an anti-rights agenda on the entire world” and “an intentional act of reproductive coercion”. A prominent medical humanitarian organization calls it “heartless and dangerous”. Charities attempt to acquire the contraceptives so they can fulfill their original purpose, but the US rejects each bid. The situation remains in deadlock as host nation officials refuse to permit the destruction of viable medicines.
‘Global Gag Rule’ Expanded
Reviving the global gag rule, which prohibits Washington's support for groups that offer, promote, or give information about abortion services overseas, is standard practice for certain US administrations. It came as no surprise when the rule was reinstated 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 cover diversity programmes. Further specifics about the policy's widened application are anticipated next year. A leader in global maternal health says widening the scope will have “unimaginable effects”. Reproductive justice campaigners fear that new US aid packages being arranged with states on the continent will become conditional on accepting the expanded global gag.
