A Quintet of Significant Developments in the Attack on the Freedoms of Women and Girls in the Year 2025.
This time last year, women’s rights organisations were anticipating a new Trump administration. The ensuing chaos was largely unforeseen. The sheer number and rapid pace of administrative decrees issued from the White House were seen as a calculated strategy to paralyze through overload. To a large extent, it succeeded – there was disarray, outrage, and weariness as networks struggled to address the shortfall left by a freeze on international development funds. But this was only the precursor.
The US administration has been the key driver, supported by vigorous campaigning by far-right organisations seizing the opportunity to forge international alliances with like-minded governments.
The anti-rights movement signifies a transnational grouping of elected officials, faith-based bodies, non-governmental organisations as well as wealthy philanthropists and dynasties that aim to roll back advances on numerous fronts. This covers access to termination, gay and trans protections, alternative households, and factual sexual instruction.
They achieve this through advocating to officials, financing legal challenges, sabotaging multilateral work to foster equity, propagating misinformation, and bankrolling sympathetic charities.
We review five junctures that affected the welfare, autonomy, and survival of the female population.
The Dismantling of USAID
In the month of March, six weeks after a major US aid agency is frozen, causing international chaos, a senior US official reveals that nearly all of the organization's initiatives will be axed. Career diplomats, ex-presidents and humanitarian and health experts criticize the move, stating that people will die as a result. Human rights advocates say that the demise of the agency is not just a financial shortfall, it is a brutal assault on fundamental freedoms and birth control and maternal healthcare. A multitude of agencies say females will bear the brunt by reduced funding, especially in conflict areas. As the year ends, reports confirm how hundreds of thousands of people have already died from sickness, hunger, poor pregnancy healthcare, and abuse targeting females, with millions more to come. Another pair of leading funders follow with their own cuts. A leader of an international advocacy group says a choice to reduce international development funding is a gesture of alignment with another government's agenda.
Christian-Right Groups Raise Voices During UN Women Summit
In March, several faith-based advocacy networks meet in an luxury Manhattan venue for a two-day conference held concurrently with the UN's flagship gender equality meeting. It is an opportunity to share tactics on how to counter the UN's progressive policies. They are in optimistic frame of mind as they welcome new Washington directives on gender, diversity and abortion. Meanwhile, the UN secretary general opens the global conference with a somber alert that “the poison of patriarchy” is back, after a report shows that anti-rights actors are actively undermining historic agreements on key women’s rights issues 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 sparks alarm among rights advocates. In the start of May, a national leader and spouse open a major forum to push back on what they label criminal foreign forces eroding traditional family values. A few days later, another regional summit on family values is held. Both events are attended by leading US and European anti-rights figures, including presidents of prominent organizations. One speaker exhorts African NGOs to stand up to “radical global social engineering” of global institutions. In the following month, a prominent church hosts a family strengthening conference in an African nation, an event that reproductive rights advocates say has become a forum for opposing queer and trans rights. Advocates remark that the extent of foreign involvement has expanded considerably.
American Plan to Burn Birth Control
As clinics in sub-Saharan Africa report they are running out of contraceptives, including post-rape care packages, the US announces in July plans to destroy a significant cache of reproductive health commodities held in a storage facility in Belgium. A leading family planning organization states that their elimination will deprive countless females from family planning options, and lead to hundreds of thousands of unintended pregnancies and unsafe abortions. The organization labels the plan an ideological decision “about imposing an anti-rights agenda on the entire world” and “an intentional act of reproductive coercion”. A renowned doctors' group calls it “callous and reckless”. Aid groups propose purchasing the contraceptives so they can be distributed to those in need, but the US declines every proposal. The situation remains in deadlock as local authorities are blocking usable products to be destroyed.
Widening of the Anti-Abortion Policy
Reinstating the Mexico City Policy, which prohibits Washington's support for groups that provide, advocate for or advise on abortion services overseas, is commonplace under certain US administrations. It was anticipated when the rule was reinstated in the first month of the year. The administration also rejoined an international anti-abortion agreement. But in October, the US announces it intends to broaden the scope of the policy to include governments and multilateral organisations in addition to NGOs, and to encompass equity and inclusion initiatives. More details on the expansion of the rule are anticipated next year. A director of a major health partnership says extending the reach will have “devastating consequences”. Pro-choice activists fear that upcoming Washington funding agreements being negotiated with countries in Africa will become conditional on accepting the broadened restrictions.
