A Quintet of Significant Developments in the Rollback of the Freedoms of Women and Girls in 2025.
This time last year, feminist advocacy groups were anticipating a new Trump administration. Hardly anyone anticipated. The volume and speed of White House mandates originating in the White House were interpreted as a premeditated approach to paralyze through overload. To a large extent, it succeeded – there was bewilderment, fury, and fatigue as organisations scrambled to address the shortfall left by a freeze on international development funds. But that was just the beginning.
The Washington leadership has been the main instigator, aided by intense advocacy work by far-right organisations exploiting the situation to solidify transnational relationships with political allies.
The movement against gender equality describes a worldwide alliance of elected officials, faith-based bodies, non-governmental organisations as well as affluent financiers and clans that seek to undermine advances on numerous fronts. Areas targeted involve pro-choice policies, equality for sexual minorities, gender identity recognition, and inclusive relationship teaching.
They pursue this agenda via advocating to officials, financing legal challenges, sabotaging multilateral work to foster equity, propagating misinformation, and bankrolling sympathetic charities.
We examine five instances that impacted the welfare, autonomy, and survival of girls and women.
USAID Dismantled
In the month of March, six weeks after a key American development organization is its funds are blocked, causing international chaos, a top American diplomat announces that the lion's share of the organization's initiatives will be axed. US diplomats, former presidents and relief and public health authorities condemn the news, cautioning that lives will be lost. Rights defenders say that the dismantling of this institution is not just a financial shortfall, it is a vicious offensive against basic liberties and family planning and reproductive care. A multitude of agencies 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. Another pair of leading funders initiate similar reductions. A head of a worldwide campaign network says a choice to reduce international development funding is a move to appease a political ally.
Faith-Based Activists Mobilize at UN Conference
In March, several Christian-right organisations meet in an luxury Manhattan venue for a strategic summit held concurrently with the annual UN Women gathering. It is an forum to discuss methods on how to oppose what they term a UN overreach. They are in high spirits as they applaud changes in American foreign policy on gender, diversity and abortion. Meanwhile, the head of the United Nations opens the women’s summit with a grave caution that “the poison of patriarchy” is back, after a report shows that anti-rights actors are deliberately weakening established norms on key women’s rights issues around the world.
African ‘Family Values’ Conferences
Over the summer, a sequence of gatherings in Africa focused on the conservative family structures and national independence raises concerns among human rights defenders. In early May, a president and first lady open a large assembly to resist what they label overseas agendas corrupting societal morals. A few days later, another Pan-African conference on conservative ethics is held. Both events are graced by leading Western campaigners against gender ideology, including presidents of prominent organizations. One speaker urges African NGOs to stand up to “radical global social engineering” of multilateral bodies. In the following month, a prominent church hosts a family strengthening conference in West Africa, an event that reproductive rights advocates say has become a stage for criticizing gender equality. Advocates remark that the level of external participation has increased markedly.
American Plan to Burn Birth Control
As medical centers in numerous African countries report they are depleting their stocks of family planning supplies, including emergency kits for survivors of sexual violence, the US announces in midsummer plans to incinerate a vast stockpile of birth control held in a European depot. A major reproductive health federation states that their elimination will deprive a huge female population from access to birth control, and lead to a public health crisis of unwanted pregnancies. The organization labels the plan an politically-motivated move “about imposing an anti-rights agenda on the entire world” and “a calculated move to control fertility”. A international emergency medical charity calls it “callous and reckless”. NGOs offer to buy the contraceptives so they can fulfill their original purpose, but the US rejects each bid. The situation remains at a standstill as local authorities will not allow the destruction of viable medicines.
Broader Restrictions on Aid
Reviving the global gag rule, which halts US aid to groups that offer, promote, or give information about abortion services overseas, is commonplace under certain US administrations. It was anticipated when the policy was restored in January. The administration also signed onto a conservative consensus document. But in October, the US announces it intends to extend the restrictions to include governments and multilateral organisations in addition to NGOs, and to encompass equity and inclusion initiatives. Additional information regarding the policy's widened application are anticipated next year. A director of a major health partnership says broadening the policy will have “catastrophic impacts”. Pro-choice activists fear that fresh American assistance deals being negotiated with countries in Africa will become conditional on accepting the new, wider policy.
