The UN Just Watered-Down Women's Rights Worldwide--and the U.S. Insisted on It (war on women)

the WAR ON WOMEN continues apace, fueled by the misogynistic sexual predator in chief and his loyalists)

(FUCK pence, bolton, and all the damned woman-hating reichwing fundamentalist assholes who think it is their go-given right to treat women as something less than human. I HATE them!!!


The UN Just Watered-Down Women’s Rights Worldwide—and the U.S. Insisted on It
4/24/2019 by Dulcie Leimbach

The latest battle over words at the United Nations drew global attention to the Trump administration’s attempts to wrestle full control over women’s bodies and minds—in the U.S. and across the world.



Amal Clooney told the UN Security Council that now is its “Nuremberg moment” to push for prosecuting cases of sexual violence in conflict. (Evan Schneider for the UN)

After four weeks of tumultuous negotiations over a resolution that reinforced decades of international efforts to combat sexual violence in conflict and to introduce more legal reassurances and services for victims, the 15-member United Nations Security Council approved a text whose wording had been rigorously fought over between the United States and many of its fellow Council members.Many Council members had hoped that the Germans, who were leading the negotiations, would not cave in to U.S. pressures to weaken commitments to women in conflict. Some members even threatened to walk away from the text if the U.S. got its way, while others wanted the Germans to call the bluff of the U.S. and put the resolution to a vote with the forbidden wording in.

Ultimately, some capitulation was necessary, it turned out, to save the resolution. The text aimed to be all-encompassing—building on a chain of previous resolutions to enhance the legal recognition of victims’ needs, such as justice and reparations. But what the resolution lacked, and what caused tremendous consternation among many UN member states in and outside the Council and women’s rights advocates, were the words “sexual and reproductive health.” Such language is a fixture in some related UN resolutions, such as No. 2106, but the Trump administration—circling back to Vice President Pence, an evangelical Christian—contends that it connotes abortion. Those words vanished during the tail-end of negotiations led by a German diplomat, Andreas Glossner, amidst threats of a veto by the U.S. (The resolution, however, affirms earlier resolutions, including 2106.) The success by the U.S. in banishing such language symbolizes how the Trump administration is fast making inroads to eliminate women’s rights word by word—including references to abortion or any other language that implies a termination of pregnancy.

. . . .

The voices who spoke up in Council for the missing language on sexual and reproductive health came mostly from Europe and Africa. At least three countries had toyed with abstaining on the vote. Among Africans, South Africa voiced objections the most loudly, as did Belgium, Britain and France. The Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti in the Caribbean and is Roman Catholic, that stood up the tallest for the right of women and girls to have access to sexual reproductive health services. José Singer Weisinger, the country’s special envoy in the Council, called such access “non-negotiable,” declaring that to refuse it is “tantamount to degrading cruel and inhuman treatment and greater suffering.”

. . . . . .

In a world where “it is still largely cost-free to rape women,” as Pramila Patten, the UN’s envoy on sexual violence in conflict, told the chamber, the new resolution is written to end such lawlessness. But what resonated the most in the April 23 debate was the refusal of the U.S., the most potent democracy in the world, to allow three certain words into a resolution to stop women, girls, men and boys from being raped in conflict. “Watering down” the resolution, as an African diplomat put it, “will certainly not be good for survivors of sexual violence who are most in need of it.”


https://msmagazine.com/2019/04/24/the-un-just-watered-down-womens-rights-worldwide-and-the-u-s-insisted-on-it/