A Trump Victory Could Reinvigorate a Global Antiabortion Pact: 'Women Are Going to Die'

(lengthy, important, disturbing read. this was published before the election, so even worse now) trigger warning


A Trump Victory Could Reinvigorate a Global Antiabortion Pact: ‘Women Are Going to Die’
PUBLISHED 11/2/2024 by Jodi Enda, The Fuller Project


Participants of the 47th annual March for Life rally march up Constitution Ave. on Jan. 24, 2020 in Washington, D.C. President Trump, who spoke at the rally, is the first U.S. president in history to speak in person at the annual march. (Amanda Voisard / The Washington Post via Getty Images)

This article was originally published by The Fuller Project, co-published with Foreign Policy.

Less than two weeks before his 2020 election defeat, then-President Donald Trump’s administration rolled out a document that purported to promote women’s health and rights while declaring that there was “no international right to abortion.” “It’s the first time that a multilateral coalition has been built around the issue of defending life,” then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said at a signing ceremony, conducted virtually because of the coronavirus pandemic. Brazil, Egypt, Hungary, Indonesia and Uganda joined the United States in sponsoring the nonbinding directive, called the Geneva Consensus Declaration on Promoting Women’s Health and Strengthening the Family. Another 28 countries, many with authoritarian governments that repress women’s rights, signed it.

Abortion is one of the most pivotal issues that will determine whether Trump returns to the Oval Office. The Republican nominee routinely brags about his role—via three Supreme Court nominations—in overturning Roe v. Wade in a 2022 ruling that inevitably limited abortion access for millions of people in the United States. Less known is the work that Trump and his appointees did to prevent women in other countries from obtaining the procedure. The Geneva Consensus Declaration, which encourages governments to improve women’s health care without abortion, is one slice of Trump’s work to impose antiabortion values on people overseas. It has garnered fewer concrete results than his expansion of the Mexico City Policy, a perennial Republican rule that prevents foreign organizations that accept U.S. assistance from providing abortions or related services. But if Trump is elected, the declaration is expected to have renewed vigor. In fact, it could loom over all U.S. foreign assistance. While the one-page document—with its emphasis on health and human rights for women—presents as nonthreatening, detractors assert that a Trump victory on Nov. 5 could make it very threatening indeed. “I mean, sorry—to be brutal about it, women are going to die,” said Swetha Sridhar, a senior global policy research officer for Fòs Feminista, an international alliance that promotes sexual and reproductive health and justice. “That’s what we’re going to see.”

President Joe Biden withdrew the United States from the declaration upon assuming the presidency in 2021 because, his administration said, it “promotes anti-LGBTQI sentiment and undermines women’s health.” But Washington’s rejection of a document that it produced did not kill it. The declaration has been kept alive largely through the work of one former Trump administration official, Valerie Huber, who is known as its “architect.” Sridhar and other abortion and gender rights advocates say that the Geneva Consensus Declaration represents a long-term, conservative attempt to create new international standards grounded in faith-based views of abortion and family structures. “It has a big impact when you have these established global norms,” said Serra Sippel, the executive director of the Brigid Alliance, which provides logistical support for people who need to travel to obtain abortions within the United States. “Anti-gender, anti-rights folks can use this consensus as a tool to try to get countries to pass laws,” Sippel added.

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https://msmagazine.com/2024/11/02/trump-global-gag-rule-mexico-city-policy-republicans/