Five Defining Landmark Occurrences in the Rollback of the Rights of Women and Girls in 2025.
Twelve months prior, organisations advocating for women's rights were bracing themselves for a new Trump administration. Hardly anyone anticipated. The volume and speed of administrative decrees emanating from the White House were interpreted as a calculated strategy to induce a state of shock. This strategy had its intended impact – there was confusion, anger and exhaustion as organisations scrambled to fill the gap left by a sudden aid suspension. But that was just the beginning.
The Trump administration has been the key driver, bolstered by fervent lobbying efforts by ultra-conservative groups seizing the opportunity to build worldwide connections with political allies.
This opposition to progressive rights describes a worldwide alliance of political leaders, religious institutions, civil society groups as well as billionaire families and individuals that seek to undermine forward movement on multiple topics. These include reproductive choice, queer and transgender freedoms, diverse family models, and honest sex ed.
They pursue this agenda via lobbying governments, supporting court cases, discrediting international efforts to promote fairness, circulating falsehoods, and resourcing aligned NGOs.
We look at five episodes that influenced the welfare, autonomy, and survival of the female population.
The Dismantling of USAID
In early spring, shortly after a key American development organization is frozen, causing turmoil around the world, a top American diplomat confirms that nearly all of the organization's initiatives will be axed. Career diplomats, former presidents and aid and medical specialists denounce the action, warning that mortality will increase. Rights defenders say that the closure of the organization is greater than a budgetary issue, it is a vicious offensive against basic liberties and access to contraception and reproductive health services. Many organisations say the impact on girls and women will be severe by shrinking assistance, especially in conflict areas. As the year ends, statistics reveal how hundreds of thousands of people have already died from disease, starvation, lack of access to maternal care and gender-based violence, with a far greater catastrophe looming. Two other major donor nations announce their own austerity measures. A director of a global justice organization says a choice to reduce international development funding is a gesture of alignment with another government's agenda.
Conservative Religious Groups Lobby at UN Women Meeting
In the same month, several faith-based advocacy networks meet in an upmarket New York hotel for a biannual gathering held alongside the UN's flagship gender equality meeting. It is an forum to discuss methods on how to oppose what they term a UN overreach. They are in high spirits as they celebrate new Washington directives on gender, diversity and abortion. Meanwhile, the head of the United Nations opens the gender equality forum with a stark warning that “the toxin of gendered hierarchy” is returning, after a report shows that opponents of gender equality are actively undermining longstanding consensus on core aspects of gender equality around the world.
Summits Promoting Conservative Norms
Over the warmer months, a cluster of meetings in Africa themed around the conservative family structures and national independence triggers anxiety among human rights defenders. In May, a head of state and partner open a large assembly to combat what they label criminal foreign forces eroding traditional family values. A few days later, another continental gathering on conservative ethics is held. Both events are participated in by leading Western campaigners against gender ideology, including heads of influential networks. One speaker calls on African NGOs to resist “international liberal agenda” of multilateral bodies. In June, a global faith group hosts a event focused on reinforcing families in West Africa, an event that health activists say has become a forum for opposing queer and trans rights. Campaigners note that the scale of their presence has grown significantly.
American Plan to Burn Birth Control
As clinics in sub-Saharan Africa report they are depleting their stocks of family planning supplies, including emergency kits for survivors of sexual violence, the US announces in July plans to dispose of a significant cache of reproductive health commodities held in a storage facility in Belgium. A major reproductive health federation states that their incineration will prevent millions of women and girls from family planning options, and lead to a public health crisis of unwanted pregnancies. The organization labels the plan an dogmatic choice “about imposing an anti-rights agenda on the entire world” and “a calculated move to control fertility”. A international emergency medical charity calls it “heartless and dangerous”. NGOs offer to buy the contraceptives so they can reach their intended destinations, but the US refuses all offers. The situation remains unresolved as local authorities are blocking the destruction of viable medicines.
Broader Restrictions on Aid
Reinstating the Mexico City Policy, 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 was widely expected when the ban was reimposed 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 expand the global gag rule to include sovereign states and UN agencies in addition to NGOs, and to cover diversity programmes. Further specifics about the broader enforcement are likely forthcoming. A director of a major health partnership says broadening the policy will have “unimaginable effects”. Advocates for bodily autonomy fear that fresh American assistance deals being negotiated with countries in Africa will become dependent on agreeing to the expanded global gag.
