Five Key Moments in the Assault on the Rights of Females in the Year 2025.
In the previous year, groups dedicated to gender equality were preparing for a return of Donald Trump to office. Few were prepared for. The flood and velocity of administrative decrees emanating from the White House were viewed as a premeditated approach to overwhelm and create panic. To a large extent, it succeeded – there was bewilderment, fury, and fatigue as groups rushed to address the shortfall left by a sudden aid suspension. But that was just the beginning.
The Trump administration has been the main instigator, bolstered by intense advocacy work by religious fundamentalist networks capitalizing on the climate to forge international alliances with sympathetic regimes.
This opposition to progressive rights denotes an international coalition of political leaders, religious institutions, civil society groups as well as affluent financiers and clans that seek to undermine progress across a wide spectrum of issues. These include access to termination, gay and trans protections, alternative households, and factual sexual instruction.
They pursue this agenda via advocating to officials, financing legal challenges, sabotaging multilateral work to foster equity, propagating misinformation, and bankrolling sympathetic charities.
We look at five junctures that affected the safety, dignity and lives of the female population.
USAID Effectively Dismantled
In March, a month and a half following a key American development organization is frozen, causing turmoil around the world, a top American diplomat announces that over eighty percent of the body's projects will be terminated. American foreign service officers, ex-presidents and aid and medical specialists decry the decision, cautioning that people will die as a result. Rights defenders say that the demise of the agency is more than a funding crisis, it is a savage attack on human rights and family planning and reproductive care. A multitude of agencies say women and girls will be disproportionately affected by reduced funding, especially in regions of instability. As the year ends, evidence indicates 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 proceed with parallel slashes. A leader of an international advocacy group says a decision to slash billions in overseas assistance is a move to appease a political ally.
Christian-Right Groups Raise Voices During UN Women Summit
In the same month, several Christian-right organisations meet in an high-end hotel in NYC 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 LGBTQ issues, inclusion, and reproductive rights. Meanwhile, the world's top diplomat opens the gender equality forum with a grave caution that “the venom of male dominance” is back, after a report shows that anti-rights actors are actively undermining longstanding consensus on fundamental freedoms for women around the world.
Conferences on Traditional Values in Africa
Over the warmer months, a series of conferences in Africa focused on the conventional household and state autonomy sparks alarm among rights advocates. In early May, a president and first lady open a major forum to push back on what they label overseas agendas corrupting societal morals. A shortly thereafter, another continental gathering on traditional morals is held. Both events are participated in by leading Western campaigners against gender ideology, including leaders of well-known groups. One speaker exhorts African NGOs to resist “radical global social engineering” of international organizations. In the following month, a global faith group hosts a event focused on reinforcing families in an African nation, an event that health activists say has become a forum for opposing queer and trans rights. Activists observe that the extent of foreign involvement has increased markedly.
American Plan to Burn Birth Control
As clinics in sub-Saharan Africa report they are facing shortages of birth control, including post-rape care packages, the US announces in July plans to incinerate millions of dollars worth of contraceptives held in a storage facility in Belgium. A leading family planning organization states that their destruction will deny a huge female population from contraceptive supplies, and lead to a public health crisis of unwanted pregnancies. The organization labels the plan an ideological decision “about imposing an anti-rights agenda on the entire world” and “a calculated move to control fertility”. A prominent medical humanitarian organization calls it “cruel and irresponsible”. Aid groups propose purchasing the contraceptives so they can fulfill their original purpose, but the US declines every proposal. The situation remains at a standstill as the regional government are blocking perfectly good supplies to be incinerated.
‘Global Gag Rule’ Expanded
Reviving the global gag rule, which cuts American funding for groups that offer, promote, or give information about abortion services overseas, is typical of certain US administrations. It came as no surprise when the ban was reimposed in January. The administration also signed onto a conservative consensus document. But in the autumn, the US announces it intends to broaden the scope of the policy to include governments and multilateral organisations in addition to NGOs, and to include DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) projects. Further specifics about the expansion of the rule are expected in early 2026. A director of a major health partnership says widening the scope will have “unimaginable effects”. Pro-choice activists fear that fresh American assistance deals being negotiated with countries in Africa will become contingent upon adopting the new, wider policy.
