On this International Women’s Day, the Family Research Council is celebrating Donald Trump’s executive order reinstating the “Mexico City Policy,” which in past iterations has banned taxpayer funds from going to organizations that provide or promote abortions. Trump’s massively expanded version of the “global gag rule” could have catastrophic consequences for poor women around the world.
Past Republican presidents have supported this policy, but Trump drastically expanded its scope. Groups that even tell women about the availability of abortion or advocate for legal access to abortion are blacklisted from any global health funding. As the Washington Post noted, Trump’s policy “will inflict the same damage on far more programs and far more people.” The New York Times said the order will “harm global health” and “may well have made it harder for health workers around the world to fight cancer, H.I.V., Zika and Ebola.” Something to celebrate!
In the FRC blog post today, Daniel Hart gloats that Canada and Europe “grind their teeth” in response to Trump’s policy. He mocks She Decides, an effort launched in January by Dutch Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation Lilianne Ploumen to “increase financial as well as political support for sexual health and family planning worldwide and mitigate the impact of decreased U.S. funding for family planning.” FRC says if other countries want to take part in She Decides, “that is their inhuman prerogative.”
Trump also named the ardently anti-choice Nikki Haley to be U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, where she will almost certainly resist efforts by UN agencies to have access to contraception and safe abortions acknowledged as human rights.
Concerned Women For America has its own contribution to International Women’s Day and the “A Day Without A Woman” effort organized by the activists who put together the post-inaugural women’s march. CWA explains just how good women in the workplace have it in the U.S.:
While women were at one point dangerously overworked and underpaid, especially in comparison to men, there are now laws in place monitoring men’s and women’s work hours and pay to create a platform of equal opportunity and a method of redress when necessary.
Of course, whatever rights and workplace protections women have is no thanks to the right-wing politicians and judges that CWA supports, who have fought laws that protect women and other workers. Concerned Women for America even called the Lilly Ledbetter Act, which corrected a right-wing Supreme Court ruling that made it harder for women to challenge pay discrimination, one of President Obama’s “paybacks to the radical feminists.”
