Resist and Persist: How Ipas will meet the changing global health landscape

April 2025

For 52 years, Ipas has supported communities around the world to ensure access to abortion and contraception for all. We have a deep history and experience working on abortion in places in the world with very restrictive laws, and with health systems that face critical challenges. Ipas has survived extraordinary challenges in the past, and our mission, persistence, and expertise are more critical than ever in the current moment.

The United States’ drastic dismantling of its $79.5 billion foreign aid program has significantly impacted development and humanitarian sectors and created chaos around the globe. Health systems have been crippled, and countless lives and livelihoods have been disrupted. This is a moment of inflection in the global health and development community.

Continued: https://www.ipas.org/our-work/resist-and-persist-how-ipas-will-meet-the-changing-global-health-landscape/

Weaponizing Aid: How U.S. Policies Undermine Reproductive Health in Humanitarian Crises

U.S. restrictions on foreign aid like the global gag rule are endangering women and girls by cutting off access to essential reproductive healthcare in humanitarian crises.

2/18/2025
by Ira Memaj

Shortly after taking office, the Trump administration issued a cascade of executive orders—among them, the reinstatement of the Mexico City Policy, commonly referred to as the global gag rule (GGR). The GGR restricts U.S. funding for international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that provide, refer for, lobby or counsel on abortion care. While much has been covered about the GGR’s adverse effects on global health and NGOs, its impact on vulnerable populations in humanitarian settings, particularly refugee women and girls, has received less attention.

In 2024, a record 122.6 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced due to climate change, political unrest, persecution and armed conflict. More than 90 million women and girls are expected to require humanitarian aid, including sexual and reproductive health services, such as perinatal and abortion care, gender-based violence (GBV) support, and STI screening and treatment.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2025/02/18/us-global-gag-rule-refugee-women-healthcare-crisis-trump/

How Trump and Musk’s War on Government Will Lead to More Abortions

“There would be 1.3 million unsafe abortions.”

David Corn, Washington, DC, Bureau Chief. Mother Jones
Feb 12, 2025

In 2023, during a speech at a Washington, DC, gala for the far-right Faith & Freedom Coalition, Donald Trump declared that he was proud to be “the most pro-life president” in US history. Yet with the war on the federal government that he and his billionaire sidekick Elon Musk are now waging, one probable result will likely not please his conservative Christian allies: an increase in the number of abortions, perhaps by over 1 million.

The first target of the Trump-Musk crusade has been the US Agency for International Development, the federal agency that distributes foreign aid through programs that help millions of people defend against deadly diseases (such as malaria, AIDS, tuberculosis, Covid, and ebola), obtain clean water, gain access to health care, bolster democratic institutions, and build more productive local economies. Of its $23.4 billion budget for 2024, the agency earmarked $2.2 billion for health initiatives. About one-quarter of that was to be spent on clean-water programs. Two-hundred-and-forty-seven million dollars was committed to maternal and child health. Programs for family planning and reproductive health received $191 million. (Including other government programs, Congress in recent years has annually appropriated about $600 million in total for overseas family planning.)

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/donald-trump-elon-musk-usaid-abortions/

Attacks on reproductive health will have devastating consequences worldwide

MSF is committed to ensuring people have access to sexual and reproductive health services, but we cannot do it alone.

January 28, 2025

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) condemns the Trump Administration’s recent reinstatement of the Mexico City Policy, more commonly known as the Global Gag Rule, as well as the US government’s support of the so-called Geneva Consensus Declaration.

The Global Gag Rule prevents organizations abroad from using their own non-US government funds to provide or advocate for safe abortion care as a condition to receive US global health assistance. This includes direct services, as well as information, counseling, and referrals, even in countries where abortion is legal. When the policy was last in place from 2017 to 2021, critical health programs were disrupted and suspended in low- and middle-income countries.

Continued: https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/attacks-reproductive-health-will-have-devastating-consequences-worldwide

28.01.2025

Commentary

Avril Benoît

Doctors Without Borders

Geneva Consensus Declaration

Global Gag Rule

Global HER Act

Helms Amendment

Médecins Sans Frontières

Trump’s assault on human rights, bodily autonomy and democracy

January 25, 2025
Ipas

Late on Friday, January 24th, President Trump doubled down on his administration’s anti-abortion policies, reinstating the harmful Global Gag Rule, rejoining the non-binding Geneva Consensus Declaration (GCD), and strengthening the Hyde Amendment.

“These actions add up to a violation of human rights, bodily autonomy and democracy, as well as an unprecedented attack on the reproductive rights of people in the U.S. and across the globe,” says Ipas President and CEO Anu Kumar.

Continued: https://www.ipas.org/news/trumps-assault-on-human-rights-bodily-autonomy-and-democracy/

What to expect from Trump 2.0: The anti-rights brigade are now in power

We're hurtling into a dark period for abortion rights and beyond. Get out your flashlights

Dr Anu Kumar
20 January 2025

With Trump 2.0, the US enters a new era – one where people’s rights, particularly those of women and girls, LGBTQIA+ people, Black or brown people, or immigrants, are ignored, or worse, violated. Climate change is not a concern. Disinformation is rampant. Reproductive freedom, particularly the access to abortion, is radically curtailed, despite broad voter support.

Most of us are familiar with (and frankly, are already experiencing) the Project 2025 playbook, which calls for dismantling democratic norms in the US, unitary executive power, harsh Christian nationalism, a punitive approach to foreign assistance and multilateralism, and violations of human rights. We're hurtling into a dark period. Get out your flashlights.

Continued: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/trump-project-2025-abortion-rights-inauguration/

Trump expected to quickly revive ‘global gag rule’ on abortion

by Alejandra O’Connell-Domenech
01/19/25

President-elect Trump is expected to reinstate a controversial policy soon after taking office that would further bar foreign nongovernmental organizations that perform, counsel on or provide information on abortions abroad from receiving U.S. funding.

The Mexico City Policy, referred to as the global gag rule by its opponents, was first introduced during the second Reagan administration and has been rescinded by every Democratic president and reinstated by every Republican president since then. Trump previously restored the policy four days into his first term before President Biden rescinded it again a week into his own.

Continued: https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5092735-trump-abortion-mexico-city-policy/

Trump’s Second Term Blueprint: Using the Helms Amendment to Enforce Total Global Abortion Bans

As the second Trump administration gets underway, Project 2025 looks to the Helms Amendment—a decades-old policy that keeps women abroad from accessing safe abortion—as a tool.

12/16/2024
by Rachel Marchand

We’re at an inflection point in the long, harmful history of the Helms Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act. Enacted 51 years ago this month in the wake of Roe v. Wade, the amendment stipulates “no foreign assistance funds may be used to pay for the performance of abortion as a method of family planning or to motivate or coerce any person to practice abortions.” The State Department, USAID and other federal agencies have often broadly interpreted the Helms Amendment as a total ban on U.S. funding for abortion care—even in cases of rape, incest or a life-threatening pregnancy.

As the second Trump administration gets underway, Project 2025 looks to Helms as a tool. It calls for using the amendment to enforce a complete ban on using any U.S. taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions abroad, period, no matter the circumstances.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2024/12/16/trump-project-2025-helms-amendment-abortion-bans-usa-foreign-assistance-aid/

‘Grave and Serious Moment’ for Reproductive Rights

Dr Anu Kumar, CEO of the global reproductive justice organisation Ipas, outlines the impact of a global clampdown on abortion

27/11/2024
Kerry Cullinan

“Unsafe abortion remains a leading cause of maternal mortality, and it is entirely preventable,” says Dr Anu Kumar, CEO of Ipas, an international reproductive justice organisation. “So there is something we can do about it. We know what to do and we know how to do it. We just need to do it.”

But Kumar concedes that the election of Donald Trump as United States (US) President has ushered in a “pretty grave and serious moment”.

Continued: https://healthpolicy-watch.news/grave-and-serious-moment-for-reproductive-rights/

Trump’s win spells disaster for abortion rights

I’ve spent years tracking the far right attack on reproductive rights. Here’s what Trump’s win means for abortion.

Sian Norris
6 November 2024

Trump is heading back to the White House and the consequences for reproductive health in both the USA and globally are catastrophic.

When Trump first came to power in 2016, it provided Christian nationalists with what the author Anne Appelbaum described as their “biblical moment”. This was their unique opportunity to push forward their project and to fulfil their desired policies – to ban abortion, to roll back LGBTIQ rights, and to protect whiteness in America.

Continued: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/trump-abortion-rights-catastrophe/