‘Trojan horse moment’: anti-rights groups seize chance to fill void left by US aid cuts

Ultra-conservative Christian organisations look to reshape global health landscape as new aid agreements open door to demands restricting family planning services

Isabel Choat
Wed 17 Dec 2025

The sudden stop work order on USAID in January 2025 sent shock waves around the world. Many health clinics were immediately shut down, leaving millions without access to vital medicines and facilities, with potentially deadly consequences, especially for HIV patients, children, and women and adolescent girls.

To many, the subsequent axing of 83% of USAID programmes seemed like pure nihilism, engineered by ideologues who wanted to kill off the agency. But there was a long-term vision behind the destruction. The gutting of USAID has cleared a path for the next phase of a plan to reshape the global health landscape, say reproductive justice campaigners.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/17/trojan-horse-moment-anti-rights-groups-fill-void-us-aid-cuts

Trump’s Abortion Policy Could Go Global

In this year’s U.S. election, abortion is also a top foreign-policy issue.

By Jodi Enda, the Washington bureau chief and senior correspondent for The Fuller Project.
November 1, 2024

Less than two weeks before his 2020 election defeat, former U.S. 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.

Continued https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/11/01/trumps-abortion-policy-could-go-global/

Project 2025 Is Already Here

Core aspects of the far-right plan to overhaul U.S. government are already being put into place, through an anti-abortion influence campaign overseas.

GILLIAN KANE
APRIL 25, 2024

When pundits, critics and supporters discuss Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s readiness work plan for a second Donald Trump presidency, it’s always in the future tense. At more than 900 pages, Project 2025’s playbook, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, is a door-stopper of policy recommendations that lays out detailed steps for decimating democracy in the first 180 days of the new administration. Some executive orders include eliminating the Department of Education (“a woke education cartel”), renaming the Department of Health and Human Services the “Department of Life,” and anchoring these commitments in the promise to restore “the family as the centerpiece of American life.”

This Christian nationalist plan is no fever dream: even if Trump loses in November, many core aspects of Project 2025 will still be implemented. In fact, some of its recommendations are already underway.

Continued: https://inthesetimes.com/article/project-2025-protego-trump-huber-abortion

The Terrifying Global Reach of the American Anti-Abortion Movement

Conservatives have not limited their attack on reproductive rights to the United States. They’ve been busy imposing their will on other countries, too—with disastrous consequences for millions of poor women.

Jodi Enda
March 18, 2024

Because Editar Ochieng knew the three young men, she didn’t think twice when they beckoned her into a house in an isolated area near the Nairobi River. One was like a brother; the other two were her neighbors in the sprawling Kenyan slum of Kibera.

Ochieng did not know the woman who performed her abortion. She and a friend scoured Nairobi until they found her, an untrained practitioner who worked in the secrecy of her home and charged a fraction of what a medical professional would. Mostly, what Ochieng remembers is the agony when this stranger inserted something into her vagina and “pierced” her womb. “It was really very painful. Really, really, really painful,” she told me. Afterward, Ochieng said, she cut up her mattress to use in place of sanitary pads, which she could not afford. She was 16 years old.

Continued: https://newrepublic.com/article/179485/american-anti-abortion-movement-terrifying-global-reach

18.03.2024