Sawyer Bailly
A week into his term, President Joe Biden issued a memorandum that restored United States funding support for reproductive health services and rights. This included the immediate rescindment of the Mexico City Policy, more commonly known as the “global gag rule.”
The global gag rule essentially withholds all US global health assistance from overseas organizations that provide or offer information on abortions. First adopted in 1984 by the Reagan administration, the policy has been repealed by every Democratic administration and reinstated by every Republican one.
Former President Donald Trump, always an avid supporter of the policing of reproductive bodies, was a strong proponent of the global gag rule. In fact, he took things even further than his predecessors: the Trump administration expanded the policy, which had previously applied only to family planning organizations, to include all global health programmes, including ones addressing HIV, nutrition, malaria, and cholera. According to the health policy research group the Guttmacher Institute, this increased the aid funds affected from approximately 600 million dollars to twelve billion dollars. This led to drastic cuts in funding in health programmes, particularly regarding reproductive and sexual healthcare, in countries throughout the Global South.
A women’s health team from Zimbabwe, from the organization MSI Reproductive Choices, cut its operations by 60%. “We reduced our outreach from 700 000 women to about 300 000,” says Shibru, the leader of the team as well as the head of the organization’s Ethiopian operations. “Women missed out on information, they had no access to family planning, and in return they were exposed to unintended pregnancy and unsafe abortion, which contributed to higher maternal mortality.”
This is one of many examples of the devastating impact that the global gag rule has had on reproductive healthcare worldwide. Again, as we have seen countless times before, restrictions do not lower abortion rates. Instead, these cuts in health and reproductive services only lead to an increase in unsafe abortions. “There is no evidence that abortion rates are lower where it's restricted,” argues Zara Ahmed, associate director of federal issues at the Guttmacher Institute. “In fact, abortion rates are lowest in high-income countries where abortion is broadly believed to be legal, but almost four times higher in low-income countries where it is heavily restricted.”
Biden’s repeal of the global gag rule signifies the beginning of repealing “the multitude of harmful actions that the Trump administration took to attack sexual and reproductive rights around the world,” says Seema Jalan, the executive director of the Universal Access Project and policy at the United Nations Foundation. However, while health groups around the world are celebrating Biden’s repeal of the global gag rule, this repeal is only the first step of many.
Now, advocates are calling on the Biden administration to support the Global Health, Empowerment, and Rights (Global HER) act, which would prevent future presidents from re-instituting the gag rule. They are also urging support for the Abortion is Health Care Everywhere act, which is the first legislation to repeal the Helms Amendment (which bans the use of US foreign assistance funds for abortion).
“For better or for worse, the actions of the United States have an outsized impact around the world,” Jalan said. “This is why it is such a high priority to put a permanent end to these harmful policies so that people’s access to basic health care around the world is not based on the political whims of what’s happening in the United States.”
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