Anita Mpambara Cox of the Institute for Women’s Health, former Trump administration officials Alma Golden and Valerie Huber, and Burundi First Lady Angeline Ndayishimiye meet in Washington, DC.
Since 2020, former Trump officials have used NGOs to undermine abortion and LGBTQ rights in Africa, paving the way for Trump’s re-election.
Despite Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 US presidential election, his former officials and allies are working with some of the most right-wing countries on the planet, including Russia and Hungary, to fight abortion and LGBTQ rights. He never stopped campaigning against African countries that blocked his rights. .
If Trump is re-elected on Nov. 5, he is likely to entrench his opposition to abortion as a key pillar of U.S. foreign aid. Project 2025 is a controversial conservative blueprint for a Trump victory written primarily by former officials that proposes making all U.S. aid, including humanitarian aid, conditional on refusing abortion. I am doing it.
“Proposed Action Against USAID” [US Agency for International Development] “This includes significant restructuring and budget cuts, eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and dismantling institutions that support gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights,” researcher Malaya Harper said in the project. This is pointed out in the analysis of 2025.
“Drive people to death”
Saoyo Tabatha Griffiths, a Kenyan high court lawyer and women’s rights activist, said, “Trump’s return at a time when nationalist African presidents are also prosecuting women and homosexuals is a threat to the death of these groups.” It means pushing them away.”
“This is not alarming. It is purely informed by observing historical patterns,” she told Health Policy Watch.
One of President Trump’s first actions in 2017 was to ban foreign NGOs from receiving U.S. government health funding if they “provided, promoted, or discussed” abortion (Extended Global – known as the Gag Rule (GGR)).
In some of the continent’s poorest countries, such as Madagascar and Ethiopia, many family planning organizations lost funding and women lost access to contraceptives, ironically leading to an increase in unplanned pregnancies.
Banning abortion won’t stop abortions
However, the ban on abortion never stopped women and girls from trying to end unwanted pregnancies. It simply directs them to dangerous providers whose methods could harm or even kill them.
Approximately 6.2 million women and girls in sub-Saharan Africa underwent abortions in 2019, and Guttmacher said the region had the highest unplanned pregnancy and abortion-related mortality rates in the world, with 10% of abortion-related deaths. There are 185 maternal deaths per 10,000 cases.
Although the proportion of women seeking abortions in sub-Saharan Africa remains constant, the number of abortions is rapidly increasing as the population grows.
At the time of Trump’s election, Griffiths was vice president of the Kenya Legal and Ethical Issues Network on HIV and AIDS (KELIN), which focuses on HIV and women’s issues.
“After the expansion of gag rules, we saw the deaths of sex workers. We saw the deaths of women who needed safe abortions. People died because service delivery programs stopped. “I did,” she said.
The Trump administration also cut funding to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), effectively reducing the budgets of global sexual and reproductive health organizations by about 7%. This has affected the delivery of maternal and child health services around the world, particularly in humanitarian settings.
President Trump also froze U.S. contributions to the World Health Organization (WHO) in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
In 2023, Republican Congressional lobbying efforts even put the brakes on the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) by falsely claiming that some grant recipients were pro-abortion. . Due to the influence of the right-wing lobby, the PEPFAR project currently receives an annual budget rather than five-year funding.
Former Trump officials prepare for re-election
Although most African women and girls do not have access to legal abortion, 19 African countries have relaxed access since 1994, mostly with the aim of reducing maternal deaths from unsafe abortions.
However, U.S. groups have recently been led by Trump administration-era special representative for global women’s health Valerie Hoover and former USAID deputy director for global health Alma Golden to oppose loosening access to abortion in Africa. It’s stirring up.
Mr. Hoover is the architect of the Geneva Consensus Declaration (GCD), an anti-abortion agreement, and in October 2020, in the final weeks of the Trump administration, he announced that the It was adopted with the support of Sudan.
GCD also promotes the “natural family,” which is primarily aimed at eliminating recognition of the existence of LGBTQ people.
When Biden withdrew the United States from the GCD in 2020, Hungary took over the secretariat. However, President Trump acknowledged that the United States would rejoin the agreement if elected “to reject the globalist claim of international abortion rights.”
“Under my leadership, the United States will also rejoin the Geneva Consensus Declaration, authored by my administration and signed by 36 countries, to reject globalist claims of an international right to abortion. ” pic.twitter.com/1r4R4l23Pg
— Team Trump (text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) September 20, 2023
After President Trump’s defeat, Hoover and Golden launched an NGO called the Institute for Women’s Health (IWH) in 2021 to seek support for GCD. IWH is on the advisory board of Project 2025. Its Africa coordinator is Ugandan anti-gay pastor Philip Sayuni, and its international program director Anita Mpambara Cox is a Ugandan-American who was seeking election as a Republican senator in 2022.
Valerie Huber speaks on the fourth anniversary of the Geneva Consensus Declaration, an anti-abortion agreement, in front of the flags of signatory countries including Iraq, Belarus, Benin and Hungary in Washington, D.C., in September.
Over the past year, IWH has been persuading Burundi and Chad, which have poor human rights records, to sign up to the GCD. Abortion is only allowed in Burundi to save the life of a pregnant woman, and is not allowed even in cases of rape or incest. Women who have abortions can be sentenced to prison. Chad’s military dictatorship allows abortions to save a woman’s life and in cases of rape or incest.
Since founding IWH, Ms. Huber has courted several right-wing African governments, including Sudan, South Sudan, Mali, Burkino Faso and Tanzania, but her closest ally is the Ugandan government.
Ms. Valerie Huber, Director and CEO of the prestigious Women’s Health Institute headquartered in Washington, DC, is currently visiting Burundi starting Sunday, May 5, 2024. She is accompanied by Mr. Philip, Executive Operator for Africa. pic.twitter.com/1fmShe0TCP
— OPDD-Burundi (@OPDD_Burundi) May 5, 2024
Support from conservative Christian groups in the United States
Supporting Mr. Hoover’s anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ movement are conservative American NGOs active in Africa, particularly Family Watch International (FWI), led by conservative Mormon Sharon Slater. It’s a group. FWI has been promoting the same agenda in Africa for more than 20 years, and both Mr. Slater and Mr. Huber work closely with Uganda’s first lady, Janet Museveni.
Some of these US groups also oppose birth control and sex education for school children, known as “comprehensive sex education.”
Spending on Africa by 17 conservative U.S. Christian groups known for opposing reproductive rights, including FWI, nearly doubled after President Trump’s defeat in 2020. FWI spending increased by 495%, albeit from a low base.
According to the Institute for Journalism and Social Change (IJSC), the 17 organizations spent about $16.5 million on Africa from 2019 to 2022, with nearly a third of that amount spent in 2022, the year after Biden took office. ($5.2 million).
Institute for Journalism and Social Change (IJSC)
Importation of US anti-LGBTQ laws
For decades, a group of American anti-rights groups have worked with conservative African politicians to push for laws to crack down on the very existence of LGBTQ people across Africa.
Last year, Uganda and Ghana passed strict anti-LGBTQ laws at the encouragement of these US groups, especially FWI.
In April 2023, Sharon Slater (center, black dress), leader of the American conservative Christian group Family Watch International, held a photo shoot with Uganda’s first lady, Janet Museveni ( (center, white skirt).
According to a recent Wall Street Journal revelation, FWI was one of the driving forces behind the recent Inter-Parliamentary Conference on Family Values and Sovereignty, which also received $300,000 in aid from the Russian government. Ta.
The conference also featured speakers attacking regular vaccination campaigns and the World Health Organization (WHO), as previously revealed by Health Policy Watch.
But its main agenda was to galvanize support from politicians across Africa for anti-LGBTQ, anti-abortion legislation.
The government of Kenyan President William Ruto, the country’s first evangelical leader, is considering a “family values” law that would crack down on LGBTQ people and even make divorce more difficult.
Kenyan LGBTQ activist Arya Japia Carrillo said some of the country’s anti-LGBTQ bills are “direct copies” of anti-transgender bills in the United States.
Two areas of concern included in the bill, access to toilets for transgender people and transition of minors, are “not relevant to Kenya’s water access situation or meeting the medical needs of transgender people. No,” Carrillo said.
She explained to Health Policy Watch that many schools in Kenya struggle to provide adequate toilets, leaving little opportunity for transition for adults, let alone minors.
“If you read the anti-transgender bill in the United States side-by-side with some of the anti-LGBTQ laws passed in Ghana, Uganda, and proposed in Kenya, you’ll see that they have the same author, and they are clearly different continents. I’m from,” Carrillo added.
Meanwhile, Namibian LGBTQ activist Omar van Reenen points out that “anti-rights groups in the United States are sharing resources, strategies, and rhetoric internationally.”
“The cross-border exchange of anti-rights ideology imported from American evangelical groups and NGOs like Family Watch International is alive and well,” Van Reenen said in a recent interview with the journal Transcript. spoke.
Mr. Griffiths will issue a stern warning if Mr. Trump wins the US presidential election. “African women and LGBTQ people should expect Trump’s return to reignite ideological warfare and have real and physical repercussions on their bodies.
“Issues such as contraceptives, surrogacy, single parenting, safe abortion, the HPV vaccine, and sexual orientation will all be fought through conspiracies and misinformation rather than science and data.”
Image credit: IJSC.
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