The Global Gag Rule and Women's Reproductive Health: rhetoric versus reality [Audio]

Speaker(s): Professor Yana van der Meulen Rodgers | In 2017, three days after entering office, President Donald Trump not only reinstated the Global Gag Rule, he also expanded the order extensively. Trump halted US funding to family planning organisations providing abortion-related activities, but also extended this rule to any foreign nongovernmental organisation that receives funding from US Aid that does not certify that they do not use their own funding to provide abortions services. The estimated funding gap of $8.8 billion in US global health assistance will be hard to fill through philanthropy with consequences for the support of family planning, maternal and child health as well as the provision of health services not directly related to abortion such as HIV and Malaria treatment. On top of this, there is strong evidence to suggest that the Global Gag Rule leads to more rather than fewer abortions, projected to lead to 2.5 million unintended pregnancies and 870,000 unsafe abor