Five key moments in the assault on women’s and girls’ rights in 2025 | Anti-rights movement
This time last year, women’s rights organizations were preparing for a second Trump term. Few were prepared for the chaos that would unleash in January. The volume and speed of executive orders coming from the White House were seen as a deliberate tactic to overwhelm and create panic. In many ways, it worked: There was confusion, anger, and exhaustion as organizations rushed to fill the void left by the USAID freeze. But that was only the beginning.
The US administration has been the main driver, supported by intense advocacy work from ultra-conservative groups who are using the opportunity to strengthen global ties with their political allies.
Questions and answers
What is the anti-rights movement?
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The anti-rights movement – also known as the anti-gender movement – refers to a global network of political leaders, religious institutions, civil society groups, and billionaire families and individuals who seek to undermine progress on a wide range of issues. These include abortion, LGBTQ rights, trans rights, non-traditional family structures, and comprehensive sex education.
They do this by lobbying governments, supporting lawsuits, discrediting international efforts to promote equality, spreading disinformation, and funding nonprofits that align with their values.
Until Everyone is Free, a report by Purposeful, an organization focused on girls’ activism in Africa, described the “anti-rights tide” as a “transnational, orchestrated rollback of rights and freedoms fueled by far-right extremism and authoritarianism on a scale unprecedented in modern history.”
Many influential groups, including Family Watch International, C-Fam, and Alliance Defending Freedom, are ultra-conservative Christian fundamentalist organizations based in the United States with close ties to governments in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. There are similar groups in Europe and Australia.
Such organizations have grown in importance in recent years, with the support of governments including those of the United States and Hungary. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advocacy, lobbying, litigation and media campaigns.
Although they are independently funded and run, they use similar tactics and rhetoric, emphasizing national sovereignty, “family values,” parental rights, freedom of speech, and religious freedom, which they promote to their partners in poorer countries by speaking at international conferences, notably in Africa, and by training policymakers and activists in the United States.
We look at five moments that have affected the safety, dignity and lives of women and girls.
USAID dismantled
In March, six weeks after USAID was frozen, causing unrest around the world, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed that 83% of the agency’s programs would be cut. US diplomats, former presidents and humanitarian and health experts are condemning the news, warning that people will die from it. Rights advocates say USAID’s demise is more than a funding crisis, it’s a savage attack on human rights, family planning and reproductive care. Many organizations say women and girls will be disproportionately affected by reduced aid, particularly in conflict zones. As the year ends, data shows that hundreds of thousands of people have already died from disease, hunger, lack of access to maternal care and gender-based violence, with millions more to come. The United Kingdom and the Netherlands, the two largest donors of family planning aid after the United States, are following with their own cuts. Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now, says Kier Starmer’s decision to cut around £6 billion in foreign aid is a move to appease Trump.
Christian right groups raise their voices at UN Women
In March, several Christian right organizations gathered at an upscale New York hotel for a two-day conference held in conjunction with the annual UN Women gathering. This is an opportunity to share tactics on how to defeat the UN’s “radical agenda.” They are in good spirits and applauding Trump’s second term and changes in US policy on gender, diversity and abortion. Meanwhile, UN Secretary-General António Guterres opens women’s summit with a stark warning that “the poison of patriarchy” is back, after a report shows anti-rights actors are actively undermining long-standing consensus on key women’s rights issues around the world.
African conferences on “family values”
Over the summer, a series of conferences in Africa focused on the traditional family and national sovereignty are raising concerns among rights advocates. On May 9, Uganda’s President and First Lady opened the third Inter-Parliamentary Forum on Family, Sovereignty and Values in Entebbe to push back against foreign criminal forces eroding traditional family values. A few days later, the Pan-African Conference on Family Values is held in Nairobi. Both events bring together prominent figures in the fight for human rights issues in the United States and Europe, including Family Watch International President Sharon Slater; Austin Ruse, president of the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam); and Jerzy Kwaśnewski, co-founder of the Poland-based “extremist religious organization” Ordo Iuris, which calls on African NGOs to fight against “global radical social engineering” by the UN and EU. In June, the Mormon Church is hosting the Strengthening Families Conference in Sierra Leone, an event that reproductive rights advocates say has become an anti-LGBTQ and anti-gender platform. This is not the first time that Americans and Europeans have come to strengthen ties with their African allies, but activists say the scale of their presence has increased significantly.
US threatens to burn contraceptives
With clinics across sub-Saharan Africa reporting shortages of contraceptives, including emergency kits for survivors of sexual violence, the United States announced plans in July to destroy $10 million worth of contraceptives held in a warehouse in Belgium. The International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) says their destruction will deprive more than 1.4 million women and girls of contraceptives and lead to 174,000 unwanted pregnancies and 56,000 unsafe abortions in the five African countries studied. The IPPF says the plan is an ideological move “aimed at imposing an anti-rights agenda on the entire world” and “an intentional act of reproductive coercion.” Médicins San Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) calls him “insensitive” and “reckless.” NGOs offer to purchase the contraceptives so they can reach their intended destination, but the United States refuses all offers. Today, the situation is at a standstill since the Flemish government does not allow the destruction of usable products.
The expanded “global gag rule”
Reviving the global gag rule, which suspends U.S. aid to groups that provide, advocate or advise abortion services abroad, is standard practice for Republican administrations. So it’s no surprise that President Trump reinstated this rule during his first week in office in January. He also joined the Geneva Consensus Declaration, an anti-abortion agreement created by former Trump health adviser Valerie Huber that has won support from around 40 countries. But in October, the United States announced plans to expand the global gag rule to include governments and multilateral organizations in addition to NGOs, and cover diversity programs. Further details on the expansion of the global gag rule are expected in early 2026. Rajat Khosla, director of the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, says expanding the scope of the rule will have “unimaginable effects.” Reproductive justice activists fear that new US aid packages being negotiated with African countries are conditional on acceptance of the expanded global gag order.
