Empower women but don’t let them have rights
The UN Women’s Conference is on.
The Trump administration is lining up with less liberal nations such as Saudi Arabia and Malaysia at a major United Nations conference on women this month to roll back international consensus on climate change and migration, while seeking to prevent the expansion of rights for girls, women, and LGBT people.
…
The U.N. women’s conference, focused on empowering women and girls through social protection programs and promoting access to public services, runs from March 11 to March 22. Negotiations on the final outcome document are expected to resume on Thursday.
The U.S. delegation, which includes anti-abortion conservatives in line with the Trump administration’s broad policy stances, is seeking to weaken international support for the Beijing Declaration, a landmark 1995 agreement that stands as an internationally recognized progressive blueprint for women’s rights.
…
“Their efforts to undermine global commitments to gender equality and sexual and reproductive health and rights should lay to rest any notion that the Trump Administration cares about women or their human rights,” said Shannon Kowalski, the director of advocacy and policy for the International Women’s Health Coalition. “Instead they are trying to use the Commission to strip women and girls of their ability to exercise control over their lives.”
Does it matter? Yes.
For civil society advocates and smaller U.N. member countries, these changes to U.N. documents are more than just words on paper. “A lot of other countries look to these agreements as a framework. They are using these agreements and outcomes to advance national laws and policies,” said one source familiar with internal CSW negotiations, who declined to speak on record.
The U.S. delegation is also seeking to chip away efforts by other states to elevate international issues anathema to the Trump administration, including language on climate change and collective bargaining as well as sexual and reproductive health, in the final outcome documents.
For instance, the United States proposed that references to “sexual reproductive health and rights” be removed from a section addressing human rights. Social conservative advocates who follow these international negotiations have long viewed such language as implicitly condoning abortion.
If women don’t have the right to stop being pregnant, they don’t have reproductive rights.
And if women don’t have the right to stop being pregnant, all of their other rights are meaningless, because a single pregnancy can stop their entire career in its tracks, depending on their situation. It can destroy women’s lives.
Way too many women are willing to support this nonsense, too. Under the guise of Christianity…or whatever other religious tradition they wish to claim. Or just, eww, killing babies, dirty sluts, and so on. Meanwhile, a lot of people prefer to focus on the illusion that men can get pregnant, and that there are women with penises, and if you try to protect women’s rights, you are ignoring the rights of the truly marginalized.
Right now, I’m really glad I won’t live forever. I can hardly stand it anymore.