The return of the global gag rule stinks of neocolonialism

Lola Okolosie

The answer to that is revealed in Trumps decision to reimpose the global gag rule. For
women in poorer countries reliant on American aid, their lives have been deemed a fair
compromise in service of politicking and moralising. It is a brutal use of these womens
bodies in order to mount an ideological assault on the idea that a woman can have
bodily autonomy. Women of developing nations have become expendable collateral
damage in a war far closer to home. Who isnt reminded of colonialism and the hierarchy of bodies
that matter?

Some 22,000 women will die this year because of unsafe abortions, and 8.4 million will suffer serious
illness or injury

The global gag rule, also known as the Mexico City Policy, stops any foreign NGO receiving US
government aid for family planning from using their own funds to provide safe abortion services, if
legal in that country. Not only that, the rule stops funding NGOs if they are: known to have referred
women elsewhere to receive terminations; lobbying their own governments to liberalise restrictions
on abortion law; campaigning against governments wanting to restrict abortions; and even educating
the public on the fact that they can ask for safe legal abortions.

The rule has been brought in and out of existence by Ronald Reagan in 1984, Bill Clinton nine years
later, then George W Bush in 2001, and Obama in 2009, before Trump re-imposed it this week.
Trump is in fact expanding the rules powers so that it no longer applies solely to family planning
assistance given by the US government, but also to funding given to NGOs focusing on disease
control.

Some 22,000 women will die this year because of unsafe abortions, and 8.4 million more will suffer
serious illness or injury. Millions more will lose access to contraceptives and condoms because the
NGOs who once provided them with such services will no longer exist. All because of the moral ideals
of a powerful anti-choice lobby is intent on winning something, anything. How easy it is to play
political football with the lives of people from the developing world.

It is the same contingent that calls NGOs working to make abortion part of family planning initiatives
cultural imperialists. Cultural relativism and the pretence that they are making a charitable
intervention is supposed to mask a commitment to enforcing their sense of morality elsewhere. They
assume that using the argument of salvaging traditional cultures will protect against an essential
truth: it is a womans right to decide what happens to her body and when. Never mind that women in
the developing world are not a homogenous lump with identikit views on abortion. Like colonial
missionaries of old, its all for the moral good of the natives, apparently.

An American friend recently pointed out the paradox in Trumps promise to put Americans first, (with
its implication of isolationism) and yet make America great again, a sentiment that is nothing if not
outward-looking and colonial in spirit. What better way to neatly combine the two than to withdraw
billions in funding to poorer nations while making them understand the almighty power of the US
dollar?

'Global gag rule' could have dire impact in Latin America, activists warn

During Trumps inauguration speech, the language of moral virtuosity was

barely contained, lest it sound too imperialistic for the moment. It has
nevertheless been let loose. American religious values, by way of the global
gag rule, will be imposed on countries as far flung as Kenya and Peru,
Ethiopia and Nepal.

Last year Trump stated that in the event of abortion being criminalised, women who went on to have a
termination would have to face some form of punishment. Asked by MSNBCs host Chris Matthews
about how you actually ban abortion, Trump said: Well, you know, you will go back to a position like
they had where people will perhaps go to illegal places.

The casual you know seems all the more perverse appearing as it does before an acknowledgement
that it would mean putting womens lives at risk. It seems that the lives of women from the developing
world have been taken as a good starting point.

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History of feminism

The history of feminism is the chronological narrative of the movements and ideologies aimed
at equal rights for women. While feminists around the world have differed in causes, goals, and
intentions depending on time, culture, and country, most Western feminist historians assert that all
movements that work to obtain women's rights should be considered feminist movements, even when
they did not (or do not) apply the term to themselves. Other historians limit the term to the modern
feminist movement and its progeny, and instead use the label "protofeminist" to describe earlier
movements.

Modern Western feminist history is split into three time periods, or "waves", each with slightly different
aims based on prior progress. First-wave feminism of the 19th and early 20th centuries focused on
overturning legal inequalities, particularly women's suffrage. Second-wave feminism (1960s1980s)
broadened debate to include cultural inequalities, gender norms, and the role of women in
society. Third-wave feminism (1990s2000s) refers to diverse strains of feminist activity, seen as both
a continuation of the second wave and a response to its perceived failures. Although the waves
construct has been commonly used to describe the history of feminism, the concept has also been
criticized for ignoring and erasing the history between the "waves", by choosing to focus solely on a
few famous figures, and popular events.

What Does It Mean to Be a Feminist?

Are you a feminist? When the New York Times recently posed this question in a front-page news
story some young women professed bafflement as to what that even meant. Such confusion in turn
causes older women to lament a generation unappreciative of its hard-won gender battles and, as
weve learned this election season, to endow a pitchfork in hell for each of these insolent young
apostates.

But these young women are right. We need to recognize the paltry limits of the word instead of
blaming them for rejecting it.
Ive been asking what it means to be a feminist since the 1980s, attempting to first articulate these
thoughts in a story I wrote for the Village Voice, where I worked back then. The question felt urgent
because the college professor who helped shape my feminist thinking had become a pariah among
liberal feminists. Because I was a young liberal feminist fresh out of the university their response left
me struggling to define what it meant to be part of this social movement.

My professor was a political scientist who urged me to read all the nonfiction feminist writing of
English novelist Virginia Woolf. The professor talked about her own difficulties rising through the
ranks of academia (we dont hire women, she initially was told). When she mentioned to her mentor,
an eminent political scientist, the book she planned to write about women in government, he
responded, But Jeane, you dont have a subject there. I listened attentively, longing for the buoyant
canopy of intellectual confidence she possessed that navigated each of these leaps for equality into a
steady landing.

Jeane (who didnt have a subject there) was Jeane Kirkpatrick. Her name probably means little to
todays socially engaged young women, but before Samantha Power and Susan Rice, Kirkpatrick
was the first woman to serve as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations and the first
woman foreign policy cabinet member.

Except the president was Ronald Reagan. Kirkpatrick, a Democrat when I knew her who told me she
planned to support Teddy Kennedy for president, had become a foreign policy hawk and
subsequently was plucked by Reagan for this post. Her conservative political philosophy outraged
feminists, and although Kirkpatrick became one of the most powerful women in American history, the
editors of the Handbook of American Womens History intentionally excluded her from this reference
book.

I shared their outrage about Kirkpatricks foreign policy views (she famously argued that totalitarian
regimes were always intolerable, but it was in Americas interest to support friendly authoritarian
ones). But does feminism mean that we (whoever the self-determined we are) get to handpick our
feminists and deny Kirkpatrick the label that she used to define herself?

Virginia Woolf had the prescience in the 1930s to recognize that the problem may lie in the word. She
argued that after womens right to earn a living had been won, the word feminist should be thrown
out of the language if its only meaning is one who champions the rights of women. Within the
meager limits of this definition, a dead word, a corrupt word exists. If the word is destroyed, wrote
Woolf, in the cleansed air we could see the task ahead: Men and women working together for the
same cause. (Woolfs cause was fighting fascist tyranny.)

It may be impossible to find an all-inclusive definition for feminism because a womans struggle to find
a place in the world is rooted in, and reflected by, the prism of her own experience. Contemporary
American feminism has primarily come to mean championing womens autonomy and challenging the
privileging of male over female. But a feminism that is chiefly about autonomy is bound to liberate one
person at the expense of another as witnessed in womens victory to secure the right to earn a
living. The professional mother too often is liberated by the nanny who scrambles to find care for her
own children.
Many college women also cant relate to feminism because the autonomy they experience during
their time on campus is unique and irreplaceable. But these young women may confront boundaries
later, especially if they choose to become mothers. Nothing cleans all the wonder and mess of
personal freedom like a diaper wipe.

Contemporary feminism carries with it a troubled legacy of affirming equality without reconciling the
reality of dependency one that has contributed to our countrys shameful lack of family policies.
The challenges inevitably arise when nurturing and raising another human being. Thats where the
tenets of mainstream feminism, based on the Enlightenment values of equality, autonomy, and self-
determination, have always seemed inadequate.

Men and women need to work together toward the same cause a society in which every member
has the opportunity to flourish. Meanwhile, lets not get stuck on the word feminism or at least
recognize that its paradigm-shifting radiance dims when pitting one womans fulfillment against
anothers.