Now is the Time for Bold Imagination on Global Sexual and Reproductive Health Policy
Dawn Laguens, Interim Executive Director of Planned Parenthood Global
It’s been a humbling year to be an American. COVID-19 laid bare the gaps in our public health system. We’ve been humbled by our long-overdue nationwide racial reckoning. And we were horrified by the sight of a violent, white supremacist mob attacking the seat of our government. For anyone still clinging to the doctrine of American exceptionalism, recent events confirmed that the United States is vulnerable to the same forces in the world that everyone else is: systemic racism, tribalism, misogyny, and the threat of authoritarianism.
But now, the United States has an opportunity to re-engage constructively on the world stage, and to be bolder in our imagination of what it means to be globally connected. In late February, Linda Thomas Greenfield was sworn in as the second African American woman to serve as UN Ambassador. The Biden-Harris administration has made a clear commitment to the global community, from the World Health Organization to the UN Human Rights Council.
We believe sexual and reproductive health and rights must be a cornerstone of the Biden-Harris Administration’s global agenda. Anywhere in the world you find authoritarian regimes, you’ll also find efforts to strip people of their bodily autonomy — and without control over our bodies, we cannot have freedom anywhere else in our lives. From Nicaragua to Hungary, we’ve seen the playbook the Trump administration was also following, and we know that this battle isn’t over. As long as the reproductive freedom of people around the world is treated as a bargaining chip in an American political game, we cannot live up to any kind of meaningful global solidarity.
This year marks 50 years of Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s international work. As Planned Parenthood Global, we work with nearly 100 local partners in nine focus countries across Africa and Latin America to expand access to sexual and reproductive health and rights. Whether it be investing in a group of young people in Guatemala in their effort to form the first youth peer providers of sexual and reproductive health care in the country, or supporting a constellation of feminist leaders in Kenya as they formed the first advocacy coalition devoted to reproductive freedom, we are at our best when we work in solidarity with partners bravely delivering more justice and freedom to their communities.
We also know that our calls for reproductive freedom and racial justice are stronger when we make them together. In the final days of 2020, Argentina legalized abortion — a hard-fought victory made possible by the grassroots power of “la marea verde.” Just last month, Thailand removed first-term abortion from their criminal code. Those organizers didn’t just secure a victory for every person in their country seeking reproductive freedom. They also exported a deeply underrated organizing tool: imagination. The victory in Argentina gave a playbook to organizers in Chile. Activists in Poland resisting draconian abortion restrictions can look to activists in Ireland for strategies on how to play the long game. Here in the US where anti-abortion majorities control 29 state legislatures, these imaginative strategies are more needed than ever. When people get a glimpse of freedom, they’ll fight like hell to make it their own. In movements for social change, there are no words more powerful than “that could be us.”
We were pleased that President Biden rescinded the global gag rule, but that’s just the start. We need to break the 37 year cycle of whiplash at the start of each new administration and push for permanent repeal. And we need true reforms to ensure U.S. investments are accountable to the people whose lives are impacted by them. Planned Parenthood, along with more than 100 partner organizations, developed a Blueprint for Sexual and Reproductive Health, Rights, and Justice, which provides a proactive U.S. domestic and foreign policy roadmap for bold progress.
As this agenda makes clear, Planned Parenthood’s work is inherently global. This shouldn’t be a radical notion, but after the last four years of “America first” isolationism, it bears repeating. Neocolonialist US policies, like the global gag rule and the Helms Amendment, have profound negative repercussions, especially when it comes to the ability to access critical health care. And the COVID-19 crisis has driven home the point global health experts have been making for decades: health emergencies know no borders.
Everywhere in the world, women (often women of color) have borne the brunt of this pandemic, as mothers, essential workers, and caregivers. They’re also carrying movements — for reproductive rights and racial justice — on their backs. They know, and we know, that lived experience isn’t bifurcated into “women’s issues” and “other injustices.” That’s why our advocacy agenda, and U.S. foreign policy, must be informed by the intersectional experiences of the people who are most impacted.
As the United States government begins its re-engagement on the world stage, we have an opportunity to be bolder than ever before. To think transformationally, not incrementally, in the fight for health, human rights, and race equity. And to stand with the bravest people, policies, health providers and organizers to build a strong, globally connected movement for equity and freedom. Imagine that.
