II. International women’s rights norms

Within the realm of international law and global governance, norms are standards of appropriate behaviour for an actor with a given identity that often develop through a ‘norm life-cycle’, whereby norm entrepreneurs (e.g. human rights advocates) build support for norm adoption, eventually leading to a ‘norm cascade’ and widespread norm institutionalization and internalization by states (Finnemore and Sikkink Reference Finnemore and Sikkink1998). They become legal norms when expressed through ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ legal instruments such as UN treaties, resolutions and multilateral outcome documents that outline state obligations. Basic minimal references to women’s rights norms are advanced by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the two 1966 International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (especially Article 2 on equal entitlement to all rights and freedoms without distinction as to sex). They are more fully developed in the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the 1993 Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, the 2000 UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security, and the 2013 UN Security Council Resolution 2106 on sexual violence in conflict, among other documents. The United Nations has promoted women’s rights through the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly Goal 5. Every year, the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) seeks to produce agreed conclusions to further advance the action of states towards realizing their commitments. Several overarching normative standards echo throughout these instruments: states must ensure women and men enjoy equality in social, political and economic life; women must not be confined to stereotypical socially constructed gender roles; and women must control their own bodies, sexuality and reproduction.

CEDAW is one of the most widely ratified international human rights treaties, suggesting that women’s rights constitute established principles of international law. Only the United States, the Holy See, Iran, Palau, Somalia, Sudan and Tonga have refused to ratify. President Jimmy Carter signed CEDAW in 1980, but the treaty never received the two-thirds support from the Senate necessary for approval. In 2010, President Obama reopened ratification efforts, which failed (Baldez Reference Baldez2014). The Trump administration strongly opposed ratification; however, the Biden administration has indicated support (Biden and Harris Reference Biden and Harris2020).

In addition to treaties, declarations and CSW-agreed conclusions, women’s rights principles are promoted by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, CEDAW’s treaty body. Made up of 23 experts, the Committee produces reports and general recommendations, often reflecting feminist political understandings, which serve as influential interpretations of international law. For example, CEDAW General Recommendation no. 35 on gender-based violence against women suggests ‘denial or delay of safe abortion and/or post-abortion care, forced continuation of pregnancy, and abuse and mistreatment of women and girls seeking sexual and reproductive health information, goods and services, are forms of gender-based violence that, depending on the circumstances, may amount to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment’ (UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women 2017: 7). The UN Human Rights Committee’s General Comment no. 36 on Article 6 of the ICCPR similarly interprets international law in support of abortion rights (UN Human Rights Committee 2018: 2). Such statements are considered controversial by critics because they specifically mention abortion rights, whereas state-endorsed treaties such as CEDAW reference reproductive rights more generally.

Recently, human rights advocates have sought to consolidate recognition of sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) rights in international law. Like women’s rights, these emphasize non-essentialist conceptualizations of gender and every individual’s control over their own body and sexuality. While no international treaty explicitly acknowledges SOGI rights as such, UN member states have introduced supportive joint statements in the General Assembly while the Human Rights Council passed its first resolution in support of the basic rights of LGBTI persons to be free from torture, imprisonment, violence and discrimination in 2011, and appointed an Independent Expert to monitor state conduct in 2016.

This legal landscape points to a paradoxical reality. Women’s rights constitute well-established normative principles of extant international law. At the same time, widespread ratification of treaties such as CEDAW and related initiatives does not indicate that states have necessarily moved towards greater internalization of international women’s rights norms. Nor do all states agree on what respect for women’s rights entails in practice. While the expansive understandings of women’s rights preferred by feminist women’s rights advocates have tended to dominate in UN committees and fora dedicated to rights promotion, state and non-state critics of women’s rights in general, and of feminist interpretations in particular, have inserted themselves into international law and policy-making in order to halt and reverse the progressive development and diffusion of women’s rights norms. In some cases, these norm spoilers challenge rights head on; in others, they utilize the language of rights, reinterpreting the meaning of rights to reflect their rival preferences (Bob Reference Bob2019). This pattern of contestation is not surprising – states have always attempted to manipulate international law to achieve their objectives (Hurd Reference Hurd2017). However, efforts to spoil women’s rights norms are becoming increasingly coordinated and effective.

Women’s rights are especially vulnerable to spoiling because many states have failed to take action to realize their commitments (Avdeyeva Reference Avdeyeva2007). One need only conduct a cursory survey of the actual status of women and girls around the world to understand that states regularly ignore their legal obligations. While there is nothing new about human rights hypocrisy, whereby states say one thing and do another, the women’s rights deficit in many places reflects not just a lack of capacity, but deeper ideological and cultural resistance. Indeed, this was already evident in states’ numerous signing statements and reservations – seemingly incompatible with the treaty – that accompanied CEDAW ratification (CEDAW Declarations and Reservations). Diplomats and activists have succeeded in forging a robust international women’s rights agenda at the United Nations, and mechanisms such as ‘persuasion’ may lead to CEDAW and related instruments receiving ‘acceptance by key actors’ in a state (Avdeyeva Reference Avdeyeva2007: 897). However, when rhetorical norm adoption is not accompanied by institutionalization and routinized compliance, or when these processes are destabilized by political contestation and shifts in government power, norms can quickly be eroded. This creates fertile terrain for spoilers, which aim not just to promote non-compliance, but to unmake international women’s rights law itself.

III. Human rights contestation and ‘norm spoiling’

International human rights literature has, until recently, tended to obscure the important role of conservative pushback in eroding international law. Once international legal norms emerge and reach a tipping point of acceptance, scholars focus on how best to promote commitment and compliance (Avdeyeva Reference Avdeyeva2007; Finnemore and Sikkink Reference Finnemore and Sikkink1998; Goodman and Jinks Reference Goodman and Jinks2013; Risse, Ropp and Sikkink Reference Risse, Ropp and Sikkink2013; Simmons Reference Simmons2009). In contrast, attention to anti-women’s rights campaigns suggests that established legal norms may be revised and even reversed by counter-advocacy. Although there is a growing body of literature on women’s rights contestation in international politics (Buss Reference Buss2004; Buss and Herman Reference Buss and Herman2003; Butler Reference Butler2006; Chamberlain Reference Chamberlain2006; Chappell Reference Chappell2006; Crossette Reference Crossette2013; Cupać and Ebetürk Reference Cupać and Ebetürk2020; Druelle Reference Druelle2000; Goetz Reference Goetz2020; Guns Reference Guns2013; Krizsán and Roggeband Reference Krizsán and Roggeband2018; Neal Reference Neal1998; Sanders Reference Sanders2018a) as well as the closely related issue of SOGI rights contestation (Ayoub and Page Reference Ayoub and Page2020; Bob Reference Bob2012; Kuhar and Paternotte 2017; Nuñez-Mietz and García Iommi Reference Nuñez-Mietz and Iommi2017; Symons and Altman Reference Symons and Altman2015; Weiss and Bosia Reference Weiss and Bosia2013), the rapid pace of emerging developments demands ongoing attention.

Scholars are still learning how norms are weakened and undermined. In this regard, research on norm contestation tends to examine how local normative preferences and politics reshape international norms (Wolff and Zimmermann Reference Wolff and Zimmermann2016), how norms are revised through practice and implementation (Wiener Reference Wiener2008, Reference Wiener2018) and how actors use other types of principles and interests (such as sovereignty or security) to challenge human rights norms (Heller, Kahl and Pisiou Reference Heller, Kahl and Pisiou2012; Hopgood Reference Hopgood2013; Panke and Petersohn Reference Panke and Petersohn2011; Sanders Reference Sanders2018b). Moreover, while the extant literature offers extensive insight into the strategic ways in which NGOs and transnational advocacy networks seek to influence states (Bob Reference Bob2005; Keck and Sikkink Reference Keck and Sikkink1998; Moghadam Reference Moghadam2005; Stroup and Wong Reference Stroup and Wong2017), we know less about the mechanisms and impact of competing forms of advocacy on policy outcomes (Bloomfield and Scott Reference Bloomfield and Scott2016; Bob Reference Bob2012, Reference Bob2019; Corredor Reference Corredor2019; Deitelhoff and Zimmermann Reference Deitelhoff and Zimmermann2020; Meyer and Staggenborg Reference Meyer and Staggenborg1996). Our research thus aims to paint a richer picture of tactics that impact the development, legitimacy and sustainability of international women’s rights (Joachim Reference Joachim2007; Krook and True Reference Krook and True2010).

In particular, this article develops the literature on human rights erosion by refining Sanders’ (Reference Sanders2018a) conceptualization of ‘norm spoiling’ through a new typology of language-based spoiling mechanisms. We differentiate efforts to control, alter or delete words essential to framing and enacting rights, while recognizing that these tactics are overlapping and interrelated. We selected illustrative (Ackerly and True Reference Ackerly and Jacqui2020: 173–74) rather than comprehensive textual examples of each tactic so future research can build on our elaboration of norm spoiling with additional cases, examples or mechanisms. Our primary focus is recent, US-based initiatives to spoil global sexual and reproductive health rights norms. We analyse language in several fora, ranging from a domestic commission to UN committees and related texts, including US government policies and reports, US-based NGO documents and advocacy, and UN agreements. We interpret legal, policy and political texts as our ‘objects of analysis rather than a window into an external social reality or truth’ (Ackerly and True Reference Ackerly and Jacqui2020: 197). Roggeband and Krizsán (Reference Roggeband and Krizsán2020: 30–31) draw a useful distinction between policy dismantling and reframing. We document the blatant dismantling of norms by denying funds needed to implement them (in Section V) and removing or blocking words from legal documents (Section VII). Reframing norms is most central to Section VI, but silencing or deleting words can also reframe an issue. We recognize that these tactics interconnect; thus, we employ qualitative ‘critical frame analysis’ throughout, focusing on ‘how certain problems are framed, which issues are ignored, and how particular representations grant authority to an actor or policy direction’ (Calkin Reference Calkin2016: 160).

This contribution brings much-needed focus to the crucial, and multiple, roles of language in international law. This is significant because language has direct and indirect material effects. As called for by Hudson (Reference Hudson2015: 414–15), this project therefore combines ‘discourse and materiality’ with its attention to the impact of legal language on bodies and, in particular, sexual and reproductive health. At a literal level, legal words denote who has power, who can access resources or exercise rights. It is thus not surprising that debate over the precise placement and meaning of words constitutes a central focus of treaty and legislative negotiation, as well as subsequent lawyering and judicial interpretation. More broadly, repeated use of terms and phrases in legal documents and policy-making helps to consolidate and reinforce crucial shared understandings of underlying norms and their regulative and prescriptive content.

When meanings are altered or words are silenced or removed, these shared understandings and concomitant manifestations in real-world policy are also weakened. As UN experts report with regard to the growing challenge of language contestation, ‘gender equality policies are discursively delegitimized, often in concealed ways. Official political discourses that are largely supportive or silent on gender equality start to openly challenge gender equality objectives, often opposing formally adopted and accepted national policy positions’ (UN Women 2019b: 6–7). Relatedly, Roggeband and Krizsán (Reference Roggeband and Krizsán2020: 30–31) use frame analysis to understand the ‘reversal or dismantling’ of women’s rights, noting that ‘re-framing policies from targeting equal opportunities to, for example, protecting family values’ can undermine gender equality. For instance, international norms have been stripped of gender equality content when translated into national policies framed in terms of individual rights, as Krizsán and Popa’s (Reference Krizsán and Popa2014) research on Central and Eastern European domestic violence policies demonstrates.

Of course, contestation of language is also accompanied by other spoiling strategies such as appointing spoilers to key policy positions, excluding feminists from decision-making, leveraging financial resources, lobbying politicians and diplomats, advertising and propaganda, and mass electoral and protest mobilization (Sanders Reference Sanders2018a). Efforts to control, alter and delete words are only a partial – but crucial – element of the attack on women’s rights. Focusing on language-centred norm spoiling highlights how the most serious threats to norms do not always take the form of crude defiance. The Trump administration exuded overt hostility and indifference to international law (Birdsall and Sanders Reference Birdsall and Sanders2020); however, its quieter, less dramatic efforts may prove more damaging in the long term. Alarming norm breaches, such as Trump’s boasts about sexual assaults, or tweets and comments insulting women leaders, provoked mobilizations to defend women’s rights (Havercroft et al. Reference Havercroft, Wiener, Kumm and Dunoff2018: 9–11). Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s support for manipulating and undermining the language of women’s rights in governance policies and international legal documents was more discreet but potentially more durable.

IV. Women’s rights norms spoilers: Patriarchal populist and conservative alignment

Efforts to undermine international women’s rights in recent years have been animated by a deepening alliance between traditional – often religiously inspired – conservatives and rising far-right populist movements and regimes. Several charismatic populist presidents and prime ministers have given these conservative movements and regimes higher profiles, international allies and institutional clout. Former US President Donald Trump and several other populist leaders around the world have advocated returning to traditional families and sex roles and attacked those who have challenged gender binaries. Trump, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Victor Orbán of Hungary and Matteo Salvini of Italy, to name a few, ‘all link the new political order they seek to create to a more subordinate and traditional role for women’ (Beinart Reference Beinart2019: 14). These leaders vary in terms of which other groups they attack and which economic policies they advocate, but they are united in their ‘desire to roll back the feminist gains of the last several decades’ (Reference Beinart2019: 11). In rallies and public statements aimed to excite their followers, they denigrate both feminist principles and prominent women, and engage in misogynist rhetoric ranging from Duterte’s exhortation of soldiers to shoot rebel women ‘in the vagina’ to render them ‘useless’ to Trump’s frequent cry of ‘lock her up!’ (Reference Beinart2019: 13–14).

This political trend has been called ‘authoritarian populism’ (Norris and Inglehart Reference Norris and Inglehart2018) and ‘authoritarian nationalism’ (Beinart Reference Beinart2019: 12). Most of these leaders also can be categorized as right-wing populists based on their nativist and natalist nationalism (Lacatus Reference Lacatus2019: 224) and traditionalist populists due to their desire to return to or reinforce traditional notions of the family (Stoeckl and Medvedeva Reference Stoeckl and Medvedeva2018). Recognizing how these authoritarian, nationalist, natalist and traditionalist elements all feed into gender inequalities, we dub this group of leaders and their governments ‘patriarchal populists’ in order to underscore their open attacks on gender equality and women’s rights. Populists pit a ‘corrupt elite’ against a ‘pure people’, but populism is a ‘thin ideology’ that is always layered with other ideologies (Mudde and Kaltwasser Reference Mudde and Kaltwasser2017: 1669). For patriarchal populists, feminists are corrupt elites and those opposing feminism are the pure people. Patriarchal populists in power provide an influx of ideological and political energy by layering populist ideologies onto conservative ideologies about gender, sexuality, and sexual and reproductive health.

Some scholars argue that the concept of patriarchy oversimplifies intersectional oppressions or denies women’s agency, while others use the terms ‘patriarchy’ or ‘patriarchal’ in thoughtful analyses of regressive gender politics (Arat Reference Arat and Tezcür2020; Schleusener Reference Schleusener, Dietze and Roth2020: 194; Wiesner-Hanks Reference Wiesner-Hanks2018: 321–22). We use the term to draw attention to a set of populist governments that reinforce binary and heteronormative gender hierarchies and that try to obscure intersectional complexities. We recognize that gender intersects with other identities in multiplicative forms of domination; moreover, many women have demonstrated agency through political action explicitly calling out patriarchy, as in contemporary protests featuring slogans such as “smash the patriarchy” (Wiesner-Hanks Reference Wiesner-Hanks2018: 321).

Populism takes many forms, and political scientists study populism in several ways: as an ideology, a mobilization strategy, a set of attitudes or a form of political rhetoric (Lacatus Reference Lacatus2019: 223–24). To some, it is a ‘style of rhetoric’ calling for the people, rather than the elites, to rule (Norris and Inglehart Reference Norris and Ronald2019: 4). We too focus on language but move beyond populist speeches to examine how contemporary populist administrations have latched onto and amplified pre-existing transnational initiatives to undermine the words essential to women’s human rights. Challenging both multilateralism and gender equality resonates with patriarchal populists’ antipathy to both globalism and feminism, which they see as elite intrusions on the popular will.

Patriarchal populists build on and strengthen the work of conservative governments and organizations that previously spearheaded traditionalist attacks on women’s rights, often in the name of nationalism and/or religion. Long-time state critics of international women’s rights principles active in international law and global governance debates include the Vatican and its UN mission, the Holy See, which has permanent UN observer status and has provided ideological leadership for decades; the United States under Republican administrations; a variety of post-Soviet, Islamic and Catholic-identified countries; and regional organizations and inter-state coalitions such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the League of Arab States and elements of the G77 and the UN Africa Group (Goetz Reference Goetz2020; Sanders Reference Sanders2018a). Many of these states cooperated to resist explicit recognition of abortion rights and challenged non-essentialist notions of gender at the 1994 Cairo and 1995 Beijing conferences and related follow-up meetings (Sanders Reference Sanders2018a). States have recently assembled under the auspices of the Group of Friends of the Family, a network of 25 UN member countries led by the authoritarian states of Belarus, Egypt and Qatar, which aims to undermine policies that they allege erode heterosexual marriage and women’s traditional roles as wives and mothers (Group of Friends of the Family 2015). A similar coalition endorsed the anti-abortion ‘Geneva Consensus Declaration’ in 2020 (US Department of Health and Human Services 2020), as discussed below.

These strange bedfellows have overcome significant political, religious and cultural differences in pursuit of their shared antipathies. This highlights a central feature of norm spoiling, which is based more on a common enemy than a uniform substantive vision of politics (Sanders Reference Sanders2018a). In this way, undermining norms is easier than building them because it does not require consensus on alternatives. At the same time, through their shared hostility to women’s and LGBTI rights, diverse actors engage in forms of cooperation and mimicry that make them more alike as they work to build societies characterized by patriarchal power relations, mandatory heteronormativity and the legal or even violent exclusion and oppression of people deemed deviant or subversive.

At the regional level, so-called ‘anti-gender’ campaigns have become highly influential in recent years, producing model messaging and policy that have been emulated in several contexts. In both Europe (European Parliamentary Forum 2018; Kováts and Pető Reference Kováts and Pető2015; Kuhar and Paternotte Reference Kuhar and Paternotte2018) and Latin America, the anti-gender movement is animated primarily by right-wing populists, but also sometimes more left-leaning figures such as Rafael Correa of Ecuador. As Corrêa, Paternotte and Kuhar (Reference Corrêa, Paternotte and Kuhar2018) explain:

Montoya (Reference Montoya2019: 463) highlights the populist framing of LGBTI human rights as an ‘external threat’ in conflict with ‘religious nationalist identity’ in the European Union, which can impede norm internalization, a dynamic also observed by Ayoub (Reference Ayoub2016: 201). Furthermore, far right groups sometimes use human rights frames, such as protecting European women from the immigrant ‘Other’, characterized as sexist or homophobic, while simultaneously undermining human rights implementation: European ‘far right groups use human rights discourse to justify their anti-immigrant sentiments at the same time they work against gender equality initiatives’ (Montoya Reference Montoya2019: 463–64; see also Ayoub Reference Ayoub2016: 204). The gap between ratification of and compliance with women’s rights treaties in Eastern Europe (Avdeyeva Reference Avdeyeva2007) set the stage for further efforts to not just ignore but undermine these treaties. In other regions of the world, parallel trends have taken on their own historically and culturally contextual expressions (Moghadam and Kaftan Reference Moghadam and Kaftan2019).

On the non-governmental side, numerous conservative NGOs, such as the Heritage Foundation, C-Fam, Civil Society for the Family, Family Watch International, United Families International, the Family First Foundation, the UN Family Rights Caucus, Heartbeat International, International Right to Life Federation, the Population Research Institute, Alliance Defending Freedom International, Concerned Women for America, REAL Women of Canada, and CitizenGo, have targeted international women’s rights for revision. Many of these organizations have consultative status at the United Nations, allowing them to hold side and parallel events at UN conferences and influence diplomats alongside domestic lobbying (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2019).

Moreover, both state and non-state critics of international women’s rights have joined transnational political networks. The World Congress of Families (WCF) has become a central showcase for these emergent alliances through their annual meetings. The WCF website features Orbán addressing WCF XI in Budapest in 2017 and boasting that he opened the summit and that ‘top ministers’ from his government helped to plan it (World Congress of Families 2019). WCF president Brian Brown (Reference Brown2019) wrote a public letter celebrating the swearing in of Bolsonaro, praising him for his statements and efforts to ‘combat the ideology of gender’. The increasing convergence and coordination of domestic, regional and international conservative forces was evident at the 2019 World Congress of Families in Verona, where speakers included Matteo Salvini of Italy’s far-right League, and politicians and activists from the United States, Hungary, Russia, Moldova, Australia, Uganda and Nigeria, among others, along with representatives of the Catholic, Orthodox and Mormon churches (World Congress of Families 2019).

Patriarchal populists are working to entrench their preferences within national and international governance. This leads to multidirectional advocacy between NGOs and states as conservative transnational advocacy networks influence states, and states in turn engage in diplomatic pressure and multilateral alliances to pressure other states. Moreover, once successful in capturing state foreign policy, conservative non-governmental activists become state representatives, serving in the bureaucracy and in diplomatic missions. For instance, at the 2017 UN Commission on the Status of Women, the Heritage Foundation and C-Fam joined the official US delegation to the conference. US diplomats at the United Nations were instructed by the Trump administration to deliver talking points drafted by C-Fam (Borger and Ford Reference Borger and Ford2019). The impact of these trends has been compounded by changes in UN processes, such as the growing pre-negotiation of CSW outcome documents, which has served to exclude feminist civil society activists from formative deliberations (Goetz Reference Goetz2020).

In their research on Russian support for traditional notions of the family, Stoeckl and Medvedeva (Reference Stoeckl and Medvedeva2018: 394–95) observe that between 2009 and 2016, ‘the traditionalist agenda has mobilized broad support among NGOs in the West’ and noted the presence of traditionalist NGOs within several countries, including the United States, whose governments had voted down traditionalist initiatives in the United Nations. This agenda subsequently gained support from the Trump administration and several other patriarchal populist governments. In the United States, Trump’s advocacy for traditional families and gender roles formed a central part of his appeal to evangelical supporters: ‘whatever their differences when it comes to the proper behavior of men, Trump and his evangelical backers are united by a common desire to constrain the behavior of women’ (Beinart Reference Beinart2019: 13). This contempt for women’s rights and international institutions converged in the Trump administration’s participation in women’s rights norm spoiling at the United Nations.

Not only have states failed to adequately ensure the realization of the international women’s rights norms to which they have committed, but some have also sought to alter extant agreements and limit the progressive development of international law. Arguing that international women’s rights principles have been too broadly interpreted by feminists (who are consistently cast in derogatory terms), women’s rights norms spoilers have for decades attempted to narrow and limit their application in light of sovereign prerogatives and traditional cultural sensibilities. In recent years, these arguments have resonated with patriarchal populists. Together, advocacy organizations and sympathetic governments work to spoil norms through controlling, altering and deleting language. We now turn to outlining what these tactics entail. We pay particular attention to US policy, US-based NGOs and the Trump administration because US power and influence give it disproportionate sway and enhance its capacity to damage international norms.

V. Controlling women’s rights language

The Mexico City Policy, periodically enacted by US administrations, remains one of the most destructive policy initiatives for women’s rights globally, not only because it restricts access to safe and legal abortion care around the world, but because it quite literally prevents women from talking and learning about sexual and reproductive health and rights. Antecedents include the 1973 Helms Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act, which prohibited the use of US federal funds ‘for the performance of abortions as a method of family planning or to motivate or coerce any person to practice abortions’, and the US Agency for International Development’s (USAID) ban on ‘information, education, training, or communication programs that seek to promote abortion as a method of family planning’ (Ernst, Katzive and Smock Reference Ernst, Katzive and Smock2004). In 1984, the Reagan administration further entrenched the anti-choice position of the United States via executive order with the Mexico City Policy, which prevented NGOs outside the United States from receiving American financial support if, with their own funds and in accordance with local law, they performed or ‘actively promoted’ or discussed abortion as a method of family planning. The policy has been suspended by Democratic administrations and revived by subsequent Republican administrations, including the Trump administration.

The Mexico City Policy has been called the ‘global gag rule’ because it leverages much-needed US foreign aid funds to control what health providers can say to women. Providers are not allowed to inform women about the availability, safety or appropriateness of abortion care, even if asked by patients. These restrictions are rooted in US political preferences rather than professional medical protocols. In fact, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (2014) ‘supports the availability of high-quality reproductive health services for all women and is committed to improving access to abortion’.

The Trump administration extended global gag rule restrictions beyond funding for family planning initiatives to apply to the entire US$9 billion American global health assistance budget. Renamed ‘Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance’, the latest iteration of the policy covered all US granting agencies and cut off all funding, rather than just family planning funding, to NGOs that did not comply. As a result, it not only limited access to critical sexual and reproductive healthcare such as contraception, prenatal monitoring and HIV/AIDS prevention, but also tuberculosis and malaria care, tropical disease initiatives, and sanitation and hygiene programs provided by NGOs in poor countries (Filipovic Reference Filipovic2017). While the most obvious targets of the gag rule were large organizations such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation and Marie Stopes International, lack of clear implementation rules also undermined smaller country partners, which ‘had believed it applies to NGOs providing abortion only, and were not aware that it restricts client-level interaction and the provision of information, referrals and counseling, which is more relevant to their work’ (Planned Parenthood Global 2019: 15). Because of the damaging effects of such policies, other highly respected healthcare providers such as Médecins Sans Frontières have long avoided dependence on USAID so as to preserve their ability to offer ‘evidence-based policies in order to deliver the best possible care to our patients’ (Médecins Sans Frontières 2017: 3).

The gag rule not only stifles safe and legal abortion care (not to be confused with abortion rates, with the prevalence of unsafe abortions rising where safe and legal care is unavailable) but has had a chilling effect on the discussion of women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights. As reported by Planned Parenthood Global (2019: 27):

The global gag rule has served as a crude method of controlling what can be said about women’s rights around the world. It forces a stark tradeoff: NGOs must not talk about the full spectrum of women’s reproductive health and rights or they lose funding for vital programs to help the world’s poorest citizens. This use of financial leverage to coerce speech produces direct material impacts for women. For instance, healthcare providers and experts in Kenya reported that a decline in safe and legal abortion care led to ‘a spike in unqualified practitioners performing abortions with tools such as knitting needles, as well as women ingesting traditional herbs, crushed glass or bleach to terminate pregnancies’ (Wadekar Reference Wadekar2020).

In response, women’s rights advocates led by ministers from Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden launched the She Decides initiative (2020), raising hundreds of millions of dollars to offset the financial impact of the global gag rule. As anticipated, the Biden administration rescinded the gag rule. But the harm to people’s ability to speak (and act) freely to advance women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights will remain for those subject to the residual effects of US policy.

VI. Altering women’s rights language

Another spoiling tactic alters the meaning of women’s rights by reframing women’s equality – particularly sexual and reproductive health and rights – as incompatible with other human rights, such as religious freedom, with purportedly foundational ‘unalienable’ rights, or with an ideal of the ‘natural family’.

VII. Deleting women’s rights language

Attempts to exclude and erase women’s rights language from international law constitute another longstanding norm-spoiling tactic. This is evident even in regard to CEDAW, the core women’s rights treaty. While CEDAW is now widely ratified, many states acceded with extensive reservations that sought to nullify its impact (CEDAW Declarations and Reservations). In some cases, states declared themselves not bound by particular treaty provisions, essentially excising them from their obligations, or announced that requirements would be interpreted in light of contradictory domestic laws, rendering them moot or – when it comes to their status as prescriptive words – mute.

In subsequent years, states intensely debated the adoption of further women’s rights instruments. The 1994 Cairo Conference on Population and Development and the 1995 Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women served as flashpoints. Disagreements over women’s rights increasingly coalesced around the use of specific words in outcome documents and legal texts. For both proponents and opponents of women’s rights, language became a battleground. Notable episodes of linguistic contestation included the process of drafting the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, during which conservative critics objected to references to ‘gender-based violence’ because ‘gender’ could be construed to acknowledge SOGI rights (Oosterveld Reference Oosterveld2014: 565). As a result, Article 7, paragraph 3 of the Rome Statute (1998) states, ‘the term “gender” refers to the two sexes, male and female, within the context of society. The term “gender” does not indicate any meaning different from the above.’ Moreover, ‘forced pregnancy’ was defined in the treaty so as not to infer a right to abortion: ‘“Forced pregnancy” means the unlawful confinement of a woman forcibly made pregnant, with the intent of affecting the ethnic composition of any population or carrying out other grave violations of international law. This definition shall not in any way be interpreted as affecting national laws relating to pregnancy’ (Article 7, paragraph 2(f)).

Yet despite spoilers’ efforts to delimit meanings of key terms, language evolves and becomes vested with shifting connotations. In such cases, spoilers have resorted to deleting words. The term ‘gender’ is a case in point. The varied usage of this term is evident in the UN Term database, which defines nomenclature in the UN system. For example, it cites the aforementioned Rome Statute definition of ‘gender’ in English, but also includes a UN Development Programme source to define gender as ‘A concept that refers to the social differences between women and men that have been learned, are changeable over time and have wide variations both within and between cultures’ (UNTERM Portal 2019). In the French version of the entry, an even more expansive definition of gender drawn from the Yogyakarta Principles, a non-governmental initiative to identify SOGI rights in international human rights law, is cited:

Further variance is present in the Russian, Chinese and Arabic definitions, which also emphasize gender as a social construction.

For their part, women’s rights advocates have identified the significance of advancing particular patterns of language for institutionalizing progressive and inclusive interpretations and understandings of what rights mean in international law. For instance, UN Women (the UN agency devoted to gender equality) has developed a GenderTerm database which ‘recognizes the importance of language in fighting gender bias and promotes the use of gender-inclusive language in all contexts and at all times. Gender-inclusive language refers to language that places both women and men at the same level, and which does not convey gender stereotypes’ (UN Women 2020). Returning to the core term ‘gender’, the Gender Equality Glossary suggests:

The language of ‘sexual and reproductive health and rights’ is also increasingly important. This concept requires that women and all people should control their own bodies and reproduction, which implies access to medically accurate sex education, birth control and abortion care. The Gender Equality Glossary defines sexual and reproductive health rights (SRHR) as

Such definitions build on prior documents. For example, the notion of ‘reproductive health’ as articulated as far back as the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (1995: paragraph 94) included the provision that:

‘Reproductive rights’, echoing CEDAW, include people’s rights ‘to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so’, but are limited in practice by

Similar understandings are iteratively advanced in numerous international legal sources (Miller et al. Reference Miller, Kismödi, Cottingham and Gruskin2015).

When it comes to SRHR and abortion, the CEDAW Committee’s General Recommendation no. 30 on women in conflict prevention, conflict and post-conflict situations asserts that states are obligated to:

This complements similar CEDAW Committee and Human Rights Committee recommendations recognizing abortion rights.

The terminology of international women’s rights at the UN thus intentionally advances what one could broadly construe as feminist conceptualizations. In this sense, states and NGOs that oppose distinguishing ‘gender’ from biological sex differences, access to sexual education and birth control, and the right to abortion care are not wrong to see the repeated invocations of such terminology as a threat to their patriarchal preferences. Accordingly, in several instances states have tried – sometimes successfully – to literally excise these words from outcome documents.

The Catholic Church and its UN mission, the Holy See, has long championed attacks on what it calls ‘gender ideology’ (Case Reference Case2019) and advocated limits on objectionable words in international law. For example, the Pontifical Council for the Family published a Lexicon of Ambiguous and Debatable Terms Regarding Family Life and Ethical Questions in 2003. As explained by Anthony Favier (Reference Favier2015), ‘The book aims at explaining to Catholics the meaning of expressions that have become “problematic” in the modern age’. It highlights

As stated in the preface to Lexicon, ‘Since the terms that have been made up are not really innocent, their authors seek to promote their methods as a way to reach their goals by changing the meaning of the terms. They do this to avoid rejection, which they see as a possible risk. The cunning use of ambiguous terms has reached worrisome levels’ (López Trujillo Reference López Trujillo2003). It furthermore argues:

In other words, ‘cunning’ feminists use ambiguous language to surreptitiously advance their agenda, requiring aggressive pushback. Such arguments are reflected in multiple Church documents, statements and speeches.

Similar positions are currently articulated by conservative NGOs. According to the Heritage Foundation:

It moreover opposes references to ‘comprehensive sexuality education’ and ‘various forms of the family’, and objects to the concept of ‘gender identity’, arguing that, ‘Sex is a biological fact, not a feeling. Women and girls around the world face discrimination and harm as a result of historical and cultural factors related to biological sex’ (Melton Reference Melton2019a). The NGO C-Fam makes similar arguments and has expressed particular concern about the International Law Association’s efforts to incorporate an inclusive definition of ‘gender’ into drafts of a new crimes against humanity treaty (Gennarini Reference Gennarini2019).

State and NGO critics of international women’s rights have tried to keep certain words out of UN resolutions, and the Trump administration intensified these efforts. In addition to reintroducing the global gag rule and slashing funding to UN programs and agencies, the United States engaged in an aggressive campaign to remove language from documents (Gramer and Lynch Reference Gramer and Lynch2018). For example, in 2018, the United States opposed references to ‘gender-based violence’ in UN Third Committee discussions, advocating instead for anti-trafficking measures to refer to ‘violence against women’, reflecting concerns by conservative advocates about non-essentialist conceptualizations of ‘gender’. Around the same time, the US State Department altered the name of its webpage addressing ‘gender designation change’ on passports to refer to a ‘change of sex marker’ (Borger Reference Borger2018; Oppenheim Reference Oppenheim2018). A draft memo prepared by the Department of Health and Human Services sought to revise definitions under Title IX, the domestic statute prohibiting sex discrimination, so gender would be understood ‘on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable’ and ‘Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth’ (Green, Benner and Pear Reference Green, Benner and Pear2018).

In December 2018, the United States initiated a vote that aimed to remove references to ‘sexual and reproductive health’ from a UN resolution about violence against women (Sherman Reference Sherman2018). In discussions over the agreed conclusions of the 2019 CSW,

Later that spring, the United States threatened to veto UN Security Council Resolution 2467 condemning sexual violence against women in war, allowing it to pass only after references to survivors’ rights to sexual and reproductive healthcare were excised (Ford Reference Ford2019; Powers Reference Powers2019). In October 2019, UN ambassador Kelly Craft (Reference Craft2019) criticized a UN Security Council women, peace, and security resolution that

These manoeuvres are striking not only because they seek to deny women raped in armed conflict the right to healthcare, including safe termination of forced pregnancy, but also because they attempt to remove references to previous measures that include contested language. In this sense, they seek to halt the iterative progressive development of international women’s rights law.

These efforts are increasingly coordinated transnationally. In September 2019, the United States announced that it would join a coalition intent on stripping international law of words deemed objectionable (Cha Reference Cha2019). Issued on behalf of nineteen other like-minded states including Bahrain, Belarus, Brazil, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Guatemala, Haiti, Hungary, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Nigeria, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen, the initiative announcement declared:

It moreover stated that ‘only documents that have been adopted by all Member States should be cited in U.N. resolutions’ (Azar Reference Azar2019). In 2020, the United States joined with many aforementioned states and co-sponsors (Brazil, Egypt, Hungary, Indonesia and Uganda) to issue the so-called ‘Geneva Consensus Declaration on Promoting Women’s Health and Strengthening the Family’, affirming that

In March 2020, conservative NGOs cheered US withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO) amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, criticizing the WHO’s advocacy of reproductive healthcare, including contraception and abortion, as essential during the crisis. For example, a Heritage Foundation senior fellow called on the US government to demand the ‘restructuring of the WHO’s financing to concentrate on communicable diseases and responding to international health emergencies’ (Schaefer Reference Schaefer2020) and thus sidestep the endemic global crisis of women’s reproductive healthcare and steady death toll resulting from that. In 2017, about 810 women per day died from ‘preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth’ (World Health Organization 2019). Unable to control the WHO’s agenda and language, spoilers sought to end US participation altogether.

Efforts to delete words, veto language and undermine legal instruments or agencies that promote women’s rights are not merely academic; rather, they substantively weaken norms and, by extension, disable the international promotion of policies necessary for women’s equality, safety and health.