Religious college campuses, the Trump administration and the Global Gag Rule

By Angela and Kory, International Youth Leadership Council Members

As students attending a Catholic and Jesuit University, we experience every day the conservative ideology that restricts bodily autonomy in the name of religious doctrine. Our community faces significant obstacles in accessing sexual and reproductive health services on campus, as illustrated by our school’s rank of 126 out of 140 in Trojan’s most recent Sexual Health Report Card. Our school, Georgetown University, neither distributes nor allows the sale of condoms on campus, restricts doctors in the Student Health Center from prescribing medications for contraceptive use, and forbids staff from “aiding and abetting” abortion. When the Trump administration gutted the contraceptive mandate in the Affordable Care Act last May, every student and worker on Georgetown’s insurance risked losing coverage for their contraceptive care. Although we organized and won a guarantee from the University not to further restrict our community’s access to basic healthcare this time, we understand that the limited options we do have remain at risk.

While many of the challenges we face are specific to Catholic and other religious institutions, we see parallels between our experiences with conservative religious ideology and the repeated actions of the Trump administration. From the Department of Education’s refusal to protect transgender students under Title IX to the Department of Health and Human Services’ newly created Conscience and Religious Freedom Division allowing providers to use religion to discriminate against patients, the Trump administration has weaponized religion to attack bodily autonomy and health.

Last week, the State Department continued this dangerous legacy when it released a six month review of Trump’s Mexico City Policy, commonly known as the global gag rule. Even as the review touts the policy as successful, it has such structural issues that the State Department had to admit it conducted the review under “insufficient” parameters. Worse than attempting to sell the policy through a faulty review, though, it ignores the experiences of those directly impacted by the rule: providers and patients, particularly young people, in the Global South.

As problematic as the review is, we cannot forget the larger issue of the global gag rule harming people all over the world and its representation of the Trump administration’s attempts to control the bodies and wellbeing of individuals, particularly young people, under thinly veiled conservative religious ideology. Placing the review and the global gag rule more generally in the context of Trump’s recently released budget, with its ban on words like “fetus,” “diversity,” and “evidenced-based,” and deep cuts to HIV/AIDS programs, education, and family planning exposes the administration’s true priorities.

Since its first imposition in the 1980s, the global gag rule has attached a funding restriction that prevents recipients from not only providing abortion-related services but also from even discussing abortion whatsoever with their patients. Trump’s rule takes what previous administrations have done to new a level by expanding the policy’s reach. Instead of encroaching only on family planning funding, the Trump administration attached the global gag rule to all global health spending, impacting programs working to prevent HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis, and increasing the affected funds by more than 1500 percent, from roughly $575 million to about $8.8 billion.

The policy, which seeks to appeal to the Republican “pro-life” base, directly leads to women dying because they cannot access safe abortion care. Numerous studies have shown that restrictions on legal abortion fail to lower abortion rates, but succeed in increasing incidence of maternal mortality. The International Planned Parenthood Federation, just one of the organizations that lost funding from the global gag rule, estimated that 20,000 preventable maternal deaths in 29 countries occurred for the $100 million in funding the organization lost due to Trump’s rule.

As U.S. citizens attending a university in the nation’s capital, we have many privileges, protections, and options those directly impacted by the gag rule do not. As frustrating as Georgetown’s restrictions on care are, many in our community can still access services off-campus. Those impacted by the global gag rule often do not have similar choices. The policy also exempts U.S. organizations because its speech restrictions violate the First Amendment. Foreign-based nongovernmental organizations, though, lack the standing to challenge this infringement. This anti-choice ideology masquerading as policy turns U.S. foreign policy into a tool of both violating free speech rights and endangering the lives of millions around the world.

As we resist attempts to restrict bodily autonomy here in the United States, we cannot forget that the Trump administration has exported its conservative religious ideology through policies like the global gag rule. We know without a doubt the harm the global gag rule causes because we have the hard data and testimony from organizations, providers, and global health experts. It is time to permanently end the global gag rule by affirming the legislative solution that is the Global Health, Empowerment, and Rights Act. As our university experience has taught us, although the fight against weaponized religion is not an easy one, but in the face of the Trump administration’s deadly crusade it is one that we can and must win.