Abortion Group Applauds Biden’s Nominee to Head Global Women’s Issues

By and Rebecca Oas, Ph.D. | December 9, 2021

Geeta Rao Gupta

WASHINGTON DC, December 10 (C-Fam) President Biden nominated Geeta Rao Gupta to head the important Office of Global Women’s Issues at the Department of State. Gupta, a gender and development expert, has garnered the support of the largest abortion group in the United States.

The president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Alexis McGill Johnson, said she was “excited” by the nomination. Gupta has promoted the use of international assistance for social engineering goals for two decades, including by streamlining the LGBT agenda in UN policy.

Gupta will “play a key role” in promoting “sexual and reproductive health and rights across U.S. foreign policies,” McGill Johnson said in a press release from the global abortion giant following the White House announcement.

“In recent years, women, girls, and the LGBTQ+ community around the world have been disproportionately affected by harmful policies like the global gag rule,” Planned Parenthood’s statement reads, referring to federal restrictions on the use of U.S. funding for abortion overseas.

The Indian-American doctor worked for twenty years at the Washington, D.C. based International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), an international development think tank that promotes abortion and LGBT rights alongside women’s and girls’ issues. She was president of the organization for ten years, leaving in 2010 to join the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Gupta is credited with coining the term “gender-transformative” in a 2000 speech on HIV/AIDS policies. Her approach to international policy seeks to leverage foreign assistance for social engineering goals on a global scale. The approach contrasts with interventions that take into account the practical differences experienced by men and women in the cultural contexts in which they live, sometimes referred to as gender-neutral or gender-sensitive policies. Gupta instead, has long advocated for a “transformative” approach to international policy that seeks to “transform gender roles” throughout entire societies.

UN agencies have followed Gupta’s lead, including the UN children’s agency, UNICEF, where Gupta was deputy executive director from 2011-2016.

For example, a UNICEF guidance on child marriage calls for “gender-transformative” programming for “transforming the underlying social structures, policies, and broadly held social norms” and “ending the patriarchy.”  It frames relationships between men and women in terms of power, and frames traditional cultures, religion, and the family as its primary barriers.

Gupta described the gender norms she seeks to change in an article published in The Lancet as “toxic masculinities.” In the same article she supports promoting “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) justice” and pressuring countries to legalize abortion.

Gupta and her coauthors accuse conservative forces of “co-opting the term gender” and “rallying against the so-called threat of gender ideology” to oppose things “such as LGBTQ rights, access to comprehensive sexuality education, and accommodation of diverse family forms.”

Gupta’s desire to transform gender norms extends to home life and private family decisions.  In a 2020 online event, Gupta referred to the fact that women spend more time than men on household care work “one of the most stubborn inequalities to shift.”

Established in 2009 under President Obama, the Office of Global Women’s Issues is known to partner with abortion groups overseas. The programs it promotes depend largely on the policy direction of the U.S. President and Secretary of State. Under President Trump’s leadership, the office avoided abortion by focusing on women’s economic advancement through skill training for women who wanted to enter the workforce and entrepreneurial assistance for small business owners.

Even though it has no legislative mandate, Congress appropriates funds for the office. The Biden administration has asked that the $200M appropriated for economic advancement be reclassified for gender equality programming.

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