ANALYSIS: Trump Changes Paradigm for Pro-Life Cause Globally

By | April 17, 2025

NEW YORK, April 18 (C-Fam) The Trump administration upended decades of UN social policy diplomacy last week at the UN Commission on Population and Development. A UN agreement on population policies that should have been adopted without a glitch was rejected by U.S. officials because of concerns about gender, global government, and abortion.

The U.S. sent a strong message that it was not willing to adopt language about sexual and reproductive health, gender, and UN development goals. All these elements are included in dozens of UN resolutions every year. They have been part of the grand bargain on social issues at the UN for the last three decades and are typically adopted without a snag.

The long-standing UN compromise on social issues can be summarized in simple terms. Liberal Western countries promote gender ideology and abortion in UN policy under the rubric of sexual and reproductive health, gender equality, and international development. Traditional countries let them do this so long as they do not impose any new international legal obligations.

The U.S. government sent a strong message that it is no longer satisfied with this compromise.

During two weeks of negotiations, the U.S. government objected to language on sexual and reproductive health, gender and the 2030 Agenda, a 15-year General Assembly agreement that has been widely criticized as inching toward global government. The position was considered so outrageous that hardly any delegations took the U.S. threat seriously.

When delegates from Tunisia and Colombia presented the UN population commission with a final draft of the agreement, the draft included the elements the U.S. government had objected to throughout the negotiations. So, U.S. officials blocked the agreement.

The failure of the commission to reach an agreement is not something new. It gets bogged down each year in debates about abortion, gender ideology and extreme notions of sex education programs. Seven of the last ten sessions of the commission have ended in deadlock. But this year’s collapse in the negotiations was entirely different than in past years.

In past years, negotiations failed because Europeans insisted that the commission’s annual resolution endorse extreme notions of sex education programs or because traditional countries insisted that the commission had to acknowledge the sovereign prerogative of countries on sensitive social policies. This year these were non-issues.

The draft agreement had all the right compromises that would have secured adoption in the past. It was widely seen as “balanced.” It had language about “sexual and reproductive health” that Western countries wanted. It also had limiting language calling for respect for sovereignty that traditional countries wanted. It even left out issues like poverty eradication, climate, the right to development, Israeli occupation and sanctions known to be a red line for the U.S. delegation. Adoption of this kind of resolution was par for the course.

The only explanation for why the commission failed is that the Trump administration refused to preserve the status quo, one that allows UN agencies to promote gender ideology and abortion under the guise of providing “sexual and reproductive health” and protecting gender equality.

This creates an unprecedented opportunity to re-negotiate new terms for UN social policy, terms that will respect sovereignty and be favorable to the family, mothers, and their unborn children. The new state of play of the UN social policy debate will affect the negotiations of dozens of resolutions and strategic plans expected to be finalized this year and direct the work of UN agencies for years to come.

Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter