UN Feminists Angry and Frightened at Pro-Lifers

By | 2026

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 20 (C-Fam) UN agencies, together with progressive governments and powerful foundations, took to this year’s UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) to argue that the biggest threat to women’s justice comes from pro-life and pro-family groups. Through repeated speeches and panels, they are calling the efforts of pro-lifers a “backlash.”

At a side event co-hosted by UNAIDS, Finland, Germany, and the U.K., panelists framed socially conservative voices and groups as bad faith “anti-rights actors” that are “infiltrating” civic spaces, including the United Nations.

According to Laura Turquet, policy adviser at the powerful UN Women agency, pro-life efforts to remove “sexual and reproductive rights” and “gender” terminology from the document under negotiations were called “norm-spoiling” tactics by “anti-rights” groups to “stall progress.”

“This is exactly what this year’s CSW has run into,” she said, and singled out the United States delegation for proposing amendments to this year’s outcome document that aimed to define gender as binary and exclude abortion from the UN’s health policy. “Anti-gender actors have moved from the margins to the center of multilateral spaces, shifting from outside fringe protests to participation in official meetings and member state delegations.”

Turquet is likely referring to pro-lifers who are closely advising various delegations to the negotiations, and also the decades long methods of lobbying by pro-life groups from around the world.

Haley McEwen, a self-proclaimed “anti-rights researcher,” lamented the conservative framework that defends “gender binary,” “gender complementarity,” and the “heterosexual” and “nuclear family model.”

McEwen expressed concern that such groups “seek to normalize the idea of gender difference” and said people “must refuse to allow these actors to narrow the horizons of what kind of societies we are able to imagine and build.”

At an event on intersex rights hosted by the pro-LGBTQ+ rights advocacy group Outright International, UN Women reaffirmed its uncompromising position on sex and gender, saying “laws, policies, and health systems have been built on a rigid binary understanding of sex and gender, and that rigidity has caused harm.”

Young conservative women were all over the two-week conference. One of them expressed disappointment during an “anti-backlash” event hosted by UN Women and the Council of Europe. She said conservative views were “repeatedly described as anti-rights or opposed to protecting women” and said that she found this framing “not only discouraging but also misleading.”

Another one asked an Oxfam panelist promoting abortion whether they had ever considered the value of the baby in the womb and why policies can’t be advanced that protect both the baby and the mother. A panelist responded that the baby in the womb “cannot be considered a life” and that we need to focus on the people who are already living in the world.

Reflecting on the various events portraying the conservative vision for women’s rights as “backlash,” Anna Derbyshire, Campaign Director of CitizenGo, said, “This goes to show that they realize they are losing, which is why they have to be so aggressive, and they have to be so completely dominant.” Derbyshire went on to say that “there are more of us than they would like to admit […] the backlash is actually the truth.”

Anti-life groups have tried for decades to keep pro-lifers out of the United Nations. For decades, they have failed, and it is likely the new effort to brand and ban them will work this time.

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