US & EU Set to Clash at UN Commission on Women

By | 2026

NEW YORK, February 20 (C-Fam) The Trump administration is set to clash yet again with the European Union at the UN Commission on the Status of Women. This time, it will be about transgender issues, abortion, and DEI in UN policy.

Negotiations began this week on the agreement on women and girls’ “access to justice,” which is expected to be adopted by the commission in March. The EU delegation at the UN shows no signs of relenting on divisive culture war issues, and neither does the Trump administration.

Europeans say that access to justice for women includes giving men who identify as women access to women’s only facilities like bathrooms, prisons, shelters, and women’s sports. They also say it requires giving women access to abortion-on-demand and allowing governments to censor pro-life views on abortion. U.S. diplomats and traditional countries are expected to push back on these notions.

President Trump’s executive orders on gender, DEI, and censorship, as well as recently published State Department rules for foreign assistance, require the administration to push back hard. Moreover, the President’s executive order on women’s sports requires the Secretary of State to work through the United Nations to protect women’s sports and women’s only spaces, including shelters and prisons that will be specifically addressed in this year’s CSW agreement.

Many conservatives in Europe were surprised last week when the EU Parliament requested EU diplomats to promote transgender ideology in UN negotiations. But UN insiders know this has always been the position of the EU delegation at the United Nations, for decades.

As in other years, European diplomats are asking the commission to place an emphasis on “sexual and reproductive health and rights” and to recognize “women in all their diversity” in the draft agreed conclusions, as the outcome of the commission is known.

EU diplomats single out these issues as priorities in their interventions whenever possible. The idea is to wear down traditional nations or buy their silence. In the long run, they plan to impose abortion rights and gender ideology as binding obligations on all states under international law.

New this year, the European Union is supporting the creation of a broad category of “reproductive violence” in UN policy. Rather than referring to issues like sexual violence and government coercion in reproductive decisions, such as forced abortion and sterilization—as past UN agreements have done—this new category would include denial of abortion and transgender issues.

UN publications and programs on access to justice, including those funded by the European Union, routinely promote abortion rights and other transgender issues.  They say that opposition to transgender ideology is a crime against humanity and that denial of abortion or criminalizing abortion is a violation of international law. One UN manual “for the investigation of gender-related killings” in Latin America categorized “deaths due to unsafe or clandestine abortions” as “passive or indirect category of femicides.”

The Commission meets annually and is expected to reach an agreement by the second week of March. While the agreement will not be binding, it will ensure that UN programs include abortion and transgender rights. The agreement will be used as a mandate for the UN system to promote any of the commitments in the agreement with governments, politicians, and non-governmental groups across the world.

 

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