Trump's Declaration of the Global Gag Rule: Understanding Socio-Political Discourses Through Media

Background

The Global Gag Rule (GGR), also known as the Mexico City Policy is a health policy first announced in 1984 by the United States (US) President Ronald Reagan, which has been into effect under various administrations. As per the policy, foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are required to certify that they will not “perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning,” using funds from any source (including non-US funds), as a condition for receiving global family planning assistance and now also other U.S. global health assistance after President Donald Trump’s (2017-2021) declaration on January 23, 2017 (The White House, 2017).

The current expanded policy on the Global Gag Rule by the US government applies to almost all of bilateral global health assistance (KFF, 2020), including family planning and reproductive health, maternal and child health, nutrition, Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), tuberculosis, malaria under President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI), neglected tropical diseases, global health security and certain types of research activities. This policy led to wide debates and discussions among the NGO sector, especially in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) such as Nepal that is heavily reliant on US funding for health research and intervention projects.

President Trump and US government’s decision on the Global Gag Rule has already had an adverse effect. Say health care professionals from clinics being shut down, predictions of high rise of unsafe abortions and some life-saving procedures are avoided due to unavailability of funds (Quackenbush, 2018). The gravity of the effect is as such that the funding loss for just two organizations, International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and Marie Stopes International, could lead to about 7.5 million unwanted pregnancies and 2.5 million unsafe abortions (Quackenbush, 2018).

The International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in 1994 provisioned for freedom of individuals to decide on the number, spacing and timing of their children, and to have the information and means to do so. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), three out of ten of pregnancies and six out of ten of unintended pregnancies resulted in an induced abortion. Among these, one out of three were carried out in the least safe or dangerous conditions. Strikingly, over half of all estimated unsafe abortions globally were in Asia, mostly in south and central Asia (World Health Organization, 2020a).

Undoubtedly, the year 2020 has been particularly challenging with the Covid-19 global pandemic with over 53.7 million cases and 1.3 million deaths reported globally during the first half of the year (World Health Organization, 2020b). Access to quality and timely reproductive health services, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) due to this global pandemic, has already been a challenge. The global health crisis brought about by Covid-19 creates overwhelming demands for national health system to provide essential sexual and reproductive health services. A study by Riley et al. (2020) estimates that a mere 10 percent decline in service delivery due to Covid-19 would result increase of 49 million in the number of women with an unmet need for modern contraception and an additional 15 million unintended pregnancies per year.

The current expanded policy on the Global Gag Rule by the United States (US) government and President Donald Trump, therefore, has led to wider debate and discussions among the non-government organization (NGO) sector, especially in LMICs, such as Nepal, that are heavily reliant on US funding for health research and intervention projects. Debates and discussions are also very much shaped by how the media shapes the narrative. Using the securitization theory, this chapter attempts to unfold the trend and the nature of stories reported in Nepali media on the Global Gag Rule declaration, meticulously unfolding the impact it has had in Nepal.