Ember Duke | layout editor

Despite centuries of social progress, women still carry the shackles of misogyny with them everyday. President Donald Trump’s rhetoric and policies are a bleak reminder of where we stand now.

In his warpath, Trump ended all foreign aid through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) as a way to curb “unnecessary” spending. Women across the world are being stripped of their reproductive freedoms, access to contraceptives, healthcare and disease testing and family planning because of it, according to The New York Times.

On-the-ground organizations in developing countries including Yemen, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have been entirely defunded and their workforces either gone or spread too thin to distribute materials already in transit before the funding cuts.

Nearly 50 million women will be affected in some way by the change, according to The New York Times. Without the aid, roughly 34,000 women could succumb to preventable maternal deaths, according to Guttmacher Institute, an international research and policy organization focused on sexual and reproductive health.

The cuts to foreign aid signal a deep lack of empathy from the administration. Reproductive care is a crucial aspect to women’s overall health and putting barriers to access it can create a windfall of other health, economic and social issues which can be detrimental to someone’s entire livelihood.

In poor countries and communities, having an unwanted pregnancy can easily keep a woman in the grip of generational poverty. She has to pay for child expenses on top of having less time to work.

The right often equivocates reproductive healthcare with abortions — which are a form of reproductive healthcare, but, that’s not all it is. It means access to birth control, STI and STD screening, pre-pregnancy and pregnancy treatment, education, family planning, fertility treatments and in some cases social services.

In 1950, 23 years before Roe v Wade was signed, the officially reported death toll was just under 200 women a year for illegal abortion and accounted for 17% of all deaths related to pregnancy, according to a 2003 report by Guttmacher Institute.

Whether it’s for economic reasons or not, access to contraceptives and abortive care simply is healthcare — abortions don’t stop simply because the safe resources to perform and prevent the procedure go away, they just become more dangerous.

With increased awareness and availability, the desire for contraceptives and reproductive health was rising in the affected countries, according to The New York Times. Now, women who seek this aid will have to pay much higher rates for it and, in many instances, might be in a position where they have to choose between contraceptives or other essentials — like food.

To take actions which block foreign medical aid, is a gross refiguring of what the American government cares about both symbolically and literally. We should want to help other people simply because they are people, not because of their national identity.

As one of the leaders of the modern world and top funders of global health, the U.S. should look out for those in worse conditions, which has rarely been the case in all of history. By ending foreign aid and thus decimating women’s healthcare in worse off countries, the administration is very simply stating that they do not care about the intricacies of human wellbeing and how their actions will hurt people. That should be concerning to everyone.

It may well be a sign of what’s to come domestically. Those worse off economically and socially, generally speaking, are also the most likely to be hurt the most by regressive legislation. They don’t have the protection of wealth, leaving them more susceptible to harm and injustice. If the administration can normalize dehumanization abroad, they can certainly normalize the dehumanization of the working class, minority racial communities, women and the LGBTQ+ community.

What is so infinitely ironic about the argument of reproductive freedom, and frankly most political arguments these days, is that the right is simply imagining a monster in the closet and perpetrating its own problems. They are so afraid of abortion that they think defunding agencies which provide female healthcare, such as contraceptives to stop pregnancy, is the solution, when it only creates a circular dilemma — less contraceptives means more unwanted pregnancy means more abortion.

In a memorandum on Jan. 24 Trump reinstated what is often referred to as the Mexico City rule, which forces “foreign nongovernmental agencies to certify that they don’t provide or promote abortion if they receive U.S. federal funds for family planning assistance,” according to CBS News. To be fair, every Republican president re-enacted it, according to NPR, but Trump took it a step further by banning aid for organizations who comply with the rule, but still give money to other organizations that don’t.

Coupled with the funding cuts, it hurts organizations who provide way more than just abortions. Other lifesaving reproductive healthcare, such as cancer and HIV screening and treatment is on the chopping block because of it.

Women are already taken less seriously as men by the medical field. Cutting funds which intentionally reduces their access to necessary life-saving healthcare is a statement to women that their personhood is not as important and that their bodily autonomy is less than second place to the government’s budget.

Ember Duke can be reached at dukee@duq.edu.