The Global Gag Rule is Once Again Expanded, Maximizing Harm

The Global Gag Rule, started by President Ronald Regan in 1984, prevented foreign NGOs from receiving U.S. family planning assistance if they performed, promoted, advocated for, counseled on, or referred patients for abortion. It has gone in and out of place since then, depending on who is in the White House. It was expanded during the first Trump administration to apply not only to family planning funding, but all of global health funding. Caitlin Horrigan, Senior Director of Global Advocacy at the Planned Parenthood Action Fund and Beirne Roose-Snyder, Senior Policy Fellow at the Council for Global Equality, sit down to talk with us about the new and purposefully broad expansion on an already-devastating rule.  

The Global Gag Rule impacts the most marginalized—women and girls, Black and brown people, the LGBTQI+ community, those in humanitarian settings, those living rurally, people living with disabilities, and more. At the 2026 March for Life, JD Vance announced the policy, “Promoting Human Flourishing in Foreign Assistance”, which includes three federal rules applying to grants and contracts coming from the State Department. It operationalizes and expands the existing global gag rule to all foreign assistance, to new actors (including new governments), and with new definitions. It also applies to those promoting “gender ideology” and “discriminatory equity ideology” or engagement in “unlawful diversity, equity, and inclusion-related discrimination.” These rules are purposefully long and complicated to create less obvious legal challenges. This expansion lands on top of an already devastated global health landscape.

LINKS FROM THIS EPISODE

Council for Global Equality on X
Council for Global Equality on Facebook
Planned Parenthood Federation of America on X
Planned Parenthood Federation of America on Facebook
Overwhelming Majority of Americans Concerned About the Global Gag Rule's  Dangerous Health Consequences, According to New Research Released on International Women’s Day 
BREAKING: Trump Administration Exploits Foreign Aid to Harm People and Further its Agenda Globally
Trump’s new foreign aid ban expands his “cruel” agenda on the world
The Trump Administration’s Latest Expansion of the Mexico City Policy: A Funding Analysis
Expanded global gag rule to ban US foreign aid to groups that promote ‘gender ideology’
LGBTQI+ People Need a Permanent End to the Global Gag Rule

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Transcript

Jennie: Welcome to rePROs Fight Back, a podcast on all things related to sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice. [music intro]

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Jennie: Hi, rePROs. How's everybody doing? I'm your host, Jennie Wetter, and my pronouns are she/her. So, y'all, I'm just feeling very drained and overwhelmed with all the things happening. Many of you probably know this, but I am from Wisconsin, so the pictures and the stories and everything coming out of Minnesota is hitting especially close to home at the moment. You know, it is just devastating and heartbreaking and rage-inducing and all of the things all at once to watch what is happening there and honestly what is happening everywhere, but in particular in Minnesota right now. I just- it's been a lot, and it's been a lot to take on with all of the ICE actions we've seen in Minnesota, with the amazing protesters coming out in the absolutely frigid cold. It is heartwarming, but just, it's so much, and I'm feeling just so emotionally drained with that and all the other things happening. Things with work— there was the vast expansion of the Global Gag Rule announced. We won't talk about that here because that's what the episode is about, but just that means work has been chaotic and you know, rage-inducing with that, and trying to wrap my arms around all of the things that are happening with the policy and all of the things I need to learn yet, and doing that while watching so many tragedies happen and all the things. It's just a lot, and I'm feeling it this week. I know that gets you to give up and not fight back. So, I'm not giving into it. I just am having a week where I need to take a breath and step back a little bit so that I can step more fully in again. And it's just a lot. And there's so much to fight, to fight for and to fight against at this moment, whether it's fighting to abolish ICE or fighting this new expansion of the Global Gag Rule or any of the many other terrible things that are happening right now. It is important that we are staying engaged and staying involved. But it is also important that we are taking care of ourselves so that we can stay engaged and involved long term because yeah, the authoritarianism wants you to give up and wants you to not stay in this fight. And it is so important that we stay in this fight for the long term because it is going to be a very long fight. So yeah, I'm just all the things that are kind of weighing on me this week and feeling it a lot. And so, I'm trying to remember to find the joy in the fight because there is so much joy to be found, whether it's, you know, I do this podcast and it brings me so much joy to get to talk to so many amazing people about, even if it is about terrible things. I love having these conversations and bringing them to y'all. I hope you enjoy them as well. It's just finding the little things that bring me joy while I am in the fight, but then also finding the things that are sustaining me out of the fight. I really, I feel like I've been at the part where I'm worn down by all of the things happening that I'm not seeking the joy in the things that I like to do. So, I've not been baking again for a long stretch. Or I don't know, I feel like there's like a million other little things that I've stopped doing, and I can't let everything that's happening take those away because I need that joy to sustain me. So, I hope you are finding your things that are bringing you joy and that you are staying involved in the fights because there are so many and they are so important because there is so much happening right now, and it is so important that we are continuing to fight back. So that is where I am at the moment. And I'm really excited about this week's episode. Our two guests, our two people I turn to whenever I have questions around the Global Gag Rule. You know, I talked about it in the intro last week really quickly that there was this brand-new expansion made. And I think it's really important to remember that the global gag rule was a really terrible policy when it was first announced. It did untold harm. And each time it has been expanded, it has done more harm, and it is just a continuation of this administration's attacks on human rights. We're exporting this anti-rights agenda, and it's gonna have a profound and devastating impact on the lives of people who rely on foreign assistance. At this point, we should be saving lives, right? We should be uplifting people and fighting for human rights, but this violent expansion of the global gag rule, it's not about saving lives. It's about control. And it's gonna be a long fight to mitigate harm and to repeal this policy and to get rid of it. But there are no people that I would be more happy to be in the fight with than this week's guests because they are so smart and they know so much about this policy. And I am so grateful that they were able to come on the podcast to talk about this new expansion of the global gag rule. So, I'm so excited to have with us today Beirne Roose-Snyder with the Council on Global Equality and Caitlin Horrigan with Planned Parenthood Action Fund. I am just so grateful to both of them for being here to share their expertise. So, I hope you enjoy our conversation. Hi, Caitlin and Beirne. Thank you so much for being here today.

Beirne: Hi, Jennie.

Caitlin: Hi, Jennie. Good to be with you. Although I wish we were talking about something else.

Jennie: Yes, very much so. So, before we get started, we should probably do a round of introductions, especially since there's two of you. So, people can, you know, maybe do a little voice association. So, Beirne, do you want to go first?

Beirne: Sure. This is Beirne Roose-Snyder. I use she/her pronouns. I'm the Senior Policy Fellow at the Council for Global Equality, the coalition of about 50 organizations that work on LGBTQI+ rights in US foreign policy.

Jennie: And Caitlin.

Caitlin: Hi, I'm Caitlin Horrigan. I use she/her pronouns, and I'm the Senior Director of Global Advocacy at Planned Parenthood Action Fund, where I lead our work on sexual and reproductive health and rights in US foreign policy.

Jennie: Okay, so a lot has happened, but I feel like before we can get to what the president- or what was announced at March for Life, we need to like take a step back and start doing a little bit of background for people who maybe aren't as familiar. We have the episodes of the podcast people can listen to if they want like a deeper dive into the history, but it's still we need to start with some of that history of: what is the global gag rule? And just like a little bit of background before we are able to then talk about what is new.

Caitlin: Yeah, thanks for grounding us there. I do think it's so important because certainly what the Trump administration has done, and we'll get into that, but it takes what was always a bad and harmful policy and makes it so much worse. And I think it's important to name that it's not like the status quo was good or okay, and it's only the new things that are bad. So, for those who may be less familiar with the policy, this has been kicking around since 1984. It was started by then President Reagan. And initially it targeted foreign organizations who are trying to partner with the U.S. government on international family planning programs. And what it said to them was if you want to partner with the U.S. government, receive any of our funds to do, you know, contraceptive counseling and provision work overseas, you have to give up your right to provide abortion, but also counsel for abortion, refer for abortion, or advocate for abortion. So, it wasn't even controlling what people could do with the US money that they were receiving. It was saying you can't do that with any funds that you receive from anyone anywhere. So, it was really an extreme provision. It's gone in and out of place since the 80s, depending on who is controlling the White House. It's always signed in and out of place by presidents. And it has been expanded. For the first time, it was expanded dramatically in the first Trump administration. So, moving from targeting family planning funds to actually all of global health, which was a huge scale-up in both the funding that was implicated as well as the number of partners and services that were harmed by this policy. But look, from its beginning, it's hurt communities that already face disproportionate barriers to care—women, girls, young people, LGBT communities, other marginalized groups. And it's always impacted more than abortion. So, while abortion is at its center, you know, is cutting off qualified providers who do a range of care for communities that often have no other option to turn to. So, the impacts have been vast. And so, it's really horrifying to think about the ways that they've now expanded them to make them exponentially worse.

Jennie: Okay, so that brings us to, I guess by the time this comes out a week and a half ago. And honestly, I feel like because things are still kind of happening, we should probably say we are recording this on Wednesday, January 28th at 1 p.m. Because there could be changes, because who knows? But so, what happened on- was it January 23rd?

Caitlin: Yeah, they love to ruin a Friday. [laughs] That's another truth about this administration.

Beirne: I can sort of start there. So, we saw two things happen. One was a speech by the Vice President at the March for Life, though we were expecting, we knew that they felt like they needed to be making some announcements to a base that doesn't feel like they've done enough. And they announced this "Promotion of Human Flourishing in Foreign Assistance." That sort of announcement and the things he talked about are pretty disconnected from the actual regulations and rules that were also released at 4:15 on Friday. And what was released under this framing of "Promotion of Human Flourishing" are three federal rules applying to grants and contracts coming from the State Department. And this is operationalizing the existing abortion gag rule, but expanding it to more money, as Caitlin said, to all of foreign assistance and to new actors and with some new definitions. So, the new actors that it's pushing out to are international organizations and then governments and parastatals, and then US-based organizations directly in a way that it's never applied before.

Jennie: Maybe we want to just like do a quick like: what's a parastatal? Just because I feel like that's such a specific term that I feel like the audience may not know.

Beirne: It's okay. I don't think the government really does either. So, they're in good company. There is a very specific definition. It includes just sort of basically entities that a foreign government may have controlling interest in. It's important because it gets into some particular type of hospital structures. There are some particular places where that will be important, but nothing should be understood to be like an exciting exception that's gonna save anybody. But it is important because it shows up throughout. It has been defined before. Now, in previous iterations, governments and parastatals were fully exempted from this. They're now included, though in sort of more specific and narrower terms than we see applied to international organizations, US organizations, or foreign organizations. So, we see this package of three rules. One expanding the abortion gag. And as Caitlin said, its impacts are not restricted to abortion, but the sort of the ideological targeting is around speech and provision of abortion. Then we have a brand-new rule applying the president's and White House's executive order on gender ideology to foreign assistance. And then we have a rule applying the two DEI executive orders to foreign assistance, like the abortion rule. All of them apply to all of foreign assistance, all non-military foreign spending. And all three of these rules differentially apply to governments and peristatals, international organizations and foreign NGOs and US-based NGOs. So, they're very long and they're very complicated because the government is defining things in new ways. And they're trying to structure things in a way that creates less obvious legal and constitutional challenges. So, the punchline is they released three rules: DEI, gender ideology, and abortion. All of them are garbage in different ways, and all of them are about 55 pages long and meant to feel really complicated and hard to navigate.

Caitlin: Yeah. And the other important thing I think to name here is it's not like foreign aid had a great year last year, like everything was going along well, and then this is landing to destroy it. We are dealing with a decimated system because of the Trump administration's actions in the last year, right? They froze foreign aid and then canceled so many life-saving and critical programs around the world, cut off partners, right? Walked away from UN entities, even threatened to burn contraception, right? They did chaotic and destructive things throughout last year. So, this bad policy is landing on top of an already devastated landscape where people have suffered so much. And so this policy, I think, marks sort of a turning point in some way, an ugly and destructive one of saying, okay, now as we go forward and think about what remains out of that destruction, we're going to fully weaponize it to continue to do harm, right? Like there's no survivors in this game. So, I think it's important to also think about what we've endured in this year in the context of this new policy coming into place.

Jennie: I think that's really important to point out. Cause I think some people who think about what happened in the last year are then like, well, why should we care about this new policy? Because they already got rid of USAID and like all of those structures are gone. So, like, does this even matter? And I think it's really important to reinforce why this is still such a harmful policy.

Beirne: It's already also created such a sense of desperation and scarcity amongst civil society groups, clinics around the world that they're under such increased pressure to accept whatever ideological conditions the US puts on it because they've already been put through so much this year.

Jennie: Such an important flag. Yeah. And I think it goes to that this point, the point of this policy is really to be a tool to bully— organizations, whole governments— into submission, which is a hallmark of this administration. But this is sort of a new tool in their toolbox, too, to do that kind of destructive work.

Beirne: I want to pull out something that Caitlin said about the first, you know, the original iteration of the policy, but I think we just have to keep bringing it back front and center again and again. I think for most people, they sort of go, well, sure, the government can decide what happens with their money. Like that's, you know, even if you don't agree with them, even if you wish it was something else, I think for most people that feels within the bounds of something that government funding should be able to do. These gag rules are fundamentally different because they are controlling what entities can do outside the scope of the US funding. They are saying, in order to take our funding, we get to control your speech, your advocacy, your medical provision, your programs everywhere in the world with anyone's money. If your grandmother gave you $20 for Christmas and you gave it to this organization, we get to control what happens with grandma's money too. And that's a really extraordinary thing for a government or any donor to be asserting. And it's important to come back to that again and again because it's so counterintuitive. And you can think we're talking about foreign policy and the government choosing how to spend their funds. But what we're really wanting to do is take those dollars and poison the civil society norms, the medical standards, the academic freedom of all of these other countries.

Jennie: Yeah, I've been thinking about, I mean, so many different parts of this all at once, because there are so many and it's hard to keep up with as things keep changing. But thinking through areas of funding that are now impacted, like thinking through humanitarian settings and how dire that need is right now and thinking that we're gonna restrict what groups can do around life-saving care, right, is just devastating. And then also thinking through what the new issue areas mean because they are so broad and expansive. I mean, if you're talking about DEI, this administration has really defined it to mean anything they don't like. So, like, that's so many things that could be impacted. It's just so much to balance all those things that are happening at once.

Caitlin: Yeah, I think you're exactly right to hone in on the humanitarian funding, which was explicitly exempted last time around when they did the expansion. So, to now see it in play is gutting. And to get real, it's like what we're talking about here is a country or community facing a hurricane, a tsunami, a life-endangering emergency where people need to act quickly, where we need to work with the partners who are already on the ground and have credibility and trust with the communities and the skills to deliver what's needed, whether it's food, housing, healthcare, gender-based violence services. And to be able to work in a super coordinated way, right? Everyone, no one can do everything, but everyone can do something. And this policy really erects barriers to be able to move quickly, right? All of a sudden, we're asking people to agree to an ideological checklist before you know agreeing to become a partner. And we're also saying that if you're prioritizing these things, we may not be able to work with you at all. I also think about the human level, because as Beirne mentioned, like these rules are so long, the definitions are so confusing, the application is different depending on what type of organization you are. And I just think about, you know, a humanitarian aid worker with someone, a person in front of them that they're trying to help and what it must feel like to say, I don't know if I can provide care to all people with the respect that they deserve and all the things that they need because I'm not sure how these rules work. That should be the last thing on their minds, right? We should be supporting healthcare workers and other emergency relief workers to do everything that they can. And instead, you know, we're complicating, you know, who they can serve and what they can serve them with. It's just awful.

Jennie: I think the big thing that you mentioned that I feel like we talked about a lot previously under previous iterations of the gag rule is that trust piece of, like, if the provider that you currently trust decides to make the difficult decision to accept the gag money because they feel like they can do more good by taking that money, but you're not able to access a service you were previously able to access or are being turned away, that breaks trust with that provider. So, even if the policy is gone, the people may not come back. And that makes it so hard to operate in these spaces.

Beirne: And there's another component of that too, that if an organization decides that they can't take the US funds, so they can no longer be the US implementer, they're gonna have to shut down that program, lay off all of those health staff or educator staff or whomever it is. The US government says, yeah, yeah, sure, we're gonna bring in a new implementer to do the same program. But what we've seen time and time again is those new implementers, it takes time. There's a breakage in care or breakage in programs. It's very inefficient and expensive. And then they're bringing in new people that don't necessarily have community care or community trust, who might not speak the most local language. Like, there's all of these components that you're just needlessly disrupting to score ideological points in the United States but mean absolutely nothing except for disruptions in care and harm in rural Mozambique.

Jennie: Oh, I'm so glad you turned to that because that is like the bottom line, right? So, yes, we can talk about organizations and funding, but like: what is this going to mean for the people who were recipients of aid?

Beirne: I think there's still a lot of open questions. I mean, the thing that Caitlin and I know the most and can sort of fall back on the easiest is to talk about the abortion gag because we're familiar with it, because we saw how the harm ripples out to organizations and entities who don't provide abortion care. Sometimes we wish they would provide abortion care. Like these are, you know, we have some fluency in this and can start to anticipate what it means for humanitarian settings or even sort of education funding. The two new rules are so far outside the bounds, I would say, of human decency and of international norms. And that's on purpose. But it means that it's very, very hard for us to even anticipate all the places that this harm is going to show up. One of our colleagues was talking this morning about the DEI one, and it's really difficult to read and understand how one would begin to implement that, how you would navigate that. On its face, it reads like, maybe you can't do targeted education programming for Roma children who have been segregated in education settings. It means maybe you can't do women, peace, and security work where, you know, bringing people who have been excluded to the table is the goal of the program. We're going to all work really hard to try to get clarity and to make things as clear as possible. But I think the administration wants to create that sort of uncertainty and encourage exclusion. And then it's up to the rest of us to try to figure out how best to mitigate it. I would also say all of these things are going to impact each other, right? It's a whole package of harm. And the gender ideology one, it's really extraordinary to see what they chose to put pen to paper on. And I think it may get shorthanded as a trans gag rule or something else over time, but it is a really extraordinary space where they define for the first time, I think, gender ideology and essentially include anything that acknowledges that there's anything other than two biological sexes at birth that are unchangeable and immutable. And the scope of what that ends up controlling is a huge amount. And they really do end up doing some really intense definitions, limiting within this new rule the ability, what they say is that we cannot promote or provide sex-rejecting procedures, which they define, or sex-rejecting social transition. And that's the first time we've seen them define these things. And it's not limited to young people; it's across the board. They define sex-rejecting procedures as a lot of medical sort of pieces, including hormones. They include sex-rejecting social transition and get incredibly specific. It includes changing names, it includes pronouns, it includes binders, it includes incredibly specific. And the restriction is on both provision and promotion, just like the abortion gag. They get very detailed about what you cannot do. And while I think it's relatively easy for an organization to read sort of maybe the top line and say, well, we don't do any gender-affirming surgeries. We don't do hormones at our clinic, so this is probably going to be okay. The speech and activity restrictions get so intense towards the end of their definitions. They reach into things like sex ed curricula, media, books, and say these things cannot include a gender ideology. And that includes things like it's possible to be born in the wrong body, or that you can choose your pronouns. So, this is this is the level and depth of which both the speech and activity restriction is supposed to go with these brand-new definitions on what social transition is and restricting it. So, I think it's relatively easy for entities to look surface level and say, 'well, we don't provide abortion, we don't provide gender-affirming surgeries. We'll be fine,' but these are not meant to be navigable. They're meant to be really complicated and onerous and to really encourage entities receiving US money to say, to pretend abortion doesn't exist and pretend trans, intersex, and non-binary people don't exist. And the DEI one can be used to justify exclusion and discrimination almost across the board.

Caitlin: Yeah, the other point that I'll add here, you know, even where there are very minimal exceptions, which are very minimal, on things like pregnancy that results from rape or incest or life endangerment, I think we know from experience, and listeners in the US will know from real experience of seeing abortion bans come all across this country, those things are unworkable, right? Like, we are seeing women die in parking lots waiting to get sick enough where they will get the care they need because their life is enough in danger. So, when they try to hide behind, like, 'well, you know, when people are yelling that people are gonna die for this policy, they're not. There's life exceptions.' They don't work. Those exceptions mean nothing. And when we talk about mitigating harm, Jennie, you asked about what does this mean for the aid recipient? I think, you know, we talk about mitigating harm in big like systems ways, like can we surge funding or can we, you know, get this entity to speak out, but like the individual harms that happen to people, you know, the person that misses getting the birth control method of their choice, or misses getting the HIV tests, or misses getting emergency contraception, like the harms of that, you there's no undoing that, right? A woman ends up with a pregnancy that her body or her life is not ready for, people get infected with HIV, like there's no un-ringing that bell. So, we're doing as much as we can, and it will never be enough for the harms that real people are living with. There's just been so much harm in the last year.

Jennie: But I think uh one of the things I've been thinking about is we've been talking about the expansions to the new areas, is time means nothing anymore. But remember a couple years ago, Jill Filipovic wrote that piece on Helms focusing on when we were trying to work on the expansions and, like, went into I think, like, a refugee camp and was talking to workers there who were having to turn people away from like the access to a safe abortion, and then they were going outside and getting unsafe abortions, and that was without these gag implications in place, right? So, all I was thinking about about those people that were in that story and the people who are in those places now and would need access to care and are gonna be so impacted by this policy decision in ways that they weren't before, and they were already impacted by US policies before.

Caitlin: Yeah, totally. And just to like show how extreme it is, even in the case where a person is sitting in a country where abortion is legal, is pregnant, goes to a healthcare center, says, 'I have made a decision, I cannot handle this pregnancy, I want to terminate,' and simply asks a provider where they can go to get a safe abortion. This new policy is suggesting that like that provider may not be able to say a thing to that person.

Beirne: And if they're obligated to say a thing under their national law, they have to get an individualized waiver from the State Department, which is so incredibly unworkable for healthcare providers and clinicians to have to navigate US Washington, DC bureaucratic structures in order to be able to be in compliance with their own laws.

Caitlin: And simply answer that person's question. Yeah.

Jennie: I'm sure they're a high priority. And now with no more USAID, I'm sure there's like a great place where that person can go to get that question answered to get that waiver in, to get to a person that could sign it.

Caitlin: Yeah, and no privacy concerns or concerns about safety or risk. Yeah.

Beirne: Yeah. Whatever this sarcasm font is for us.

Jennie: So, I guess that leads me to think about, like, what's next. Like, the policy was just announced. We just saw the final rule come out yesterday when we're recording this, like our final rules. Sorry, there's three of them. So, what is next?

Beirne: We can talk about procedurally what's next in the United States, which is, you know, there's 30-day from yesterday, period. And then the State Department and the State Department alone will start updating grants and cooperative agreements. That will happen only as there are new grants and cooperative agreements or new amendments of funding in agreements. So, it doesn't magically happen for everybody 29 days from now, or you know, whichever from the time this is released. It doesn't magically happen overnight. People have time. This is the time to be assessing your risk, your exposure to US funds, US foreign assistance funds through state, and really trying to figure out how to do your best within that. That's what sort of happens here. Now, this is only State Department money, and that is not the only foreign assistance funds. So, they will need to redo this for all three rules for contracts from the State Department, and then also for all three rules from every other agency that does foreign assistance. So, there's gonna be a lot of these coming up. It's gonna be hard for advocates to navigate. It's gonna create a very weird news cycle where people are like, I thought we already saw this. It's sort of gonna maximize confusion. I think what we know about the chilling effect is that I just told you nothing has changed and won't change for 29 days at the very earliest. And we know that people all over the world are already denying people care, changing their messages, scrubbing their websites because you know, they already feel like they're under pressure from the US government. I think the other thing that I just really want to highlight, because it is even more so than the abortion gag and what we've seen since 1984. This administration has explicitly framed each of the three rules around disrupting international law and order. So, each preamble mentions the Geneva Consensus Declaration, which is a non-binding, non-treaty that is really seeking to establish an international norm excluding abortion from healthcare and excluding LGBT people from families. And they root each of these three rules in that. And so, their expansion to international organizations, the expansion to US-based groups, it is like everything else this administration has done, trying to flood the zone and see how much they can get away with by doing as little work as possible. And putting out these rules, they really are hoping to change all of the information that people can get anywhere. And they really do want to create a new norm that sex education materials, comprehensive sexuality education curricula, leave out trans, non-binary, intersex people, and any mention of abortion. They're going after teaching materials, curricula, education, and clinical standards and guidelines in a very different way. The gender ideology rule includes not just appropriate, and again, this is outside the use of US funds. If you take the money, not only can you not advocate with other people's money for things like gender recognition laws or the ability of people to change their names laws. Not only can you not do that, you cannot even advocate defending existing non-discrimination laws. So, the US is very literally trying to gag half of civil society or more, and international organizations and standards on reproductive health, sexual orientation and gender identity, and anything they perceive as being sort of equity-based work. They're trying to not just tip the scales on service provision, but to truly silence half of the world or more and make it impossible for them to advocate, while propping up and funding those who can.

Caitlin: Yeah. And I think that point is so shocking because it's not just advocating for new and better laws, like even maintaining the status quo, like, whatever line you have been able to push your country up to, which in every place around the world I would argue is not sufficient, right? We need better laws everywhere, right? You can't even maintain a protection that maybe you born and lived your entire life for. It shows, I think, how extreme their agenda is, that they are really trying to drag the US and the rest of the world backwards, taking away rights, taking away respect and you know basic dignity for everyone. The agenda is backwards.

Jennie: Y'all, that was so much. It's just so overwhelming. And I'm already in this with you, right? Like, I can't imagine the audience right now just like trying to sort through all of the things. And again, the chaos, the uncertainty, the unclarity is definitely the point. So, let's talk a little bit about: what can the audience do? Like, what are some simple actions they can take right now? Like, maybe that would help with some clarity.

Caitlin: Yeah, I love that and recognize that we've been bleak, so important to I think recognize what we all can do. And I think one of the ways that we don't let them win is that we don't give up the power that we do have. And I think we each do have power in this moment. And some of the texts and messages that I got that I most appreciated, I'll say in the aftermath of the policy rollout, where like people who are like, I'm thinking about this table that I lead or this platform that I have or this thing that I control and how I can put it to work in this emergency moment with this horrible policy coming into place. And it's not that everyone does everything, it's that we think about: what skills do we have to bring to this moment? So, as an activist, as an advocate, as a lawyer, as a researcher, as a policymaker, as a donor, there are unique things that we can all do to help push back on this moment and combat the misinformation, mitigate the harm, and also really hold together with solidarity about what it looks like, you know, as we're thinking about harm mitigation, that we're not throwing people under the bus, that we're not saying, I'm gonna save my thing because it matters more than your thing, right? We are all in this together because ultimately, you know, there's no silver bullet to get us out of this immediate mess of the policy. It's gonna take everything, but it's also gonna take the collective vision of where we are all trying to get to together, where all rights are respected, where all healthcare, you know, is viewed as essential, where all people are, you know, treated with dignity. So and and the world is more resilient, where like this is a non-starter that a policy like this could land in place. So, you know, I think there are small things that you can do, even just with your platform, like share a good article to get the word out about what this policy is, you know, let your member of Congress know that you care about this and you're worried. Those things matter and reach out. Like if you know people working on this policy or affected by it, or you know that they care about something, right? They care about racial justice. All of a sudden, they may not have thought the gag rule was their thing. It's now should be their thing. So, I think connecting people and making sure they're working together is really powerful in this moment.

Beirne: I think if there's a call to advocacy, I mean, we need, we will have to create a better legislative fix to manage all of these ideological weaponizations happening at once. But I do think it's really important as many calls as you're having to make to Congress, and as urgent as every single thing is, I think really encouraging your members of Congress to speak out, but also to use their oversight power. The cost of this, the inefficiency of it, it's wildly out of step with Congress's, the majority of Congress's desires for foreign assistance, and they do still have tools for oversight that they should be using. This shouldn't be a black box of harms that are not investigated. And I think for folks around the world, the most important word is solidarity. One of the things that happens with gag rules is that people start getting excluded from meetings, they self-separate so that they're not in rooms that they think might violate their compliance with the US. It breaks up relationships and it breaks up partnerships. That's its point. So, everything we can do to not do that is helping mitigate the harm of the rule. I think in particular, naming that they intend for us to start excluding trans, non-binary, and intersex people from programs, from education spaces, from sort of across the board. They intend for us to be using these as a reason to exclude. And we really, really, all of us have an obligation to be not taking the bait and not saying, well, I can continue to do this really important work as long as I exclude trans, non-binary, and intersex people and information and all of the things that would make them feel safe. It's on every single one of us to not take the bait and not do that work for them.

Jennie: Thank you both so much. I love being in the trenches with you. I love getting to share your expertise on the podcast. And I definitely look forward to having you both come back when we have a better idea of what is happening to talk about how things are actually falling out. So thank you so much for being here.

Beirne: Thanks so much for having us, Jennie.

Caitlin: Yeah, thanks for making your platform a place where we can talk about these things.

Jennie: Okay, y'all. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Beirne and Caitlin. I really love talking to them. I learn so much from them every time. They are just such huge experts in this field, and I'm just always so grateful when they share their knowledge, and I'm grateful that they were able to share their knowledge with y'all. So, I hope you learned a lot. And with that, I will see everybody next week. If you have any questions, comments, or topics you would like us to cover, always feel free to shoot me an email. You can reach me at jennie@reprosfightback.com, or you can find us on social media. We're at rePROs Fight Back on Facebook and Twitter, or @reprosfb on Instagram. If you love our podcast and want to make sure more people find it, take the time to rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. Or if you want to make sure to support the podcast, you can also donate on our website at reprosfightback.com. Thanks all!