Troubling Motherhood by Lucy B. Hall

Author:Lucy B. Hall
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Sexual Rights and Reproductive Health

As noted previously, in June 2017, GAC committed $650 million to initiatives related to sexual rights and reproductive health. Given US President Trump’s resurrection of the “global gag rule” on his first full day in the White House (Ford 2017; Singh and Karim 2017), Canada’s explicit commitment to supporting organizations providing abortions was a welcomed and much desired gap-filler in a funding and moral vacuum. According to Planned Parenthood International, the “global gag rule” or Mexico City Policy “[blocks] aid to foreign organizations who use their own non-U.S. funds to provide information, referrals, or services for legal abortion or to advocate for access to abortion services in their own country” (2017, 1). In terms of impact, the organization cites the dismantling of health services, including the closing of clinics with HIV testing and counseling services, and the limiting of access to sexual health information and contraceptives, which has resulted in more untended pregnancies and unsafe abortions (Planned Parenthood International 2017, 1). In my interview with GAC officials, they suggested “civil society organizations are now turning to Canada” in the wake of uncertainty in US international assistance for SRHR. Of course, Canada’s $650 million commitment to SRHR over three years does not match the $600 million per year the US spent on family planning before Trump’s presidency (Ford 2017).

In my 2017 interviews with GAC about sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression, sex characteristics (SOGIESC) analyses in FIAP, officials maintained that this SRHR funding was a “big commitment” and presents an “opportunity and an opening” where GAC “needs to come up with the new initiatives and try to build LGBT rights into new programming.” They suggested that the “sexual rights” of SRHR presented an obvious “entry point to raise more awareness of how existing policy and programming efforts can be more inclusive of LGBT2QI rights.” Given the context of a recent and almost exclusive focus on maternal rights in global policy and programming (as described later), GAC officials referred to this SRHR commitment as “a shift to integrating more comprehensive SRHR where there has necessarily been a lag” and called it “a new direction,” suggesting “there is learning to happen.” Learning needs to happen because SOGI analyses are relatively new to the development industry.

In the international arena, SOGI questions are beginning to occupy a prominent place once held by what is known to feminist scholars as “the Woman Question” (Puar 2011, 139). According to Rahul Rao (2014), the “Homosexual Question” is a new marker of modernity, where campaigns, images, and news stories of LGBT rights, rather than women’s rights, circulate to mark “a temporal phase of wider acceptable of LGBT rights and conjuring up visions of progress” (2011, 2). The “Homosexual Question” (Rao 2014) within the mainstream development industry is often answered with mappings of the criminalization of same-sex acts and same-sex marriage equality, which have become primary markers of inclusion and progress, although other social, political, and economic indicators are emerging in the industry (see Cortez 2017).

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