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Françoise Girard
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This week in Say More, PS talks with Françoise Girard, former president of the International Women’s Health Coalition.
Project Syndicate: In 2018, you stressed the importance of normalizing abortion, which occurs “in every country and within every socioeconomic class,” and of overcoming widespread misconceptions, including that criminalization reduces the number of procedures. What can health-care providers and human-rights activists do to improve the public’s understanding of abortion globally? To what extent will US President Joe Biden’s repeal of the “global gag rule” bolster such efforts?
Françoise Girard: Abortion providers and women’s rights activists can use a range of approaches to influence public opinion. For starters, it is essential to share the facts. One in four women in the United States will have an abortion by age 45, for example, and unwanted pregnancy rates are higher in countries that restrict access to abortion.
But, in terms of impact, statistics have their limits. This is where storytelling comes in. During the campaign to decriminalize abortion in Ireland, many came forward to describe their harrowing experiences being forced to travel to England to terminate a pregnancy. The abortion ban was no longer an abstract idea to debate; it was a policy with very real consequences for people’s family, neighbors, and friends. This helped to turn the tide of public opinion, leading to overwhelming support for decriminalization.
Imagery, too, can play a potent role. The green scarf worn by abortion-rights activists in Argentina is now a global symbol.
Biden’s repeal of the global gag rule – which means that organizations in the Global South that receive US aid can again offer the comprehensive reproductive health services that local law permits – is an important first step toward ending the abortion stigma. But the move will not have a lasting impact unless the US Congress permanently ends this harmful policy by passing the Global HER Act. Otherwise, the next Republican president is bound to reinstate it, as past Republican presidents – including Donald Trump – have done.
PS: In the wake of the violent insurrection at the US Capitol, America seems to be facing a reckoning with right-wing extremism. You have highlighted the links between anti-abortion forces and such extremists. How widespread is support for violence among anti-abortion activists, and what can the US do to address it?
FG: The actions of anti-abortion groups speak for themselves. In the US, they began resorting to violence against abortion-clinic staff and clients soon after Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that established a woman’s right to an abortion. The first recorded clinic arson of the post-Roe era occurred three year later, in 1976. By 2015, anti-abortion extremists 7,200 had committed acts of violence, including death threats and assaults, and 234,000 other acts of disruption, including hate mail and harassing telephone calls. The National Abortion Federation reports that there were 11 murders, 26 attempted murders, 42 bombings, 189 arsons, and thousands of incidents of criminal activities directed at abortion providers from 1977 to 2019.
During the Trump era, clinic invasions, trespassing, and obstruction reached an all-time high, and online hate speech against abortion providers skyrocketed. These aggressive tactics are exported around the world, from Kenya to the United Kingdom. The first step toward addressing this violence is to prosecute its perpetrators, as we are beginning to do with other violent right-wing extremists.
PS: “This is a difficult time for women,” you observed at the beginning of 2020. Then the COVID-19 crisis erupted, and things became a lot more difficult. In fact, the pandemic has been called a disaster for feminism, with some experts warning that its economic fallout will set women back decades. How might this affect the fight for women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights? What other major risks do you see, and how can they be overcome?
FG: The pandemic has exacerbated the crises and discrimination women – especially poor, oppressed, and marginalized women – were already enduring. Women disproportionately carry the burden of child and elder care, which has been compounded during the pandemic, and bear the brunt of domestic violence, which has been on the rise.
Furthermore, though women comprise over 70% of the world’s health and care workforce, they rarely hold leadership positions. In fact, the gender pay gap in the health sector (28%) is higher than the overall gender pay gap (16%).
More broadly, women are more likely than men to hold low-paying, precarious jobs, in which they have little power to limit their exposure to the virus. This, together with increased care burdens at home, has contributed to higher rates of job losses and poverty among women than men during the pandemic.
As the gender poverty gap – already biased against women – grows, women become even more economicallydependent on men. This reduces their power to control their bodies, sexuality, and fertility.
Compounding the problem, access to reproductive health care has faltered in many settings. And some governments have taken advantage of pandemic surveillance and mobility restrictions to curtail the activities of human-rights defenders, including those focused on women’s rights.
And yet, I wouldn’t call the pandemic a disaster for feminism. This crisis has fueled demands not that we return to the pre-pandemic “normal,” but that we re-imagine global systems, in order to create a more just and sustainable world. To that end, feminist groups have proposed concrete, integrated solutions. In this sense, the crisis proved that feminists have the strategic vision and the policy approaches that the world needs, during the COVID-19 crisis and beyond.
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PS: Along with women, the COVID-19 crisis hit ethnic minorities and the poor particularly hard. This could present a golden opportunity for feminists to build stronger alliances with other progressive movements, as you advocated in 2020. Has progress been made on this front over the last year? Are there promising models or initiatives that could help to boost momentum?
FG: Women from less privileged groups – especially working-class women, immigrants, and women of color – dominate frontline health and care jobs. The COVID-19 crisis has been devastating for them. The World Health Organization estimates that at least 30,000 – and possibly as many as 60,000 – health-care workers have died of COVID-19, owing to health systems’ failure to ensure safe working conditions and to the exclusion of health-care workers from decision-making.
But there is reason for hope that conditions will improve. Over the last year, groups focused on meeting the needs and demands of workers in health care, domestic work, and other sectors dominated by marginalized women have strengthened their bonds in order to address these often-deadly lapses. For example, Women in Global Health has activated chapters of health professionals all over the world to demand action. That’s very exciting!
BY THE WAY . . .
PS: On Twitter, you amplified transgender activist Ari Drennen’s criticism of major media outlets’ reporting on the passage of the Equality Act in the US – coverage that quoted no trans people, but did quote anti-trans voices. Drennen’s criticism highlights the media’s role in reinforcing misconceptions not only about transgender rights, but also about abortion and other topics. How can journalists and editors avoid such pitfalls? Are there specific guidelines they should follow in reporting on these issues?
FG: The disability rights movement’s motto – “nothing about us without us” – has been adopted by many other social movements. Journalists and editors should embrace it, too. When writing about transgender rights, they must interview transgender activists. When writing about sex work, they must interview leaders in sex-worker movements. The same goes for any marginalized or disadvantaged group.
It’s also critical for journalists to avoid false equivalencies and “both sides-ism.” If one group is defending human dignity, rights, and justice, and the other is promoting discrimination, hatred, or outright lies, they do not deserve equal billing. Presenting them side by side, in the name of “fairness,” is not only misguided; it can serve to legitimize bigotry. Cases when this does happen should be examined and called out.
PS: In 2019, you lamented that, “while today’s philanthropists are increasingly quite vocal about achieving gender equality, many foundations have actually decreased their general operating support for…women’s rights organizations, preferring time-bound, project-specific funding aimed at ‘women’s empowerment.’” What’s wrong with such projects, and how should philanthropists be investing their resources instead?
FG: Project funding is detrimental to women’s movements – and to any social movement, for that matter. It typically disregards local groups’ textured knowledge and long-term vision, in favor of the donor’s approaches, which are often short-term and focused on technical fixes.
Moreover, donors’ reporting requirements take up precious time that should be used for program work. And, rather than support joint strategies and common action, project funding promotes competition among groups, thereby fracturing movements. The detrimental impact of project funding on women’s movements has been recorded in many settings, from Nicaragua to Ghana to Egypt. I urge donors instead to trust women, and provide women’s movements with flexible, long-term funding. For philanthropists who want to support movements through trust-based grantmaking, women’s funds are an excellent point of entry.
PS: Alliances between women’s-rights organizations and other marginalized groups have often been undermined by inadequate intersectionality within the feminist movement. What should feminists – especially white feminists – do to address this longstanding blind spot?
FG: Intersectional feminism is the only way forward, and white feminists need to sit back, listen, and learn. Audre Lorde said it best: “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not lead single-issue lives.”
Some of the most exciting breakthroughs in feminist thinking and activism have come out of true partnerships grounded in intersectional dialogue. For example, it was the African women’s movement that demanded adolescent girls be put on the women’s rights agenda, ahead of the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women. Similarly, the current push to reinstate federal funding for abortions in the US by repealing the Hyde amendment – rather than merely to demand “choice” – arose from open, sometimes difficult conversations driven by African-American reproductive- justice advocates.
PS: It’s an issue you’ve likely thought about a lot in recent months. Last October, you resigned as president of the International Women’s Health Coalition, after an independent investigation cleared you of charges of racial discrimination and retaliation against employees, but found that “deeply held and persistent perceptions” had “caused significant harm to IHWC’s workplace culture, particularly as it relates to the experiences of women of color.” How can organizations – perhaps especially progressive organizations – address or avert such perceptions?
FG: Yes, I’ve thought about it a lot, and am being asked this question by colleagues in peer organizations. Progressive organizations everywhere are being called out to change. Traditional tools – such as performance reviews, whistleblower mechanisms, and even the now-ubiquitous Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion trainings – are not well suited to surfacing and addressing perceptions, concerns, and feelings, especially those of more junior, less powerful staff, including staff of color.
It is essential that staff have mechanisms they control and trust. That is why I recommend that staff unionize. This way, difficult conversations can happen in a timely manner, and in a more egalitarian and transparent way. Not doing this has thrown many organizations and leaders into turmoil and crisis, which is not conducive to true accountability, healing, or sustainable change, and can ultimately jeopardize the work.
Girard recommends
We ask all our Say More contributors to tell our readers about a few books that have impressed them recently. Here are Girard's picks:
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Decolonization and Afro-Feminism
by Sylvia Tamale
Tamale, a Ugandan lawyer and scholar, explores concepts of Afro-feminism as keys to challenge coloniality – that is, the Western knowledge systems rooted in racism and sexism that continue to dominate African education and media. She taps philosophies such as Ubuntu (“the interconnectedness of all things and people”) and cites women’s significant social and political roles in pre-colonial times, as well as the more fluid gender roles in many pre-colonial African communities, to propose a pan-African, non-patriarchal, non-heteronormative ethos rooted in economic and social justice.
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Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy
by Talia Lavin
In this book, Lavin documents her undercover journey through online white-supremacist communities, from the now-infamous Proud Boys to Christian extremists, neo-Nazis, and incels. She shows that the desire to perpetrate extreme violence on African-Americans and other people of color is a key motivator of these movements, and that their fixation with “blood purity” is at the root of their concomitant anti-Semitism and anti-feminism. Lavin witnesses in real time as these actors’ enthusiasm for “cataclysmic, blood-soaked civil war” in America grows, presaging the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol – and more such events in the future.
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The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
by Michelle Alexander
As relevant today as it was when it was published ten years ago, this book shows how the war on drugs was created from whole cloth to reverse the progress of African-Americans that the civil-rights movement had made possible. Alexander shows how the war on drugs enabled and encouraged mass incarceration, mandatory sentencing, the militarization of police, overpolicing of communities of color, and the disenfranchisement of felons. And she demonstrates the catastrophic impact this has had on African-American families and communities. She thus makes clear that addressing racist policing requires ending the war on drugs.
From the PS Archive
In “Women and Girls Hold the Key to Universal Health Coverage,” Girard warns that ignoring sexual and reproductive needs and rights is putting a global development goal out of reach. Read more.
In “Zika and Reproductive Rights,” Girard highlights how restrictive abortion laws can aggravate the impact of a viral outbreak. Read more.
Around the web
Girard shows how the philanthropic community’s preoccupation with short-term, measurable outcomes distracts from what really works. Read the commentary.
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Access every new PS commentary, our entire On Point suite of subscriber-exclusive content – including Longer Reads, Insider Interviews, Big Picture/Big Question, and Say More – and the full PS archive.
