The Trump administration launched an advisory commission this week tasked with examining human rights in foreign policy — but advocates worry it could undermine global reproductive rights.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday announced the creation of the U.S. State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights. He said the commission will conduct “an informed review of the role of human rights in American foreign policy” and provide him “with advice on human rights.” A notice published in the Federal Register in May said the commission will provide “fresh thinking about human rights discourse where such discourse has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights.”
Though the State Department has an office devoted to human rights, the commission was “conceived with almost no input from” it, Politico reported. Officials told the outlet that the commission is “advisory and will not create policy, and maintain that everyone has ‘unalienable rights,’ including LGBTQ people and other minorities.”
Mary Ann Glendon, a professor of law at Harvard University who teaches on human rights, will chair the commission. Glendon’s anti-choice activism earned her the “Proudly Pro-Life Award” from National Right to Life in 2009. That year, Glendon turned down a medal from the University of Notre Dame, citing its decision to give President Barack Obama an honorary degree.
In 2012, Glendon penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, falsely claiming the Affordable Care Act’s birth control benefit was an “abortifacient” mandate. The “main goal” of the policy, she wrote, was “to conscript religious organizations into a political agenda, forcing them to facilitate and fund services that violate their beliefs, within their own institutions.” In another piece for the Journal in 2004, Glendon wrote of her opposition to marriage equality, claiming that it could “usher in an era of intolerance and discrimination [against religious freedom] the likes of which we have rarely seen before.”
Françoise Girard, president of the International Women’s Health Coalition (IWHC), called Glendon’s appointment to lead the commission “troubling.” Girard told Rewire.News that Glendon has “been associated with the Vatican for a very long time” and represented it at the 1995 United Nations World Conference on Women in Beijing, China. There, Girard said, Glendon “objected strenuously on behalf of the church to words like ‘reproductive rights’ [… and to] any mention of abortion.”
Girard said there is ample “reason to be worried about the commission and its makeup” given the conservative, anti-abortion voices on the panel. She said the IWHC is concerned because the new panel’s mission is “to reexamine the very notion of human rights.”
“We’re very worried that this will actually seriously undermine the notion that women’s rights are human rights,” Girard said.
The State Department’s use of language like “natural law and natural rights” points to a “religious interpretation” of rights, Girard said. The term “is a code religious conservatives often use to impose their religious beliefs about women and LGBTQ people in some sort of non-religious disguise,” according to ThinkProgress.
Jeremy Kadden, senior international policy advocate for the Human Rights Campaign, pointed to the phrasing in a statement to CNN. “This is an attempt to pull back a U.S. human rights vision that we’ve had for decades and create this new vision that uses these new terms like ‘unalienable rights’ or ‘natural rights’ or ‘natural law,’” Kadden said. “These are all things that have been used by extremist people on the far right, to create a gap between what they consider unalienable rights and alienable rights.”
Other global human rights advocates similarly sounded the alarm about the commission’s formation. “This administration has actively worked to deny and take away long-standing human rights protections since Trump’s inauguration,” Joanne Lin, national director of advocacy and government affairs at Amnesty International USA, said in a statement. “If this administration truly wanted to support people’s rights, it would use the global framework that’s already in place. Instead, it wants to undermine rights for individuals, as well as the responsibilities of governments.”
Dr. Leana Wen, president of Planned Parenthood, questioned the intentions of the State Department’s commission. “The Trump-Pence administration’s new sham commission should be seen for what it really is: an attempt to narrowly redefine human rights in order to violate them,” Wen said in a statement. “At a time when this administration is attacking reproductive rights, rolling back LGBTQ rights, and detaining children and families under horrific conditions, this commission is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to unconscionably exclude specific groups from legal protections..”
The State Department did not respond to a request for comment from Rewire.News.
Help us Prepare for Trump’s Day One
Trump is busy getting ready for Day One of his presidency – but so is Truthout.
Trump has made it no secret that he is planning a demolition-style attack on both specific communities and democracy as a whole, beginning on his first day in office. With over 25 executive orders and directives queued up for January 20, he’s promised to “launch the largest deportation program in American history,” roll back anti-discrimination protections for transgender students, and implement a “drill, drill, drill” approach to ramp up oil and gas extraction.
Organizations like Truthout are also being threatened by legislation like HR 9495, the “nonprofit killer bill” that would allow the Treasury Secretary to declare any nonprofit a “terrorist-supporting organization” and strip its tax-exempt status without due process. Progressive media like Truthout that has courageously focused on reporting on Israel’s genocide in Gaza are in the bill’s crosshairs.
As journalists, we have a responsibility to look at hard realities and communicate them to you. We hope that you, like us, can use this information to prepare for what’s to come.
And if you feel uncertain about what to do in the face of a second Trump administration, we invite you to be an indispensable part of Truthout’s preparations.
In addition to covering the widespread onslaught of draconian policy, we’re shoring up our resources for what might come next for progressive media: bad-faith lawsuits from far-right ghouls, legislation that seeks to strip us of our ability to receive tax-deductible donations, and further throttling of our reach on social media platforms owned by Trump’s sycophants.
We’re preparing right now for Trump’s Day One: building a brave coalition of movement media; reaching out to the activists, academics, and thinkers we trust to shine a light on the inner workings of authoritarianism; and planning to use journalism as a tool to equip movements to protect the people, lands, and principles most vulnerable to Trump’s destruction.
We urgently need your help to prepare. As you know, our December fundraiser is our most important of the year and will determine the scale of work we’ll be able to do in 2025. We’ve set two goals: to raise $125,000 in one-time donations and to add 1400 new monthly donors by midnight on December 31.
Today, we’re asking all of our readers to start a monthly donation or make a one-time donation – as a commitment to stand with us on day one of Trump’s presidency, and every day after that, as we produce journalism that combats authoritarianism, censorship, injustice, and misinformation. You’re an essential part of our future – please join the movement by making a tax-deductible donation today.
If you have the means to make a substantial gift, please dig deep during this critical time!
With gratitude and resolve,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy