Gender inequality can lead to women and girl’s having lower income and educational attainment and decreased autonomy and political power. Bridget Kelly, Director of Research for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights at the Population Institute, sits down to talk with us about the report Connecting the Dots: Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights as Prerequisites for Global Gender Equality and Empowerment and how the empowerment and advancement of the rights of women and girls is explicitly tied to sexual and reproductive health and rights.

According to Fòs Feminista, sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) refers to comprehensive family planning and contraceptive services (including emergency contraception, maternal health, prevention and treatment of infertility, safe abortion and post-abortion care, prevention, care, and treatment, of STIs, HIV, and AIDS (and reproductive health cancers and infections) and the prevention and treatment of gender-based violence (including the elimination of harmful practices like female genital mutilation and cutting and child, early, and forced marriage). All of these elements must be met in order for comprehensive sexual and reproductive healthcare to be fully realized and for gender equality to be advanced worldwide.

The empowerment and advancement of rights of women and girls is an agreed upon global sustainable development goal, and, as the largest funder and implementer of worldwide global health assistance the U.S. plays an incredibly important role in advancing these outcomes. Still, U.S. policymakers often fail to recognize that this goal is impacted by the accessibility of comprehensive SRHR. U.S. support for various components of the SRHR agenda flows through multiple budget and appropriation channels, making it difficult to pinpoint the exact current expenditure for SRHR. But, examining funding levels for the current family planning and reproductive health (FP/RH) funding program shows that there should be a commitment of $1.74 billion to international family planning and reproductive health programming, including $116 million to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

FP/RH programming, for the last 13 years, has been flat funded at $608 million. The Biden administration’s budget request, released in mid-March of 2023, shows an increase to roughly $657.5 million. While the current administration recognizes the need for FP/RH funding, it isn’t enough to meet the need. Unfortunately, there was not a request to pull back the Helms amendment, which dictates that U.S. government foreign assistance funds cannot be used for “the performance of abortion as a method of family planning.”  

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Connecting the Dot

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