In October 2020, government representatives from more than 30 countries, including the US, Brazil, Poland and Egypt, signed the so-called ‘Geneva Consensus Declaration on Promoting Women's Health and Strengthening the Family’. The non-legally binding document states that “there is no international right to abortion” and promotes the family as “the natural and fundamental group unit of society”. It has been harshly criticised as the latest example of international pushback against women’s rights.
The rise of a newly powerful political Right in the US, Brazil and Poland, which favours traditional, conservative Christian moral values, including the defence of a heterocentric family model and the questioning of reproductive and sexual rights, has opened up the possibility of new links between conservative, right-wing and political Islamist forces in Muslim countries. The similarity in the way that certain Christian and Islamic forces employ religion – to construct an ideal that claims to defend human life and the family – is the basis for an alliance that sets itself apart from hegemonic concepts of human rights as formulated and defended in the multilateral forums of the UN and the WHO.
This new alignment in foreign policy exposes the increased international influence of political-religious factions, revealing unexpected alliances between Catholic, evangelical and Islamic moralisms in the area of reproductive justice. These have one main goal: to diminish women’s autonomy and agency to decide what they want for their own bodies.
