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reproductive rights
UN Chief Guterres Warns of ‘Imminent Financial Collapse’ as Trump Pulls Funding
As the world's largest economy, the US provided nearly a quarter of the UN's funding. That is, until earlier this month, when Trump stripped hundreds of millions of dollars from dozens of treaties.
Jan 30, 2026
Weeks after President Donald Trump withdrew the US from dozens of United Nations organizations, the UN's chief warns that the UN is at risk of an "imminent financial collapse."
"The crisis is deepening, threatening program delivery and risking financial collapse. And the situation will deteriorate further in the near future," UN Secretary-General António Guterres wrote in a letter to ambassadors dated January 28, according to a Friday report from Reuters.
While he did not reference the United States explicitly, Guterres called out the fact that "decisions not to honor assessed contributions that finance a significant share of the approved regular budget have now been formally announced," which almost certainly referenced Trump's pullout from at least 66 international treaties earlier this month, including 31 within the UN system.
With the stroke of a pen, Trump reneged on the US commitment to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which it has been part of for more than 30 years. He also took the US out of the UN International Law Commission, the UN Democracy Fund, UN Oceans, UN Women, and dozens of other global bodies, deeming them "contrary to the interests of the United States."
As the world's largest economy, the US was the largest source of funding for the UN, providing 22% of its regular and peacekeeping budgets as of 2025—about $820 million per year.
The largest single financial cut as a result of the US pullout was the termination of dozens of grants worth approximately $377 million for the UN Population Fund, which focuses on family planning and preventing maternal mortality and sexual violence in developing nations. The organization is estimated to have prevented 39,000 maternal deaths and 18 million unwanted pregnancies in 2024, according to an annual report.
Warning that cash could run out by July, Guterres said, “Either all member states honor their obligations to pay in full and on time–or member states must fundamentally overhaul our financial rules to prevent an imminent financial collapse."
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The VA is Ripping Away Abortion Care for Veterans... Again
This isn’t just a rollback. It’s a deliberate erasure of rights that we fought for in the wake of deeply personal and collective loss.
Jan 25, 2026
In 2022, my wife and I lost our first child. We named them June. They were deeply wanted and fiercely loved. In one fateful appointment, our entire worlds changed. We learned that June had a severe fetal bladder abnormality and was unable to produce amniotic fluid. Without it, their lungs would never develop. They would not survive.
We made the impossible decision to end the pregnancy—an act of compassion, love, and medical necessity.
At the time, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) had a total ban on abortion care and counseling.
No exceptions for rape. No exceptions for incest. Not even to save a veteran’s life.
Veterans and our families deserve futures built on compassion, justice, and love—not fear.
After our loss, the only way I felt I could keep breathing was to turn that grief into meaning. I shared our story with lawmakers to help reverse this dangerous policy so that veterans and their families could turn to the VA—no matter the circumstance or where they lived. That fall, the VA finally took steps to reverse the ban, signaling a long-overdue shift toward care, autonomy, and dignity.
But that progress was short-lived.
The VA just finalized a new abortion ban policy that, once again, excludes exceptions for rape or incest and offers only vague assurances that it will intervene if our lives are at risk. They initially implemented this enormous change in secret without telling veterans or their families.
In effect, it returns the VA to what was once the most extreme abortion ban in the country—an outright prohibition on care and counseling that applies to every VA facility nationwide, regardless of state law.
This isn’t just a rollback. It’s a deliberate erasure of rights that we fought for in the wake of deeply personal and collective loss.
And it is not happening in isolation. The same administration driving this ban is also working diligently to eliminate gender-affirming care, defund programs for minority and underrepresented veterans, and strip inclusive language and data collection from federal policy. The message is unmistakable: Some veterans count. Others don’t.
Veterans are not a monolith. We are a diverse community—LGBTQIA+, people of color, disabled, parents, caregivers, survivors, and yes, women too. Our community exists at every intersection of identity and experience, and our families serve alongside us. Our care cannot be conditional. Our humanity is not negotiable.
Policy is never just about one issue. It is intersectional—because our lives are intersectional.
Reproductive care cannot be separated from gender-affirming care, from disability access and mental health, from racial justice, or maternal health. Our needs don’t exist in silos, and neither do we. When one right is taken away, the loss reverberates across all the others.
I’ve seen what’s possible when we refuse to stay silent—how lived experience can reshape policy and expand care that has never existed before. And I know exactly what is at stake when care is denied. Pregnancy can change on a dime.
June’s life, though brief, transformed mine. Through their memory, I found purpose. I found a voice. And in their honor, I will continue working to ensure that no veteran or family ever has to face what we faced alone.
We should be building systems rooted in care, equity, and truth. We should be honoring the fullness of who veterans are, how we serve, and how we build our families. Instead, our fundamental rights are being stripped away—one policy memo at a time—and once again, we are being asked to fight for the right to make personal decisions about our health, our futures, and our families.
I will not allow June’s legacy to become another casualty of politics. Their life will be a call to care.
This moment demands more than endurance. It demands action.
The policies we pass—within the VA and beyond—shape the futures of veterans and the people who love us. Had my wife not been able to access critical care in her time of need—had we not been given the chance to make the most compassionate choice amid impossible circumstances—we might never have known the joy of raising our child today, a joy born from grief and shaped by love.
Veterans and our families deserve futures built on compassion, justice, and love—not fear.
Because in the end, we are all only human.
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'Stunning Abdication of Basic Human Decency': Trump Ripped for Expanding Global Gag Rule
"President Trump and his anti-abortion administration would rather let people starve to death in the wake of famine and war than let anyone in the world get an abortion—or even receive information about it."
Jan 23, 2026
As US Vice President JD Vance on Friday addressed anti-abortion activists at the March for Life, public health and reproductive rights advocates decried the Trump administration's expansion of the Mexico City Policy, which critics call the global gag rule.
Since the Reagan administration, Democrats have repealed and Republicans have reimposed the policy, which bans nongovernmental organizations that perform or promote abortion from receiving federal funding. While President Donald Trump reinstated it as expected after returning to office last year, multiple media outlets revealed the expansion plans on Thursday.
A spokesperson confirmed to NBC News on Friday that the US Department of State will release three final rules expanding the foreign assistance prohibition to include "gender ideology," and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), or what the administration is calling "discriminatory equity ideology," in line with various other Trump policies.
"President Trump and his anti-abortion administration would rather let people starve to death in the wake of famine and war than let anyone in the world get an abortion—or even receive information about it," Rachana Desai Martin, chief US program officer at the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a Friday statement.
"People are already dying because of this administration's slashing of foreign assistance," she noted. "Now, they're making it harder for doctors and aid workers to provide food, water, and lifesaving medical care. This isn't about saving lives—it's a stunning abdication of basic human decency."
Guttmacher Institute director of federal policy Amy Friedrich-Karnik similarly called out not only the new "supercharged global gag rule" but also the second Trump administration's "unprecedented actions like the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and rescission of US foreign assistance for family planning services around the world."
"Guttmacher research estimates that almost 50 million women and girls have already been denied contraceptive care in low- and middle-income countries due to these draconian actions," she explained. "This new radical policy threatens to aggravate the cumulative harms of earlier administration actions, undermining decades of bipartisan investment in global health and gender equality, and stripping resources from the world's most vulnerable populations, including LGBTQ+ communities around the world."
Amnesty International's senior director for research, advocacy, policy, and campaigns, Erika Guevara-Rosas, blasted the expansion as "an assault on human rights" that will be "disastrous and deadly."
"It strangles healthcare systems, censors information, and violates the rights to health, information, and free expression," she stressed. "It forces frontline providers and many struggling organizations that depend on US funding into an impossible choice: limit essential healthcare for the most vulnerable populations or shut their doors."
"Doubling down on this policy is cruel, reckless, and ideologically driven," she continued. "Expanding it to international and US-based organizations will impact the poorest and marginalized first and hardest, denying people the chance to live full, healthy, autonomous lives where they are able to access rights and services. It is further proof of this US administration's blatant disregard for international law, universal rights, and the rules-based international order."
Dr. Anu Kumar, president and CEO of Ipas, which works to increase access to abortion and contraception around the world, declared that "this radically expanded global gag rule is nothing short of a regressive, harmful policy that puts the United States even further out of step with our global counterparts."
"Bullying individual countries' governments into complying with anti-rights and extremist ideology held by the current US administration is despicable and unacceptable," Kumar asserted. "It will wreak havoc on global efforts to improve health, uphold human rights, and achieve gender equality."
The broadening of the global gag rule comes as survivors and US lawmakers continue to fight for the release of files from the federal trafficking investigation into deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a former friend of Trump. Mina Barling, the International Planned Parenthood Federation's global director of external relations, said that "in an age of Epstein scandals and hocus-pocus designed to undermine science and medicine, the Trump administration has read the room."
"He knows his obsession with women's bodies is viewed cynically, so he has utilized the man-made panic funded by the fossil fuel industry to shift the focus of his policy against trans people," Barling said of the president. "The global gag rule is hate-bait designed to keep his donors happy and export more division to countries reliant on US aid, in the absence of economic justice."
"We stand in solidarity with women and trans people in all their diversity," she added. "We demand debt relief, and we support national sovereignty. We want to see a new global health architecture that is less susceptible to the whims of American politicians."
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