State Department Erases Reproductive Rights Section From Annual Report

NEW YORK― President Donald Trump’s State Department has been ordered to strip language about women’s reproductive rights from its annual global human rights report, Politico reported on Thursday.

The report, compiled each year with information from U.S. embassies around the world, typically details the lack of contraception and abortion access in various countries and sheds light on racial and sexual discrimination.

This year, a senior aide to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has reportedly directed the department to remove much of that information from the document. The new report will focus instead on forced sterilization and abortions, and the “Reproductive Rights” subsection in the report will be renamed “Coercion in Population Control.”

The section on racial and sexual discrimination will be pared down, according to the Politico story.

The move follows a string of attempts by the Trump administration to de-prioritize women’s rights and roll back women’s access to contraception and abortion around the world.

“This development is a transparent attempt by the Trump administration to not only deprioritize reproductive rights, but effectively erase them from the broader conversation on human rights,” said Tarah Demant, director of gender, sexuality, and identity at Amnesty International USA. 

State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the department is “better focusing some sections of the report for clarity,” and sharpening it to spotlight “the most egregious issues.”

Source: huffingtonpost