Hello, and welcome to
the Far Right Analysis Network's official
podcast, Right Rising. I'm your host,
Alexander Reed-Ross, and today we're
joined by Linda Gilby. Linda Gilby is a doctoral
candidate in global health and
development at Tampere University, where she
will then continue in the project as a
postdoctoral researcher. Her research has
focused on the global opposition to sexual
and reproductive health and rights, and their
mobilization and tactics in international
fora, such as the United Nations and European
Union institutions, with a special focus
on the far right. Hello, Linda.
Welcome to the show. Hi, thank you
for having me. No, it's definitely
an honor to have you, and I really
appreciate your work and the clinical
approach that you take. So, first of all, can
you talk a little bit about your project,
Transnational Flows, the impact of
transatlantic conservative networks on Finnish
and European Union environmental health and
social policies? It's a long one. Thank you.
So, yes, as you said, our project is based
at Tampere University in Finland at the Faculty
of Health Sciences, and it's led by Dr.
Valentin Pervet, and it includes two
postdoctoral researchers, Dr. Marie Cousers, Dr.
Corrado Parodi, and myself, and it's
supported by our Professor of Global Health,
Mary Koi Priscilla. So, our aim with this
project was to create an interdisciplinary
research project which would include scholars
from global health philosophy and
political sciences to examine the role
entanglements and strategies of transatlantic
conservative actors and their politics in
relation to contemporary and historical
challenges to health environmental and social
policy and when I say conservative factor.
I mean an individual organization or network
or state that seeks to resist transformative
agendas such as gender equality and
environmental regulation and prioritize
national sovereignty concerns over multilateralism
in particular. And the reason we
decided to focus on these issues and of course
while individual national contexts may differ
is because research has shown that there
have been commonalities in opposition, such
as to gender equality, sexual and reproductive
rights, public health evidence, regulations
and mandates, as well as collective global
action on climate change. And in the context
of health in particular, opposition to the
United Nations agencies, such as the World
Health Organization, have become part of a
wider focus of right -wing populist movements
and conservative think tanks, which of
course has been seen most specifically since
the COVID-19 pandemic. And so while a lot of
scholarly attention has been paid towards
movements and actors which are against
gender equality and reproductive rights, it
became clear to us that this is beyond
opposition to gender and rights, all of which has
significant consequences for public health
and global health governance. And so our
research will therefore complement the work
on right-wing populist politics and democracy
by providing insights on how policy content
debates impact public health, given
that health and social policies have become
a particular focus of right-wing populist
politics, and that these are topics that are
capable of producing depolarisation in our
societies as populist groups and politicians
have used them as leverage for mobilizing
their supporters and voters. And of course,
while populist politics have been researched
widely, we've had less focus on the
interlinkages between more specific content
areas. And furthermore, how those actors target
international decision -making forums, given
that right-wing populists have argued
that multinational forums such as the UN and
EU decision-making bodies are a threat to
national sovereignty. And also, we've seen a
merging of libertarian stances as evidenced
in Project 2025 by the Heritage Foundation,
which, of course, I'm sure many listeners
know, it is being one of the most influential
US libertarian think tanks with
transatlantic connections. And the document itself
outlines plans to remove references to
sexual and reproductive rights and climate
change and reshape gender equality as referring
only to men and women and remove also so
-called progressive social policies. And so
we've already seen the merging and meetings
between members of the Heritage Foundation and
members of conservative organizations in Europe
on these agendas, which of course we
can talk a bit about later, but essentially
what we aim to do with this project is go
beyond academic research and help decision
makers and advocates better understand the
nature and pervasiveness of the right-wing
populist agenda and their impacts on public
and global health and their linkages between
the US and Europe. Yeah, so a lot of
that is, I mean, that's extraordinarily
important. And you're talking
about also going kind of beyond their anti
-gender approach towards a larger sort of
public health approach, including environment
and social policies. But I wanted to kind
of elaborate a little bit, if you could,
about this term that you kind of pinpoint
in your work that I've never actually seen
kind of a, I don't know, um a background this
precise about before so you you write about
uh the origins of gender ideology um as
uh it was used by the catholic church as
an important part of the framework uh
within the far right uh effort to sideline
sexual and reproductive health and reproductive
of rights in favor of traditional family
values at specifically the international
conference on population and development so
this is like a um like a really specific
term that kind of has has really kind of
become the the head of this traditional family
values sort of push and it's being used
at a reoccurring conference the
International Conference on Population and
Development so can you explain what gender
ideology is you know for someone like
me who is kind of used to anti-feminism
I guess when I was growing up is what
you might call it how is gender ideology
different or yeah different from sexual
and reproductive health and reproductive rights
sure um so as you mentioned as you
mentioned it's a term developed and promoted
by the catholic church but also now they're
allied actors um to contest not only feminist
scholarship but also lgbtqi rights
comprehensive sexuality education and sexual
and reproductive health and rights and if going
forward i could use the term srhr more
broadly and it's kind of snowballed now to
target specifically a focus on trans rights
and what actors that use their opposition to
gender ideology do is they frame gender
equality as an idea rather than as an issue of
rights. By contrast, sexual reproductive
health and rights is agreed language which was
developed by consensus at the first 1994
International Conference on Population and
development. So this is a rights-based
framework which is grounded in scientific evidence
and has formed part of national level
health policies and has become embedded
in international human rights treaties and UN
documents. It's often considered as a package
deal at international negotiations and it
includes access to modern contraception,
maternal and neonatal health services,
comprehensive sexuality education, cancer
screening, treatment for SDIs, safe abortion where
legal, and of course bodily autonomy and
freedom from violence and coercion. So it's
a big package deal. The use of the term
gender ideology by opposition actors as we
see it today attempts to remove SOHR from the
realm of evidence-based policy and reframe
it as a cultural or a moral issue, rather than
as an issue of access to health services and
the right to health. So they argue that
feminism, LGBTQI rights, comprehensive sexuality
education, and sexually reproductive
health and rights threaten what they
call as the air quote natural family, which
is the heteronormative family, and even
national sovereignty. And these actors are
often referred to in the literature as anti
-gender actors, which are those who mobilize
against the legitimacy of gender equality,
which includes SRHR, and they seek to re
-establish, air quote, traditional gender
roles. So in this sense, it's not just about
opposition to SRHR, but even the word gender
itself is contested with attempts to move
it from international grammars. And so what we
see now in international negotiations is
that any resolution that contains the word
gender becomes ground for opposition and
stalling from opposition actors, leading to
delays in the adoption of agreements and the
potential watering down of language. And I
think it's important to point out here is
that a lot of these opposition actors claim
to be protecting women when these actions
and policy outcomes actually profoundly harm
women, as we're seeing in countries and states
within the US that have abortion restrictions,
and we see women with ectopic
pregnancies and septic miscarriages being denied
care, because it's not about women, right?
It's a political tool which has been used
to create fear around, and this leads to poorer
health outcomes for women, as well as,
of course, for gender diverse people right
and and that's really kind of evidenced all
over the data public health data all over
the place um so can you can you elaborate a
little more on the link between race and
reproductive rights for nationalist and populist
parties in europe because i think you
know you kind of been showing how these
things overlap. And I think that's one of
the key overlapping points that your work
kind of focuses on. Absolutely. So for
many nationalist and right-wing
populist parties, they frame motherhood
as a patriotic duty, while opposing access
to abortion services, sex education, and even
sometimes contraception. And this is
often grounded in rhetoric around the
belief that the dominant population is being
numerically or culturally replaced so in this
way we see reproductive politics becoming
a way to defend national identity and
SRHR therefore it's opposed because it
prioritizes bodily autonomy and individual rights
over demographic goals which is why
debates about abortion sexuality and family
policy are so central to contemporary
nationalist policies. So in this way,
reproductive politics becomes this mechanism
through which nationalist projects regulate
the biological and cultural reproduction
of the nation while seeking to limit the
reproductive autonomy and mobility of
migrant populations. That makes a lot of
sense. I was just talking with Valerio
Alfonso Bruno in Italy um at um poly demos
about how the um fratelli d'italia
government is sort of moderate in an outward
facing way but within italy in their domestic
policies they're like their far right
face shows specifically in this kind of
realm of biopolitics um what's that it's
an interesting nuance yeah and important
to point out yeah um that's fascinating
um is the control that they want to have
over the population and and how that
coincides with the race and
ethnicities um thank you for elucidating
that Um, so how did we
saw recently, um, the way that the
Trump administration was able to get an
international climate, you know, international
scientific body to basically
drop climate change as a
priority. And, um, I want to go back a
little bit before that and, and, uh, because
your work does really good job kind
of showing how the far right changed the
way that sexual and reproductive health or
srh and reproductive rights were being
pursued in the united nations from 2014 to
2020 so that's sort of like the the um the
prequel i guess i don't know um so so how
how did that happened how what were they
able to do like was it like a ground up thing
with kind of like you know social movement
organizations or was it like coordinated
from the top you know I don't know how
how were they able to change that and and
how did they change it yeah yeah sure um
that's a that's a really good one to talk
about and I mean I'll also add to what
you mentioned about them getting to
drop any mention of climate change is that
they've also broadened now much further
to rejecting any mention of the SDGs,
the Sustainable Development Goals. So
yes, the agenda and the opposition has
broadened dramatically. So then linking
it back to this, which is what we
found in this article. So as I mentioned
that we have this package deal
references to SRHR, which were agreed
from the 1994 ICPD. But now you're seeing,
or at least during the time of this
article, of course, and now we're seeing
opposition actors challenging the term
sexual and reproductive health and rights.
And this expanded beyond the usual
contestations to comprehensive sexuality education
and abortion, arguing that these
were against national sovereignty cultural
values and the again air quote natural or
traditional family and so this change also included
the removal of the word sexuality to an
increased emphasis on the role of families
and it also saw the removal of the reference
to access to safe abortion where legal which was
a sovereignty clause negotiated back at
the first icpd and so even now this is no
longer acceptable and I mean of course while
it's important to state that opposition to
reproductive rights is absolutely nothing
new I mean even in the initial ICPD negotiations
you know these were hard fought and the
resulting language which was formed from decades
of feminist movements for the rights and
access to services which some of us have
today and some of us are barely holding on to
an increasing number of right-wing populist
and authoritarian governments found a
powerful ally in the Trump administration and
made it hard to hold on to these gains, let
alone make any progress. And if I can give one
explicit example from that time, in 2019,
the first term of the Trump administration
threatened to veto a UN Security Council resolution
on sexual violence and conflict if they
did not remove the reference to SRHR or even
to sectional reproductive health and health
services so both of those were removed
during that time we also saw the establishment
of the Geneva Consensus Declaration in 2020
and of course they're using a title to make
it sound like a human rights document which in
itself is a tactic and so that was an explicit
attempt to expand the anti-SRHR coalition
and reframe women's health and rights
through the protection of the family as a fundamental
unit of society. And so while it adopts
language of women's health and rights,
these are only centered on women's rights as
mothers. And it does so by selectively
reinterpreting existing human rights language to
privilege heterosexual relationships and
parental authority over established sexual
reproductive health and rights frameworks
and so in that sense it functions less as
a legal instrument and more of a form
of norm contestation within global governance
which was designed to consolidate a
transnational bloc capable of challenging the
previously established consensus around SRHR
in UN negotiations. So yeah you use the
term denormalization in your work on the
global gag rule and the trump administration's
anti-abortion efforts so can you
talk a little bit about that rule it seems
pretty important to me and and how the trump
administration labels sexual and
reproductive health and reproductive rights srhr
i'll start calling it ambiguous they so they
so they call it to kind of call it ambiguous
you know as part of this denormalization
effort yeah yeah supposedly so so
ambiguous um apart from this long document in
1994 but okay so first for any listeners
who don't know what it is maybe i'll just
quickly outline what the global gaggle is
um so the mexico city policy is what it's
officially called um and was first announced
by um then u.s president ronald reagan
and has since been lifted and reinstated
by presidents along partisan lines, and it
prohibits U.S. foreign assistance to any
organization that performs or provides
counseling on abortion. And so organizations
agreeing to the policy had to pledge
not to provide abortions or even discuss
abortion, regardless of whether U.S. funds
were involved. And this is despite the
Helms Act, which has anyway prohibited
the U.S. of US foreign assistance to pay
for abortions, but this expands to whether
the US government should also restrict,
or rather gag, the activities and speech of foreign organizations using even non
-US resources. And furthermore, many
organizations affected by this policy were
also providers of modern contraception, and
so this reduced these organizations' ability
to supply modern contraceptives as well
as other reproductive health services and this
also even meant that it can impact access
to abortion services in countries where
abortion is legal which was seen in Nepal and
is therefore an example of silencing through
foreign policy where countries which were
partly reliant on U.S. global health assistance
in the provision of their health care
services were impacted. And so along with
the withdrawal of resources
that we see now, U.S. negotiators
began to characterize sexual reproductive
health and rights as, as you said, ambiguous
and even as a non -consensual term,
despite, as we discussed, the decades of use
in UN agreements. And so here I used
Dr. Rebecca Sanders' idea of norm spoiling
to explain how the Trump administration
attempts to weaken its coherence and remove
it from institutional texts and turn it
back into a matter of political disagreement.
So once that happens, every future negotiation
has to revisit the language which
was previously taken as settled, which opens
a space for rollback and therefore instead
de-normalizes it. And the global gag rule
therefore in itself is an absolute classic
example of evidence -free policy based on
ideology rather than scientific facts
because as we know from decades of evidence that
access to SRH services decreases the
amount of unwanted pregnancies and improves
maternal and infant health, while conversely
countries and states that refer to themselves
as air quote pro -life become potentially
unsafe to become pregnant and deliver a
healthy child because of the restrictions
on health services for example which deal with
pregnancy complications as well as even the
criminalization of miscarriages and we
also know from studies that have shown that
in countries which were subject to the
global lag rule they have seen an increased
number of abortions and increase in maternal
and infant infant mortality along other
health impacts such as increases in rates of
hiv infection so there is literally no public
health evidence to support the implementation
of this policy yeah i i mean i i think
you can kind of see that it's sort of like
it becomes an impassioned moral argument more
than actually a you know the the right
wing you know the the the right wing anti
-abortion sort of anti -reproductive health
argument doesn't stand on science and in fact
sort of seeks to sweep it aside with a moral
claim right so like for example this this
quote just uh sprang up uh four days ago in
the um the christian right-wing uh journal
first things um by will thibault who's at the
claremont institute he said in this in this
article first things article quote feminism
is the root and it's quiet cumulative
destruction of the family of sex differentiated
social roles and of the Western moral order
dwarfs the body count of any individual
shooting you know so feminism is murdering
people and to talk about this or that mass
shooting is you know to you know mistake the
forest for the trees because the mass shooters
I know this is where the logic takes us
the mass shooters are are desperately you
know flying against the modern world of that's
ruled by you know feminism or something like
that right so it's almost to let mass shooters
off the hook on one hand and then on the
other hand it's a Martin Bailey because
they're saying any individual shooting okay well
what about all the shootings together let's
talk about that and now you're all you're
talking about is like the terms of mass
shootings versus feminism which already is a
false equivalence the whole thing is in enormity
um but uh the argument right is that feminism
is taking lives and it's murdering people
and the primary sort of cornerstone of that
is abortions and yet when as you're saying
when anti-abortion policies kick in it
doesn't save any lives at all you know and that's
never used as you know we talk about what
sorry not we they talk about abortion being
murdered because it's so easy for them to
emote around but yet no one talks about the
murder of uh of women from being denied access
to basic care like a dnc when they're
undergoing miscarriage or something you know so
that is just not part of the discussion at
all but then also the um the incredible um
paradox in them saying in the same breath that
they're pro-life and pro-gun it's you know
it's one of those things that you want to
expand it again slowly um absolutely yeah
that's horrifying um what that what was written
thank you for sharing and um you know speaking
of public health and mortality let's
talk about the pandemic. How would you
characterize the general ways that
far-right governments and parties handled
the pandemic? Yeah, so across multiple
country contexts, of course, far-right
governments and parties tended to approach
the pandemic through this right-wing
populist anti-elite lens that reframed public
health authority as a site of political
contestation rather than of expertise. So of course
in the US you saw it most explicitly
with Dr Anthony Fauci where scientists as
well as public health agencies and international
organisations such as the World Health
Organisation were frequently constructed
as these unaccountable elites whose
recommendations threatened national sovereignty or
individual freedom, which both legitimised
non-compliance with mitigation measures, as
well as eroding trust in vaccination campaigns.
And it was this dynamic that contributed
to increasing vaccine scepticism within far
-right constituencies, where we had
opposition to mandates, which was articulated
through the language, ironically, of bodily
autonomy, you know, now bodily autonomy
is okay, as well as parental rights and
resistance to state overreach. And so the result
was not only higher levels of vaccine
hesitancy, but the consolidation of a
broader discourse around opposition to scientists
and public health experts, which then sowed
distrust of public health agencies and
multilateral governments. And what we began to
see as well is that the same transnational
networks and political actors that
had framed SRHR as an imposition by global
elites had repurposed those frames to contest
pandemic measures, reinforcing broader
political distrust towards public
health and expertise. right so we're seeing
you know this kind of discourse condensed
I guess around uh disinformation
these days you know because there is such a
a premium on rejecting science and opposing
scientists there needs to be kind of
um an overwhelming information assault
against scientific findings. So what has
the Trump administration done recently
in reference to disinformation and why
is that so dangerous? Goodness, where to
start? So the Trump administration has
dismantled much of the institutional architecture
which was designed to counter it while
framing counter disinformation efforts
as censorship, which of course was outlined
in Project 2025. And so because of that,
it therefore becomes more difficult to
govern risks, whether that is pandemics or
climate change, because the evidence base on
which policy formation depends has also been
weakened. And what we're seeing is not
a set of separate controversies, but the
consolidation of shared counter-expert
infrastructure that operates across SRHR, vaccination,
and climate science as examples. We're
seeing the same political actors, advocacy
networks, and funding streams that have
long framed SRHR as an imposition by
unaccountable global elites now deploy an almost
identical repertoire against public health
and climate expertise, such as claims of
scientific uncertainty or the language of bodily
autonomy or national sovereignty and the
elevation of parental rights and common
sense over professional knowledge and the
portrayal of multilateral institutions as
ideologically corrupted. So if I give a some
further examples of this we're seeing this
within the contemporary wellness movement which
has really become an important vector in
the circulation of health-related
disinformation in particular because it combines a
language of personal empowerment and bodily
autonomy with a deep scepticism towards
pharmaceutical industries, state regulation, and
biomedical expertise. And social media in
particular creates highly effective pathways
through which these anti-vaccine narratives
and even the promotion of unpasteurized raw
milk, for example, can travel. and so
the danger is in this way the ecosystem
normalizes the idea that individual intuition
should take precedence over scientific knowledge
which undermines the possibility of
coordinated public health responses but
if I then go back to the transnational
element in October last year There was the
launch of Make Europe Healthy Again at the
European Parliament, which was attended by
leaders of the Make America Healthy Again
and several members of MEHA's steering committee
and international advisory board, which
is a clear example of policy learning
right. And the launch was also attended by
far-right politicians, anti-vaxxers and
alternative health practitioners and
speakers who spoke about this unelected globalist
institutions such as the WHO again.
So recurring themes. Meha's founder and
president is also an anti-vaxxer
campaigner who wants tougher immigration
policy. So again, it's there, and as
opposed to the WHO. So essentially, a
lot of those on the steering committee and
international advisory board have peddled
misinformation about vaccines and
the COVID-19 pandemic. So this is a very
clear example of transatlantic
cooperation on areas which
impact health. And so the danger lies
in the erosion of the foundations that make
global health governance possible. And this
has immediate material consequences, such as
lower vaccine uptake, but it also has longer
term structural effect in that it normalizes
the idea that expertise cannot
be trusted and that
the international cooperation is a
threat to sovereignty, which makes coordinated
responses slower, weaker and more
unequal. And so, in that sense, it
transforms evidence -based global health
from a technical field into a
permanent arena of geopolitical and
ideological struggle. yeah um so coming to the end
of the questions uh um and thank you for
for your patience in in kind of um unwinding
these things uh i know it's you know it's
hard work um so can you discuss a little
bit of the role of civil society
organizations in the anti -gender campaigns more
specifically, because this is also something
I think that is increasingly important.
While you're talking about the rejection
of collaboration with sort of international
scientific efforts, there is absolutely
fairly open and opaque transnational
collaboration when it comes to mounting campaigns
against the scientists so can you talk about
like civil society organizations roles
you know in europe and in the united
states in in these anti -gender campaigns
yeah sure um so civil society organizations
are really central to contemporary anti-gender
mobilization because they provide the
organizational infrastructure the policy
expertise and the cross -border networking
capacity that allow these campaigns to
operate simultaneously at national, regional,
as well as UN levels. And there's been
detailed analysis of this by Open Democracy, as
well as the European Parliamentary Forum
for SRHR and AWID as well, which has
outlined the hundreds of millions of dollars
flowing into Europe from the US, which go
towards anti-gender mobilisation in Europe.
So rather than functioning only as grassroots
movements, many of these anti-gender
organizations draft model legislation, they train
diplomats to counter SRHR language, they
coordinate messaging, and serve as norm
entrepreneurs to roll back language on gender
and SRHR in international institutions. And
in particular, there is a growing
collaboration between U.S. conservative think tanks,
such as the Heritage Foundation and European
organizations like MCC in Hungary and
Ordo Eurus in Poland, who have made it clear
from their recently published policy briefs
which are available online that opposition
to gender inequality is embedded in a broader
project to reconfigure the institutional
architecture of the European Union itself and
particular areas of concern from one of their
latest briefs was the suggestion of the ability
of EU member states to opt out of areas
such as energy security and scientific research
cooperation, as well as a plan to dissolve
the EU to transition to a new union. So
this is where we see that it is much more
beyond opposition to gender as a concern, but
democratic institutions and multilateral
governments more broadly. Yeah, I mean, the
dissolution of the European Union is
definitely a very interesting one when
you look at the kind of different array of
far-right parties and the way that they
approach religion. You talked about Open
Democracy, their article about the World
Congress of Families has been, you know, one
of the most important that's been published
out there. and the way that they kind of
maneuver across borders to promote a different
form of transnational solidarity that they
claim, you know, represents the sovereignty of
individual nations. And the opposition to
the EU, I don't know if it's actually as
strong today as it was, you know, five
years ago, perhaps. But I guess
that's something that's kind of at play. So you talk about
how the United States Supreme Court
decisions and legislation can
influence legislation in Hungary and other
countries, like, for example, the Roe v.
Wade decision and the recent Supreme
Court, you know, re-litigation of that. And you also talk
about the controversy around the Istanbul
Convention, which is another one of these kind of
interesting moments in convention history.
I don't know if you could even use that
word. um so what's the transnational level like
in terms of the ways different far-right
parties and movements influence and support
each other like those conferences and
fake conventions and declarations that you're
talking about like on on that kind of like
institutional level what's that seem like i guess
sure so uh at the transnational level
what we see is a dense ecosystem through which
far-right parties, politicians, conservative governments,
and aligned civil society organizations
exchange strategies, and these I refer to
in my article published in Social Science and
Medicine with Professor Poivusolo, so I can
talk a little bit about it here, about
what we see at the EU level, which is that
one of the strategies of opposition is to establish
relationships with members of the european
parliament with shared views which
enable them direct access to influence eu level
language on sohr some of the anti-gender
organizations are even operating under external
financing from the us and russia to systematically
target european institutions and which
on a whole demonstrates that health-related
decisions in the eu can be subject to
lobbying from interest groups from foreign
countries with their own agendas okay of course
we saw that like just before with the maha
meha link and then there's the issue of
legitimization where hungary introduced a fetal
heartbeat requirement which was months after
the overturning of roe v wade also right
after roe v wade was overturned there was
an event organized at the european parliament
against abortion by the European Parliamentary
Group, ECR, the European Conservatives
and Reformists Group. Then we have the
creation of alternative resolutions and conventions,
which is part of this toolbox of strategies
that we presented in the article where
anti-SRHR actors attempt to delay
negotiations by submitting different texts for
debate and discussion. And there's also
the presentation of alternative resolutions
which were drafted and originated by
conservative NGOs, which demonstrates how anti
-SRHR organisations can influence the debates
in the European Parliament, and also
attempt to insert more conservative text
into policy documents. And this was also
seen in an attempt to try and draw signatures
away from the Istanbul Convention, which
is on combating violence against women.
And Poland tried to invite other countries
to leave the Istanbul Convention and
considered joining this other convention, which
was written by the conservative organization
Ordo Eurus, which was called the
Convention on the Rights of the Family. And
this mobilization against the Istanbul
Convention has circulated across Europe through
the same shared narratives about gender
ideology and national sovereignty, and it
echoes the practice seen in the creation
of the Geneva Consensus Declaration that I
mentioned earlier. So such instances led
to an open letter, which was submitted
to the President of the European Parliament,
Roberta Metzler, by MEPs in January of
2023, and it sought to withdraw the
accreditation of anti -abortion lobbyists with
transnational links. So if I give just a
few examples, because I don't remember
all of their names, but we have Alliance
Defending Freedom, Bordeaux-Eurus, and
the European Centre for Law and Justice,
among others, which cited the
potential for foreign interference in
European policymaking. So this is clear that
anti-gender actors are firmly embedded
within EU institutions and actively
try to impact discussions on SRHR,
which has impacts on access to health
services across the EU. Right. So you've
written about creating a plan of action to
defend sexual and reproductive health and
reproductive rights. SRHR. Has that come about?
Is there a plan of action formulating,
or is this sort of still germinating, I
guess? I don't know. I always try to,
it's good to end on a positive and, you
know, a call to action. There is definitely
an enormous amount of work being done by
feminist advocates, public health actors
and human rights organisations at the
national, regional, and of course,
multilateral levels. People are
doing the work, but it's not
straightforward. The money behind the
organisations that oppose gender in SRHR
is just so substantial with their networks
looking to impact global and national level
policies and so this means that the response
cannot be purely reactive or just confined
to one policy space i think one of the areas
where more strategic needing as more
strategic thinking is needed is messaging like
we were kind of talking but before um how
the um anti-gender people are so they find
it's so easy to emote around the issue of
abortion and feminism in particular they've
been extremely effective at using emotionally
charged and easily translatable narratives
where whereas the realities we're often
talking about are things like medical complications
and pregnancy and access to the health
services and health systems and these
are much more complex and harder to communicate
and so I think we definitely need closer
collaboration between scholars advocates
and policy makers and to draw on some of the
research on framing that has been done on
political communication and norm diffusion
to develop language that is both accurate
and politically effective because the urgency
is real and the consequences are already
visible and increases in maternal mortality
and morbidity and vaccine hesitancy and
vaccine preventable deaths, but also because anti
-gender mobilization is increasingly
intertwined with broader anti-democratic projects.
And so if we wait too long, we face much
bigger challenges. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, thank you very much for joining the program. So do you have any
articles in the works that you'd like to talk
about? any um anything coming up yeah um i i
have one which is the the the final article
of my of my doctorate um which is looking
at again a lot of what i've been talking
about here that it's beyond gender and also
that it's um looking into climate skepticism
and broader public health um opposition
in particular the the pandemic treaty which
was under negotiation at the who and so that
kind of ties in a lot of what i was saying
about the opposition to the world health
organization and how this was often targeted by
traditional anti-gender organizations as well
and a lot of their rhetoric and some of
the framing there as well as of course the
climate skepticism angle and again the
arguments of national sovereignty concerns etc
so trying to point out those interlinkages
there and calling for more scholarship on the
area because I think these issues should not
be looked at in silos and I also think there
needs to be a lot more analysis of the
public health impacts of these far right
movements that we're seeing because you know
as we know of some of the specific examples
we talked about today with, you know, being
denied access for ectopic pregnancies,
septic miscarriages, etc. These really have
concrete impacts on lives. And of course, no
one talks about those issues of being murder,
right? So yeah, I think we really need
to understand that this has really severe
impacts at the population health level, as well
as how we prepare for future pandemics
and global health emergencies so that's also
something that is very concerning as well so
that's what we have that's what i have
coming up and that is what will also form part
of our transnational flows project so um
yeah we're looking forward we look forward
to being able to share those results and
hopefully um collaborate with other people who
can help push this, you know, research
area forward and, yeah, stand in solidarity
also because these are not the most gentle
topics to write about. For sure, for sure.
All right. Well, Linda Gilby,
Transnational Flows the Impact of
Transatlantic Conservative Networks on
Finnish and EU Environmental Health
and Social Policies. thank you so much for
joining this has been right rising the
official podcast of the far right analysis
network and i'm your host alexander reed
ross i hope you join us for our next rousing
discussion and thank you very much linda
for joining thank you