Dual Threats and the Fight Ahead
By Dilly Severin, Executive Director, Universal Access Project
As 2025 gets underway and the new U.S. Congress and Administration comes into power, the threats to sexual health, rights and justice (SRHRJ) have never felt greater. It’s clear the opposition continues to be well-resourced, well-organized, and relentless.
These attacks are first and foremost on health, rights, and bodily autonomy. But they also signify something broader and more insidious: they are attacks on the very ideas of civil society, of government accountability to its citizens, and of principled dissent.
The global gag rule, for example, sits clearly at this intersection. The Universal Access Project has joined more than 100 international organizations denouncing what is not only an egregious attack on global health and on communities, but also a clear violation of free speech and a resource redistribution mechanism intended to starve those organizations that the government wishes to silence.
This trend is a mark of authoritarianism that will only continue under the Trump-Vance Administration. It is therefore imperative that we as advocates and philanthropists defend closing civil society spaces as valiantly as the issues themselves.
It strikes me, then, that we must conceive of health, well-being and bodily autonomy in a way that also centers and prioritizes safety, including the safety of those organizing and advocating both in-person and online.
The degree to which hate has been weaponized, and information suppressed – especially in online space, thanks in large part to efforts by Big Tech to suppress freedom of expression around SRHRJ issues and even more recent actions to explicitly stop fact-checking content – has raised many alarms. We owe it to advocates and organizers to consider their own safety in doing this important work, especially for those who are part of groups who are already marginalized.
In spite of these dual threats, we learned from an otherwise dismal election that SRHRJ is still a winning issue. American voters have time and again shown their support at the ballot box, voting to advance SRHRJ even while those in power work tirelessly to halt and even reverse progress. This gives me hope – and gives our movement an opportunity to mobilize on this clear public support, shore up champions for these issues, and beat back continued attacks.
The Universal Access Project and the global SRHRJ movement have prepared for this moment. We’re standing resolute in the face of what is to come. At the same time, we know that things are and will continue to be unpredictable. It is our agility, our values, and most importantly, our community that will guide us through this moment.
When it comes to our community, we must both broaden the tent and commit to remaining intersectional. With looming threats like a massively expanded global gag rule, we must grow our community and bring together even unlikely bedfellows. For the Universal Access Project, that means flexing our convening power now more than ever, and in new ways. We must also be courageous enough to recognize and work at the intersection of global issues: in an environment where equity and justice continues to be called into question, funding continues to diminish, and various intersecting health, security, and climate issues will accelerate harm to the most marginalized, we must center the most vulnerable to ensure efficient and effective use of limited resources.
We can, and we must, do this together, and learn from each other along the way. As we go into this new year, and new U.S. leadership, I’m carrying these three learnings with me in the fight ahead:
We must not accept this all as inevitable. Yes, the outlook is challenging. But there are battles still to be had, and won, no matter how small. We still have some power, and we should not cede it before it’s taken.
We must lean into the importance of championship. Bolstering our champions and building new ones will be a lifeline. They are out there, and they stand ready to defend SRHRJ.
We must look for ways to innovate and iterate. The sense of having the deck stacked against you opens up new avenues for innovation that may not have been clear before; we must seize them.
I know there will be much more to come in the months, and years, ahead. Until then, thank you for being in community with us and for your support and dedication to making global SRHRJ a reality for all, everywhere. Onward.
