On 19 March, the United Nations (UN) Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) did something unprecedented in its eight-decade history: it held a vote. As its 2026 session drew to a close, the USA, having spent two weeks trying to defer, amend and ultimately block the session’s main outcome document, known as the agreed conclusions, cast its vote against their adoption.

It lost: the conclusions passed 37 to one. But that vote against says much. It came from the world’s most powerful government, backed by financial leverage, bilateral reach and a network of allied conservative states and anti-rights forces that are making local to global inroads.

CSW in focus

Established in 1946 as a functional commission of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), the CSW has 45 members, elected by ECOSOC on a rotating basis from regional groups. They negotiate on behalf of all UN member states. Every year, the CSW convenes for two weeks in New York to assess progress on gender equality, agree on priority themes and produce the agreed conclusions, painstakingly negotiated commitments that, while not legally binding, shape domestic legislation, set international norms and signal the level of political will.

Civil society plays an important role at the CSW: the NGO Committee on the Status of Women coordinates thousands of organisations, from large international civil society organisations to grassroots groups, with the aim of ensuring those most affected have a presence, if not a vote, at the table. This is the closest thing the world has to a dedicated annual intergovernmental negotiation on women’s rights.

Every five years, the CSW reviews progress on the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action, the most comprehensive global policy blueprint for advancing gender equality and women’s empowerment, and issues a political declaration instead of the annual agreed conclusions. That was the case in 2025, when disagreements on the declaration foreshadowed the forced vote on this year’s agreed conclusions. Under pressure from regressive states led by the Trump administration, sexual and reproductive health rights language was removed from CSW69’s declaration as a condition for agreement.

What CSW69 foreshadowed, CSW70 made plain: women’s rights are facing the most coordinated and wide-ranging attack in decades. Anti-rights forces are dismantling protections secured after generations of struggle, rewriting legal frameworks and defunding the infrastructure built to address gender-based violence and realise reproductive rights. The session exposed how far the assault has advanced. For the first time in the CSW’s history, even the survival of the agreed conclusions was in question.

The assault on gender equality

The agreed conclusions had long been a matter of difficult but ultimately successful consensus. But the Trump administration came to CSW70 in combative mood, having withdrawn from UN Women in January and from its executive board in February, citing opposition to what it calls ‘gender ideology’ and the agency’s ‘reckless’ promotion of abortion. It submitted eight amendments targeting language on AI regulation, gender ideology and reproductive health. When those failed, it attempted to defer or withdraw the conclusions entirely, and when that too failed, it voted against adoption.

The US delegation also put forward its own resolution that sought to establish a restrictive definition of gender across UN work, based on a narrow reading of the 1995 Beijing Declaration, effectively attempting to rewrite 30 years of carefully negotiated commitments. Belgium, speaking on behalf of the European Union, responded with a motion of no action — an exceptional procedural step — that was backed by Brazil and others. It passed 23 votes to three, with 17 abstentions, blocking the US resolution.

The Trump administration’s assault on gender equality at CSW70 was one front in a broader campaign to erode international recognition of human rights. The US government has ended funding for the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), dismantling global support for sexual and reproductive health rights. At the Munich Security Conference in February, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio defined western civilisation as bound together by Christian faith, shared ancestry and cultural heritage, an ideological approach that treats women’s equality, reproductive rights and LGBTQI+ rights not as human rights but as ideological impositions to be rejected. The Trump administration is using its financial leverage to assert this view.

Funding under attack

The most immediate material crisis at CSW70 was the collapse of funding. The Trump administration’s January 2025 decision to terminate the US Agency for International Development (USAID) immediately shut down clinics, ended medication for HIV patients and eliminated contraceptive supplies. Eliminating 90 per cent of USAID contracts, wiping out US$60 billion in foreign aid, was a strategic decision. The US government has also reinstated its global gag rule, a policy that blocks US funding to any organisation that provides abortion services, referrals or counselling, or advocates for abortion law reform.

US foreign aid plummeted by US$32 billion between 2024 and 2025, and is expected to fall further. This has had immediate repercussions for women’s rights. At CSW70, Action Against Hunger made clear how hunger and the denial of women’s rights are connected problems: without legal rights, women can’t assert land claims, access productive resources or rely on safety nets in times of crisis.

Instead of abiding by international human rights standards, the USA is negotiating bilateral deals with 71 countries under its ‘America First’ global health strategy, with terms that extend its global gag rule beyond civil society organisations to governments. Any entity receiving US health funding must certify that neither it nor any organisation it works with promotes or provides abortion. Funding will likely flow through faith-based groups.

Ultra-conservative Christian organisations such as Alliance Defending Freedom, C-Fam and Family Watch International are ready to fill the void. They’ve spent years building networks across Africa, Asia and Latin America, forming part of an alternative aid framework that was growing even before the Trump administration supercharged its efforts. Between 2019 and 2023, 80 such organisations received US$131.7 million in Europe alone. With government backing and hundreds of millions to spend on advocacy, litigation, lobbying and media campaigns, they use the language of family values, parental rights and national sovereignty to gain access to politicians and consolidate conservative influence over laws affecting women, LGBTQI+ people and young people.

In many countries, anti-rights groups have achieved direct access to governments while progressive organisations are being increasingly excluded. Some provide what they promote as health services, particularly in contexts where real alternatives are being defunded. These include Teen Star, offering what it calls a natural fertility curriculum in 30 countries, which omits all information on contraception or prevention of sexually transmitted infections, and Femm, a fertility app funded by anti-abortion Catholic campaigners that actively discourages contraceptive pill use while hiding its ideological ties.

According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, with typical use, between 12 and 24 per cent of women will become pregnant in a year using fertility awareness methods, a far higher rate than with modern contraception.

Austerity as cover

As threats to women’s rights intensify, the UN is signalling retreat. A proposal under the UN80 cost-cutting initiative to merge UN Women and the UNFPA has alarmed civil society worldwide. The stated rationale is efficiency, but there’s little overlap between the two agencies and their combined budgets of under US$2 billion make up a small part of the UN’s overall spending, suggesting savings would be modest. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the targeting of these organisations reflects the increasing contestation of their rights-based mandates rather than any logic of organisational efficiency.

Any merger would require a UN General Assembly vote, giving regressive states an opportunity to define the mandate of a new combined agency in a way that minimises recognition of human rights. The Trump administration and its allies surely won’t let that chance pass.

The UN hasn’t consulted civil society. But civil society is refusing to be quiet. Over 500 organisations signed an open letter to UN Secretary-General António Guterres warning that when sexual and reproductive health rights are absorbed into broader mandates, they risk being ‘deprioritised, underfunded, or rendered politically invisible’. At a recent UNFPA board meeting, states including Brazil, Germany, Sweden and the UK urged protection of those rights. But none has yet committed to blocking the merger.

There’s another problem. In 80 years, the UN has never had a woman secretary-general, a role due to be filled by a new appointment this year. As regressive states at CSW70 tried to renegotiate the terms of women’s access to human rights, that absence sat unacknowledged in the background.

Civil society holds the line

Over 4,600 civil society delegates from across the world attended CSW70, and they made their presence count, taking the floor to denounce structural barriers and demand accountability.

Youth representatives challenged the normalisation of online violence. A young Finnish delegate recounted receiving her first unsolicited explicit image at 13 and not recognising it as violence until she was 17, and called for tech platforms to be held legally accountable. A Georgian lawyer described a sexual harassment case in which the court spent more time questioning whether a woman described as ambitious could truly be a victim than examining the evidence against her perpetrator.

A Moroccan youth activist named three forces undermining gender justice movements everywhere: growing civic space restrictions, political backlash and chronic underfunding. A delegate from the Solomon Islands described how geography compounds injustice in Pacific Island communities, where survivors must travel by boat or on foot to access police protection or legal aid. A Haitian activist working with migrant women in Chile highlighted the labour exploitation faced by people in domestic work and the informal economy, calling for labour rights to be decoupled from immigration status.

One argument united all these testimonies: that when women’s rights organisations are restricted or defunded, survivors lose both support services and their primary pathway to justice.

Civil society’s role extended well beyond testimony. In the run-up to CSW70, feminist organisations and activists monitored negotiations and coordinated advocacy across capitals for months, working alongside supportive states to defend more progressive language, including on sexual and reproductive health. The NGO CSW Forum, running parallel to the official session, hosted over 750 events. However, not everyone could participate: US visa restrictions meant several activists and feminist organisations, particularly from global south countries, couldn’t come. This is a worsening problem that limits civil society’s ability to engage.

Civil society is trying to hold the line, but the institutions built to protect women’s rights are under sustained, coordinated attack, with their funding cut, their mandates targeted and the human rights values they’re based on reopened for revision. CSW70’s contested agreed conclusions offer hope, committing states to action on AI governance, discriminatory laws, digital justice, labour rights, legal aid and the formal recognition of care workers. But political will is running low and the anti-rights community is emboldened, meaning that civil society’s current battles on women’s rights are more about defending against further regression than about expecting progress.

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