Webinar #4 | Womb Policies around the World: Control and Resistance

📅 Wednesday, 22 July 2026 | 2–4 PM CEST
📍 Online
🗣️ Interpretation available in English and French
Register here

The womb — the primary site of life — has always been a battleground for political struggle and reproductive controversies, situated at the crossroads of gender issues, sexual conventions, human demography, and social constructs. Maternity policies and the wars over abortion, and even the developments concerning the management of HIV/AIDS, have shaped laws regarding the womb and demographic cultures, forcing women to accept, willingly or not, the social determinants of fertility (Simonstein, 2022).

More than ever, today, across the globe, women’s bodies are brought back as the central venue around which to shape political, nationalist, and ideological agendas. National governments – more and more intentionally — are advancing pro-natalist policies, including restrictions on legalized abortion and limits on access to contraception methods. Overall, constraints on sexual and reproductive rights have become mainstream in the North and South hemispheres. Reproductive and sexual autonomy is seen as a matter of national survival, demographic strength, cultural identity, or moral order.

Orchestrated conservative initiatives mostly backed politically and financially by religious groups — from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 in the USA to pro-natalist and 2025 bans of “child-free lifestyles” policies in Russia, from barriers dismantling Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights (SRHRs) implementation in Argentina to restrictive reproductive governance backed by faith-based actors in several parts of Africa — well illustrate how coordinated legal, policy, and cultural strategies are widely deployed to counter women’s self-determination  restrict sexual and reproductive rights and reshape drastically hamper women’s agency.

The webinar explores the rise of transnational and strategic conservative activism against women, through a brutal sexual and reproductive rights agenda. Anti-gender networks are not peripheral — they increasingly operate within mainstream politics and institutions, shaping the  public discourse and normative standards, including at the United Nations. Laws that challenge SRHRs rapidly advance. Yet, these regressive waves are also contested by feminist solidarity movements, youth collectives, and grassroots actors. Resistance to misogyny as an ideological cornerstone and political tool of authoritarianism, whose zero-sum vision of gender insists on the idea that any gain for all women comes at men’s expense, is embedded in widespread actions of  civil society. These highlight strategies of solidarity, advocacy, and defense of reproductive and sexual autonomy.

Speakers

  • Jashodhara Dasgupta – Independent Researcher on Gender, Rights and Public Health
  • Neil Datta – Executive Director, European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights (EPF)
  • Anastasia Dzutstsati – Social Researcher and Multimedia Producer
  • Erica Hensley – Deputy Managing Editor, Fuller newsroom for women & gender-diverse people
  • Teslanik G. Houndegnon – Movement Coordinator, ODAS

Moderator: Nicoletta Dentico, Director Health Justice Program, Society for International Development, Co-Chair, G2H2

The initiative ‘Stop the Pushback on Women’s Rights’

Started as a conversation among a small group of women within the Geneva Global Health Hub (G2H2), the collective has grown and remains open to include voices of women from around the world united in response to the alarming resurgence of attacks on all women’s rights, transcending borders and affiliations. G2H2 continues to serve as a vital facilitator within Geneva’s multilateral landscape.

Visit the initiative website