The Trump administration is taking a prominent role in a global coalition to take access to birth control and abortion away from the world's women. Valerie Huber, a top Health and Human Services Department official, took time out of her busy schedule this week to go to New York for a screening of a documentary that "takes aim at the West's 'ideological colonization' of Africa through interviews with women who experienced side effects from contraception or who regretted having abortions," two attendees tell the Washington Post's Ariana Eunjung Cha and Lena H. Sun.

Huber told the crowd she was there to convey the Trump administration’s commitment to "protecting life" with its form of global health assistance. She was sponsored by a Catholic think tank called C-Fam, which says that its mission is "to defend life and family at international institutions." Apparently with the help of the Trump administration and Huber, who in her prior career managed the state of Ohio's Department of Health’s Abstinence Education Program and serviced as president of Ascend, "a professional association for people who promote abstinence education, formerly known as the National Abstinence Education Association."

She is taking her abstinence-only crusade globally since January, when she was shifted to a global affairs role. But the Trump administration has been pushing this agenda internationally from the beginning. They've been pushing an anti-woman agenda in State Department memos, telling diplomats to avoid talking about "sexual and reproductive health" or "comprehensive sexuality education." At the winter World Health Organization meeting in January, U.S. officials tried to steer the agenda away from issues of a global influenza epidemic and preventing further public health emergencies stemming from refugee crises to talk about "how the millions spent on contraceptives have not always been effective in lowering the rate of unwanted pregnancies and suggested this money could be put to better use for 'sexual risk avoidance' (or abstinence) education and other programs."

What they're trying to do is create a coalition with countries like Bahrain, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and potentially Russia to force changes in international agreements supporting girls' and womens' health and reproductive rights. Elisha Dunn-Georgiou, vice president of programs for PAI, which works on universal access to reproductive health care globally, says that what the U.S. is trying to build would allow nations "with more draconian laws about women's rights or sexual minorities to skirt their obligations under international mechanisms. […] The U.S. stance this time enables other bad actors at the U.N. negotiation table."

They're "bullying" developing nations, Serra Sippel, president of the Center for Health and Gender Equity, a Washington-based advocacy group told the Post, and using the influence of the powerful coalition to force these nations to comply. Sources described a side meeting at the WHO conference, where Huber and Garrett Grigsby, director of HHS's global affairs office, cornered representatives from an African nation. "This is important to us," Huber said, according to the Post's source. Grisby echoed that. "This is important. […] It does not matter who is in the White House. This will last."

It won't last.