Hillary’s Infamous Women in the World Talk Isn’t Quite as Awful as You’ve Heard (Though It’s Still Awful)

During what was supposedly a rousing speech yesterday at the Women in the World Summit (held in David H. Koch Theater, as it happens), Hillary Clinton touched on a number of issues where women’s welfare has improved but hasn’t reached ideal levels — access to education for example — which the subject of a recent report from the Gates Foundation and the Clinton Foundation (summary here). The last issue she mentioned:

Yes, we’ve cut the maternal-mortality rate in half, but far too many women are still denied critical access to reproductive health care and safe child birth. 

All the laws we’ve passed don’t count for much if they’re not enforced. Rights have to exist in practice, not just on paper. Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will, and deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs, and structural biases have to be changed.

As I have said and I believe, the advancement and full participation of women in girls in every aspect of their societies is the great unfinished business of the 21st century. And not just for women, but for everyone. And not just for women in far away countries, but right here in the United States.

A lot of conservatives have suggested that the combination of the first two paragraphs means she’s straight out saying this: We need to ditch whatever “deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs, and structural biases” are standing in the way of women getting abortions.

This is not way far off, because rare is the women’s rights initiative, especially when it comes to health care — in the U.S. and abroad — where abortion rights aren’t included (subtly, as here). But when it comes to many parts of the world, Clinton has a point pro-lifers and conservatives can agree with: Women’s rights aren’t adequately protected and culture is partly to blame.

Lots of laws on the books in poor countries that aim to fix this haven’t worked, as Hillary pointed out, and guaranteeing humane treatment of women does mean encouraging cultural codes in some places to change. The idea that this is a problem in Alabama as it is in Arusha is, of course, perverse, but Hillary wasn’t exactly saying that. She was mostly talking about global issues, and across the world, many backwards cultures really do inhibit women’s access to important health care, especially regarding pregnancy (for just one, horrible example, read up on obstetric fistula). It is not simply, or even primarily, about abortion (and contraception).

Though when it comes to women’s rights in this context, it’s always at least partly about abortion, which is a great tragedy, something where Hillary and the international-development elite are deeply wrong, and something that should disturb plenty of Americans moderate in their politics. Understanding that Hillary’s sentiments are international is important: Many developing countries, American charities, and Catholic groups work hard to create international-development programs that really do help women, that don’t focus on abortion rights and contraception promotion. Success has been limited.

There’s also a deeper problem in Hillary’s speech for conservatives, I’d note — the idea that women aren’t going to flourish unless they have a legal and enforced right to, say, precisely equal representation in parliament or equal access to technology. Conservatives who don’t believe in positive rights have a principled problem with this broad rights-based approach to development (it is quite distinct from prioritizing, saying, political and property rights). The positive-rights-based approach has also never shown more practical promise than most of the ideas that come out of the international-development world, as it happens.