The Geneva Consensus Declaration is part of a growing international campaign to roll back women’s and LGBTQ+ rights. Framed as a defense of women’s health, families, and national sovereignty, the declaration seeks to remove the international consensus recognizing abortion and reproductive healthcare as human rights while promoting a “traditional family” model centered on heterosexual marriage. Supported by governments with records of human rights violations and closely aligned with the Christian nationalist agenda of groups such as the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025, the GCD has become a vehicle for extending U.S.-backed anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ policies beyond U.S. borders.
Now, with the United States serving as its Secretariat, Washington has taken a central role in coordinating an international network that seeks to dismantle policies around abortion, women’s rights and LGBTQ+ equality. The shift from Hungary to the U.S. leadership underscores how the GCD has evolved from a diplomatic initiative into a vehicle for exporting anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ policies and challenging decades of progress on rights protections worldwide.
