“Human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights,” Hillary Clinton said in Beijing in 1995, but Donald Trump and Rex Tillerson’s State Department isn’t so sure. Discussion of women’s reproductive rights and discrimination is being cut from an annual State Department report on global human rights after an unnamed senior official demanded the changes:
The directive calls for stripping passages that describe societal views on family planning, including how much access women have to contraceptives and abortion.
A broader section that chronicles racial, ethnic and sexual discrimination has also been ordered pared down, the current and former officials said. [...]
In a statement to POLITICO, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said that the way the department “presents the report's material has changed from time to time,” and that “this year we are better focusing some sections of the report for clarity.” She said the department was not “downgrading coverage of LGBT or women's issues.”
The “better focus” is certainly giving “clarity”—clarity that the Trump administration does not think women’s rights are human rights or that discrimination is worth discussing.