Future PerfectAmericas culture wars are killing people overseasWhen pro-life foreign aid hurts women and children the most.by Sara HerschanderJan 30, 2026, 1:30 PM UTCShareGiftNurse Matild Zainab Kamara displays some contraceptive products used during family planning counselling sessions at the Planned Parenthood Sexual Reproductive Health Clinic in Freetown, on November 12, 2025. Saidu BahAFP via Getty ImagesSara Herschander is a fellow for Future Perfect, Voxs section on making the world a better place. She writes about global health, philanthropy, labor, and social movements.The mark of barbarism is that we treat babies like inconveniences to be discarded, Vice President JD Vance bellowed to a crowd of zoomer nuns, bagpipers, and white nationalists at the annual March for Life in Washington, DC, last Friday.The vice president then proceeded to announce a threefold expansion of the Mexico City policy, a decades-old, controversial foreign policy that prohibits organizations from receiving foreign aid if they mention abortion as a family planning option. It was reinstated last year when President Donald Trump resumed office.This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter.Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week.While its not uncommon for (usually Republican) administrations to reinstate it, this is only the second time the policy which critics call the global gag rule ha
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