The return of the global gag rule stinks of neocolonialism | Lola Okolosie

Here’s a question I’d like somebody to ask President Trump: “What’s a woman’s life worth?” I’d hazard a guess that his response would attempt to sound reasonable.

Since the word “woman” tends to evoke a particular type, much in the same way the colour nude is taken as beige with whispers of peach, I’d like to ask another: “Mr Trump, what worth do you see in the lives of women in the developing world?”

The answer to that is revealed in Trump’s decision to reimpose the global gag rule. For women in poorer countries reliant on American aid, their lives have been deemed a fair compromise in service of politicking and moralising. It is a brutal use of these women’s bodies in order to mount an ideological assault on the idea that a woman can have bodily autonomy. Women of developing nations have become expendable collateral damage in a war far closer to home. Who isn’t reminded of colonialism and the hierarchy of bodies that matter?

Some 22,000 women will die this year because of unsafe abortions, and 8.4 million will suffer serious illness or injury

The global gag rule, also known as the Mexico City Policy, stops any foreign NGO receiving US government aid for family planning from using their own funds to provide safe abortion services, if legal in that country. Not only that, the rule stops funding NGOs if they are: known to have referred women elsewhere to receive terminations; lobbying their own governments to liberalise restrictions on abortion law; campaigning against governments wanting to restrict abortions; and even educating the public on the fact that they can ask for safe legal abortions.

The rule has been brought in and out of existence by Ronald Reagan in 1984, Bill Clinton nine years later, then George W Bush in 2001, and Obama in 2009, before Trump re-imposed it this week. Trump is in fact expanding the rule’s powers so that it no longer applies solely to family planning assistance given by the US government, but also to funding given to NGOs focusing on disease control.

Some 22,000 women will die this year because of unsafe abortions, and 8.4 million more will suffer serious illness or injury. Millions more will lose access to contraceptives and condoms because the NGOs who once provided them with such services will no longer exist. All because of the moral ideals of a powerful anti-choice lobby is intent on winning something, anything. How easy it is to play political football with the lives of people from the developing world.

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It is the same contingent that calls NGOs working to make abortion part of family planning initiatives “cultural imperialists”. Cultural relativism and the pretence that they are making a charitable intervention is supposed to mask a commitment to enforcing their sense of morality elsewhere. They assume that using the argument of salvaging “traditional” cultures will protect against an essential truth: it is a woman’s right to decide what happens to her body and when. Never mind that women in the developing world are not a homogenous lump with identikit views on abortion. Like colonial missionaries of old, it’s all for the moral good of the natives, apparently.

An American friend recently pointed out the paradox in Trump’s promise to put Americans first, (with its implication of isolationism) and yet make America great again, a sentiment that is nothing if not outward-looking and colonial in spirit. What better way to neatly combine the two than to withdraw billions in funding to poorer nations while making them understand the almighty power of the US dollar?

During Trump’s inauguration speech, the language of moral virtuosity was barely contained, lest it sound too imperialistic for the moment. It has nevertheless been let loose. American religious values, by way of the global gag rule, will be imposed on countries as far flung as Kenya and Peru, Ethiopia and Nepal.

Last year Trump stated that in the event of abortion being criminalised, women who went on to have a termination would have to face “some form of punishment”. Asked by MSNBC’s host Chris Matthews about how you actually ban abortion, Trump said: “Well, you know, you will go back to a position like they had where people will perhaps go to illegal places.”

The casual “you know” seems all the more perverse appearing as it does before an acknowledgement that it would mean putting women’s lives at risk. It seems that the lives of women from the developing world have been taken as a good starting point.

The return of the global gag rule stinks of neocolonialism | Lola Okolosie

Selling yoga back to its teachers is pure neocolonialism | Swami Ambikananda Saraswati

This week began with the proverbial storm in a teacup as the British public were warned we were in danger from … yoga. On Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday, the British Wheel of Yoga’s chair, Paul Fox, claimed that teachers without sufficient training are giving yoga classes. What has since emerged is that the British Wheel, one of the wealthiest yoga organisations in the UK, has agreed to provide Skills Active, a quango, with funding to develop a National Occupational Standard for Yoga – to protect and keep us all safe in down dog.

As I listened in the Radio 4 studio, it was clear that this misrepresentation of what is happening in most yoga classes is a pretext for a kind of neocolonialism. When powerful organisations seek control, they always say it’s to “protect the public” and “keep them safe”. Are these not the claims put forward by any group seeking to impose its authority and undermine all other groups existing alongside it? A meta-analysis of studies on yoga by Dr Holger Cramer of the University of Duisburg-Essen confirms that it is as safe as other physical movement disciplines.

In the days of the British Raj, when Britain’s economy depended on commodities such as cotton, Indian cotton growers were forced on pain of imprisonment to sell their cotton yields to Britain at prices determined by the buyer. The raw cotton was sent back here, to our “satanic mills”, and Indians – who had been weaving cotton for centuries – were then prohibited from weaving their own and forced to buy woven cotton back at prices determined by Britain. That wouldn’t happen today – would it?

The art and science of yoga, which began in India, has become big business all over the world. According to Ibisworld, in the UK alone Yoga is worth about £790m a year. Nonetheless, yoga continues to be the ancient path of Hindu mysticism, and its first how-to manual, called the Katha Upanishad, dates back between 2,000 and 3,000 years, and forms part of sacred Hindu texts. In it a young man encounters Death and a dialogue between them ensues. Death is asked about the meaning of life and offers yoga as a way of understanding it all. A National Occupational Standard dismisses this spiritual connection and replays the cotton trick: giving the British stamp of approval to a particular brand of yoga and then – under the guise of health and safety – selling it back to the teachers who are already teaching it.

The financial penalty for not complying is a tax that will hit self-employed teachers, most of whom are women

Of course, yoga teachers, like all teachers, always need to improve on their training, but this proposal is just a way of paying a bureaucracy to ensure a two-tier system: some teachers get the stamp and others don’t. It won’t improve the training, but it will make it much more expensive and limit who can afford it. The financial penalty for not complying is a tax that will hit self-employed teachers, most of whom are women. A better use of resources might have been to finance research into exactly what areas of further training are needed.

A number of years ago yoga teachers formed the Independent Yoga Network to ensure that teachers applying to get on to the Register of Exercise Professionals had an acceptable level of training. The IYN undertook this without any financial compensation and in support of the diversity of yoga schools.

While yoga is part of their religion for over a billion people, it is not so for all those practising it in the UK. Many people do yoga for a sense of wellbeing – for aching backs, or muscle tension from a pressured week, or just a break from a 24/7 agenda. None of us has to change our religion – or even have one – to enjoy the benefits it offers. But nor should anyone try to misappropriate and redefine another’s religion in order to enjoy a bigger slice of yoga’s financial pie.

Is yoga dangerous? Absolutely! Here’s what it did for me: I was a young mum suffering from crippling postnatal depression that disengaged me from life when I encountered yoga. It changed all that and taught me, because I needed to learn it again, how to become a fully participating human being. Becoming engaged always makes us dangerous – we become participators rather than merely spectators – and we see very clearly when the cotton is being pulled over our eyes.

Selling yoga back to its teachers is pure neocolonialism | Swami Ambikananda Saraswati