The Guardian: U.S. abortion policy is ‘extremist hate’ and ‘torture,’ says U.N. commissioner
“The U.S. policy on abortion is a form of extremist hate that amounts to the torture of women, the U.N. deputy high commissioner for human rights told The Guardian. … ‘We have not called it out in the same way we have other forms of extremist hate, but this is gender-based violence against women, no question,’ Kate Gilmore said. ‘It’s clear it’s torture – it’s a deprivation of a right to health,’ she warned, pointing out that the committee of experts assigned to monitor the implementation of the nine core U.N. human rights instruments have each ‘independently declared the absolute prohibition of abortion … is against human rights.’ Gilmore, appointed deputy high commissioner in 2015, said the banning of abortion in some U.S. states and the attempts by the Trump administration to remove language from key international documents was ‘deeply distressing’…” (Ford, 6/4).

Quartz: The U.S. is to blame for global erosion of human rights, says top U.N. official
“… ‘When the United States starts to sneeze under the force of the pneumonia of afactual, illegal, and ascientific policy, everybody starts to catch the same cold,’ said Kate Gilmore, United Nations deputy high commissioner for human rights, [Monday] at the Women Deliver conference in Vancouver, Canada. Gilmore spoke at length about the Trump administration’s decision to reinstate a ‘global gag rule,’ [also known as the Mexico City policy] which denies U.S. government [global health] aid to … [foreign non-governmental] organizations who perform abortions or give information about the procedure. The Trump administration has also championed abortion rights rollbacks domestically … Activists have said these policies will strip vulnerable women both in the U.S. and abroad of badly needed family planning services and lead to an increase in unsafe abortions…” (Timsit, 6/3).