One Vote Against the World: The UN Moment That Reveals a Decade-Long Campaign

The United States standing alone against a women's rights resolution at the UN was not a surprise. It was the logical conclusion of a systematic, documented effort to roll back women's equality — in the military, in the workplace, at the ballot box, and now on the world stage.

The US Against the UN (Photo: Politico)

On March 9, 2026 — International Women's Day — the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women opened its 70th session in New York. When it came time to vote on the session's annual "Agreed Conclusions," a document adopted by consensus every year since 1996, the hall fell quiet. Thirty-seven nations voted yes. Six abstained. One voted no.

That vote — the United States, alone — prompted a standing ovation. Delegates and civil society advocates who had spent weeks fighting back US attempts to gut the document rose to their feet and applauded. The moment was extraordinary. It was also, for anyone tracking this administration's record on women, entirely foreseeable.

Because what happened at the UN was not an isolated policy dispute. It was the international expression of a domestic agenda building in plain sight — a coordinated, ideologically coherent effort to diminish the legal, economic, military, and political standing of women in American life. To understand what the CSW70 vote means, you have to understand the architecture that produced it.

Vote: 37 In Favor  ·  1 Against (US)  ·  6 Abstentions

The Blueprint: Project 2025 and What It Actually Says

The intellectual engine behind this administration's posture toward women is not hidden. The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 — a 920-page policy blueprint authored by over 140 former Trump administration officials — is explicit about its goals. As the National Women's Law Center has documented, the document seeks to impose a "hierarchical, gendered, patriarchal vision of society," one centered on fixed gender roles enforced through federal policy. By the end of 2025, roughly half of Project 2025's goals had been enacted or were in progress. The Heritage Foundation's president has described his organization's role as "institutionalizing Trumpism."

Project 2026 — Heritage's follow-on blueprint — is in some ways more candid. It proposes banning abortion pills, weaponizing the 150-year-old Comstock Act to criminalize reproductive medication by mail, embedding fetal personhood across federal agencies, and dismantling the Department of Education. It pairs these proposals with voter suppression measures that analysts say would disproportionately disenfranchise women.

"Every child conceived deserves to be born to a married mother and father." — Heritage Foundation, Project 2026

That sentence is a statement about family values. It is also a statement about women: that their reproductive choices are not theirs to make, and that the role of the state is to ensure they make the right ones.

The Man Heritage Hired to Say the Quiet Part Loudly

In late 2025, the Heritage Foundation appointed Scott Yenor as Director of its B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies. Yenor has called professional women "medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome." He has argued that employers should be legally permitted to hire only male heads of households. He has openly advocated for a return to "coverture marriage" — the pre-19th-century legal framework under which women surrendered their right to vote, own property, or work a profession upon marrying.

On education, he argues governments should be permitted to "prepare men for leadership and responsible provision, while preparing women for domestic management and family care," and has pushed for the re-segregation of schools by sex. This is the person the organization driving federal policy chose to lead its flagship academic center.

The Marriage Agenda: Bootcamps, Bonuses, and Early Brides

In January 2026, Heritage released "Saving America by Saving the Family" — a report calling for a "culture-wide Manhattan Project" to engineer a return to early marriage and high birth rates. Its proposals are specific and costed.

The report calls for government-funded marriage "bootcamps": structured programs that would train cohabiting couples, pair them with long-term mentors, and conclude with a communal wedding ceremony. Couples who marry before age 30 would receive government-backed savings accounts seeded with $2,500. Tax credits would reward households where one spouse stays home. The total cost of the initiative: an estimated $280 billion over a decade.

Women's rising educational attainment and career ambition are treated throughout the document as problems — contributors to declining birth rates requiring policy correction. The report pushes back against waiting for financial stability before starting a family. It limits IVF to married heterosexual couples, advocates for more religion, and discourages online dating. A law professor at Southern Methodist University reviewing the report noted there is "no indication anywhere in this entire document that whether women are happy or fulfilled or safe is relevant."

"The only way for America to thrive in future generations is to rebuild the family, and that can happen only with a societal commitment to revive the institution of marriage."— Heritage Foundation, "Saving America by Saving the Family," January 2026

The Military: A Book, Then a Purge

The administration's Secretary of Defense put his position on women in writing before he took office. In his 2024 book The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, Pete Hegseth drew a hard line: "women in the infantry — women in combat on purpose — is another story." He elaborated: "Dads push us to take risks. Moms put the training wheels on our bikes. We need moms. But not in the military, especially in combat units." And most plainly: "If we are going to send our boys to fight — and it should be boys — we need to unleash them to win."

A week before his nomination was announced, he said on a podcast: "I'm straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn't made us more effective. Hasn't made us more lethal. Has made fighting more complicated." At confirmation hearings he softened these remarks. Once confirmed, he acted on the originals.

He terminated the Women, Peace, and Security Program inside the Pentagon — a bipartisan program Trump had signed into law in his own first term. He issued memos reviewing combat fitness standards going back to 2015. He declared publicly: "If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it." He removed every senior woman from military leadership. Admiral Linda Fagan. Admiral Lisa Franchetti. Lieutenant General Jennifer Short, gone on his first day. Within months the US military had no women in four-star positions. No reasons were given. The Council on Foreign Relations assessed these departures as a direct risk to national security.

"It was not because of DEI that they earned it."— Jacki Crump, president of National Women Veterans United

The Ballot Box: Votes, Power, and Who Gets to Have Either

During the 2024 campaign, Trump told a Wisconsin crowd he would protect women "whether the women like it or not" — a line his advisers told him not to use. Largely treated as a gaffe, it was in fact a governing statement the following two years have borne out.

His Vice President had already put the underlying logic on the record. In a 2021 speech at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, JD Vance proposed that parents cast votes on behalf of their children, explicitly arguing that the childless deserve less democratic representation:

"Let's give votes to all children in this country, but let's give control over those votes to the parents of those children. When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power — you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic — than people who don't have kids. Let's face the consequences and the reality: if you don't have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn't get nearly the same voice. - JD Vance, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2021

When the remarks resurfaced during the campaign, alongside his attacks on Democratic leaders as "childless cat ladies" with no "direct stake" in the country's future, Vance called them a "thought experiment." A University of Chicago constitutional law expert was unimpressed, describing the concept as "unprecedented in a democratic constitution" — one that "harkens back to 19th-century use of property qualifications to restrict the franchise." That is precisely the era before women could vote at all.

The SAVE Act — the administration's top voting legislation — would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, presented in person. The Center for American Progress estimates that as many as 69 million women whose names changed at marriage do not have a birth certificate matching their current legal name. As written, it would make voter registration inaccessible for millions of them.

"Organized Gangs of Wine Moms": How the Right Named Its Enemy

On January 7, 2026, a 37-year-old mother named Renee Nicole Good was shot and killed at point-blank range by an ICE agent in Minneapolis during a protest against the administration's immigration enforcement campaign. The killing triggered widespread public outrage — polls found that only 30 percent of Americans believed the shooting was justified. The administration's response was to go on offense.

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem labeled Good a "domestic terrorist." Days later, Fox News opinion columnist David Marcus published a column framing the real danger not as the killing itself, but as the women who showed up to protest it. His language was precise and revealing: "What we are seeing across the country as organized gangs of wine moms use Antifa tactics to harass and impede Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents is not civil disobedience. It isn't even protest. It's just crime." He asked whether these women's activities constituted "criminal conspiracies" and called them "cosplaying would-be revolutionaries" and "deluded wine moms." He also alleged, without evidence, that Good herself was a "trained member" of one of these groups.

The right-wing website PJ Media took the framing further, declaring that the "greatest threat to our nation" was a "group of unindicted domestic terrorists who are just AWFL: Affluent White Liberal Women." Fox News host Will Cain offered his own diagnosis, describing "a weird kind of smugness in the way that some of these liberal white women interact with authority." Conservative commentator Lauren Chen — allowed back into the United States by the Trump administration after the DOJ accused her of working for a Russian propaganda operation — wrote that the ideology of women like Good was "almost wholly responsible for the decline of Western civilization."

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg named what was happening: the administration and its media allies were "trying to invent a terrorist threat to justify their increasingly unpopular siege of Minneapolis." The targeting of "wine moms" — middle-class, suburban, overwhelmingly white women who turned out to protest an ICE killing — was not primarily about public safety. It was about defining the limits of acceptable female behavior. As Goldberg wrote: "For MAGA, ICE's eagerness to put women in their place might be a feature, not a bug."

"Women-led movements are more likely to succeed and lead to egalitarian democracies. Autocrats know they have to do everything possible to dampen women's political participation because it's women who most often emerge as the most powerful forces in the fight against fascism."— Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action

The Legal Architecture: Domestic Terrorism, Redefined

The "wine mom" framing was not just rhetoric. It had a legal infrastructure behind it. In September 2025, Trump signed a National Security Presidential Memorandum directing the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force to investigate networks it associated with domestic terrorism. The ideological red flags listed included anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity. Attorney General Pam Bondi followed with a memo to all US law enforcement listing additional indicators, among them: "adherence to radical gender ideology" and "hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and moral values."

The Brennan Center assessed the combined effect: the language "all but commands law enforcement to investigate groups that write, organize, advocate, litigate, or otherwise speak out" on any issue the administration disfavors — along with their donors. A woman who supports reproductive rights, attends an ICE protest, or donates to a progressive nonprofit now falls within the scope of a domestic terrorism framework that explicitly lists opposition to "traditional views on family" as a radicalization indicator.

Back to the UN

Against this entire backdrop, the CSW70 vote carries its full meaning. The US arrived late to negotiations, proposed eight amendments targeting reproductive health language, gender identity, DEI, and AI regulation — all defeated by votes as lopsided as 26 to 1 — then forced a recorded vote on the document itself. It cast the only no vote in the room. Saudi Arabia abstained. The United States said no.

The administration had also withdrawn US funding from UN Women — ending roughly $25 million in annual contributions — exited the UN Human Rights Council, signaled intent to defund the UN's regular budget, and is withdrawing from UNESCO. The global gag rule now covers up to $39.8 billion in US foreign funding. By one count, the administration has departed from 66 international organizations since January 2025.

The standing ovation that greeted the result was the world naming what it had witnessed. The Agreed Conclusions that passed were not a compromise. They were the document the rest of the world negotiated — largely intact — over US objections.

What This Requires

The agenda is documented, funded, staffed, and substantially implemented. Senior women officers are gone. The Women's Bureau is abolished. The Heritage marriage bootcamp agenda is published and being promoted to the White House. The SAVE Act moves through Congress. The domestic terrorism framework is in place. And the UN vote is done.

What civil society demonstrated at the CSW was that coordinated, sustained advocacy across governments and borders can hold a line even against a well-resourced opponent. The coalition that protected the Agreed Conclusions was not spontaneous. It was organized. That is the model.

The world answered with 37 votes and a standing ovation. The task now is to make sure that answer echoes in every legislature, courtroom, election, and organizing space where this agenda will be contested next — because it will be contested everywhere, and the outcome is not predetermined.

Sources: Pete Hegseth, The War on Warriors (June 2024). Heritage Foundation, "Saving America by Saving the Family" (January 8, 2026). JD Vance, Intercollegiate Studies Institute speech (2021). David Marcus, Fox News (January 11, 2026). DOJ domestic terrorism memo reported by Democracy Docket (December 2025). The 70th session of the Commission on the Status of Women runs through March 21, 2026.