By overseeing the Office of Global Women’s Issues, global health programs, the Special Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBTI Persons, and more, Mike Pompeo had huge influence over the rights, health, and very lives of women and the communities that depend on them around the world.

Mike Pompeo is implementing the Trump-Pence administration’s deadly global gag rule and its expansion. Pompeo also is supporting the administration’s withholding of U.S. funding to UNFPA, one of the world’s most critical sources of contraception. As a member of Congress, Pompeo repeatedly voted in favor of these efforts.

In the six years he served as a representative for Kansas, Mike Pompeo passed 32 measures to ban or restrict access to safe, legal abortion and block patients from care at Planned Parenthood health centers.

To advance the Trump-Pence administration’s foreign policy, Pompeo aligned with anti-reproductive health leaders of nations known for human rights abuses. At a March 2019 UN conference on women, several such countries and the United States tried to weaken the 1995 Beijing Declaration, which provides a blueprint for developing the rights, health, and safety of women and girls worldwide — including protection from gender-based violence and access to the full range of reproductive health care.

The Trump administration threatened to veto two UN Security Council resolutions over abortion access for rape survivors.

The Senate narrowly confirmed Mike Pompeo shortly after the U.S. State Department’s release of a heavily censored human rights report, which eliminated the reproductive rights section of the report.

Mike Pompeo built on the agenda laid by his predecessor, Rex Tillerson. Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson approved the administration’s plan to expand the global gag rule, which Pompeo is now overseeing.

During Mike Pompeo’s confirmation hearing, senators raised strong concerns about his disturbing track record on human rights issues. Pompeo dodged questions about whether he’d censor reproductive and LGBTQ rights from the State Department’s annual Human Rights Report. He also stood by his position against marriage equality and refused to deny that he believes being gay is a “perversion.”

Mike Pompeo consistently opposed LGBTQ+ rights through his support of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and his condemnation of the historic 2015 Obergefell ruling, which guaranteed marriage equality.

Under Mike Pompeo’s watch, the State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights released a report in July 2020 that attempts to narrowly redefine human rights according to what Pompeo calls “America’s founding principles” — but what are actually centered on discrimination. The report prioritizes “religious liberty,” a principle the Trump administration used to limit access to sexual and reproductive health care and exclude LGBTQ+ people and other marginalized groups from legal protections.