With the 70th Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) taking place in New York this March, there is a shadow looming over the event that goes far beyond the usual diplomatic posturing. The United Nations is facing a crossroad, with a radical restructuring proposal being debated that will merge the agency of gender equality, the UN Women, along with the sexual and reproductive health agency, the UNFPA. Although the official explanation is that this is being done under the UN80 reform to cut down on duplication and increase impact, to many in the front line of women’s rights, this is much more malevolent than that. They consider it a tactical withdrawal on the face of a worldwide backlash against equality.
The merger suggested is based on the principle of organizational efficiency. The supporters suggest that the establishment of a single, unified body in gender and reproductive health can offer a one-stop shop to the member states and their partners. In the paper, the UN80 initiative envisages streamlining a bureaucracy often criticized for its silos.
But such financial reasoning is questionable. According to a technical report prepared by Fos Feminista, UNFPA and UN Women have less overlap and far less budget than other developmental organizations. These budgets are already a drop in the ocean as far as the multi-billion-dollar development system of the UN is concerned. The analysis indicates that, assuming efficiency to be the actual objective, the UN would focus on agencies with greater redundancies, but the choice of these two particular agencies is indicative that the proposal is driven by opposition to rights-based mandates.
The risk is that efficiency will turn into dilution. Sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) are one of the most politicized issues of international diplomacy. History reveals that as soon as SRHR is incorporated into a larger development agenda, it is the item that is often negotiated to reach a compromise.
This is not the age of progress; it is the age of rollback. As documented in the Human Rights Watch World Report 2025, the global architecture of equality is under siege. This can be seen, perhaps most evidently, in the United States, with the Geneva Consensus Declaration being revitalized in the 2025 administration. This document explicitly asserts that there is no international right to abortion and has historically served as a mechanism to divert global health funding away from reproductive services and toward initiatives that exclude non-traditional structures.
Anti-rights activists, such as the Centre for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam), have also become bold, calling UN representatives “gender lunatics” and demanding the destruction of any language that promotes the traditional family arrangements. The reintroduction of the mandates of UN Women and UNFPA into a General Assembly ballot debate in this unstable context is like throwing a wrecking ball into a glasshouse. The aggressive member states will definitely exercise this authority to coerce other nations to destroy the hard-won structure of sexual and reproductive rights.
Another concern is the very tangible threat of the donors eyeing mergers as a source of savings as opposed to investment. When two organizations that differ in terms of donor bases merge, it is not usually a mere summation of resources. In agencies already existing in a resource-depleted environment, as observed by MSI Reproductive Choices in their January 2026 report, any additional cut in funding is directly translated into disastrous service gaps. In South Sudan, aid cuts have compelled the shutting of primary clinics. In Central Asia and the Caucasus, the loss of funding for UNFPA led to a complete termination of midwifery program financing in weak areas. In Afghanistan, most acutely, loss of support to hundreds of midwives has deprived hundreds of thousands of women of skilled maternal care, effectively closing crucial points of entry for women in public life.
The prevailing situation is an opportunity that the anti-rights parties can use to take advantage of the vacuum created by aid reduction to redefine the global agenda. This merger is not an issue of bureaucratic choice; it is an international movement. With the Global South Coalition of SRHR and Development Justice taking the lead, more than 500 rights institutions have called on the Secretary-General to safeguard the visible and particular mandate of these agencies. The main lesson here is that, once SRHR is incorporated into the wider gender or development priorities without being clearly stated, it may end up being given less priority or receiving very little funding or may simply be politically oblivious.
Reform is needed but should not be at the expense of the very individuals the organization was created to serve. The UN Women-UNFPA merger is a high-stakes gamble that endangers the lives and freedom of billions of women and girls. To combine them at this moment would be to send a clear, devastating message to the world that women’s rights are a luxury that the UN can no longer afford to make a priority.
