Penny Young Vance: Meet the anti-feminist who Trump wants as his ambassador for women

When Barack Obama created the role of Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women's Issues in 2009, the Trump administration was a long way off. He certainly could not have foreseen anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ candidate Penny Young Nance vying for the role, which has been empty since January of this year.

The reputation of Penny Young Nance – Trump’s expected nominee – precedes her. She is a staunchly Christian conservative and current CEO of Concerned Women for America (CWA), an organisation renowned for its opposition to advancement of LGBTQ rights. Also a leading voice in the so-called “pro-life” movement, she penned a 2013 column for The Christian Post in which she compares pregnant people’s rights to their own bodies to the holocaust, calling it a “cruel genocide”.

The role Nance looks set to assume, while still relatively new, is a crucial addition to the United States Department of State, overseeing the Office on Global Women’s issues. The Ambassador-at-Large liaises with groups across government and in both the private and civil sectors, ensuring that the rights of women and girls are at the fore in the creation and implementation of United States foreign policy.

Nance is a widely recognised voice, but the suggestion of her appointment has garnered criticism for a number of reasons. Perhaps the best-known organisation to have spoken out is non-profit sexual healthcare provider Planned Parenthood, with executive vice president Dawn Laguens stating that the move “shows a fundamental disdain for women’s health and their lives.”

Why do Laguens and Planned Parenthood so oppose Nance’s restrictive “pro-life” ideology? The answer to that is simple: as stated by the Guttmacher Institute and cited by the World Health Organisation, restricting access to legal abortion is not associated with a reduction in overall abortion rate. Instead, individuals are forced to undergo unsafe and unregulated procedures in order to terminate their pregnancies. Worldwide, unsafe abortion is estimated to account for up to 18 per cent of maternal deaths.

Religious conservatives such as Nance continue to hold these unscientific views not out of any commitment to the safety and wellbeing of those they affect, but out of a desire to impose their own moralistic ideals onto half of the population. Where the CWA website expresses concern about the “harm of abortion to women, men and their families,” there is no consideration of the proven, measurable harm their aims would enact. With the United States acting as a major provider of global sexual healthcare, the impact of Nance’s potential election to Ambassador-at-Large cannot be overstated.

Nance’s restrictive views of course extend to her perception of the LGBTQ community. In fact, the Southern Poverty Law Centre, a non-profit legal organisation and leader in classification of hate groups and extremist organisations, previously classified the CWA as an anti-LGBTQ hate group. The CWA in fact opposed renewal of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, on the grounds that it “creates new protections for homosexuals”, calling inclusion of diverse gender and sexual identities “controversial”.

Excluding LGBTQ individuals from protection against gender-based violence prevents a large group of vulnerable women from being able to access necessary resources. In 2010, The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey revealed that one in three lesbian women and one in two bisexual women experience severe violence at the hands of an intimate partner in their lifetime, up from one in four heterosexual women. Whilst statistics for violence against transgender women vary wildly, making them difficult to verify, the Human Rights Campaign calls the rates of sexual violence that these women experience “alarming”.

The potential appointment of a woman who opposes access to safe abortion and protection for LGBTQ individuals to a role created to ensure the safeguarding of women is more than counter-intuitive: it’s a devastating blow to the rights of vulnerable individuals across the United States and beyond. The Ambassador-at-Large position has a powerful and wide-reaching impact, and the world deserves better than a woman determined to limit the rights of others to fit within her own blinkered views of morality.