International Women’s Day

Baroness Goudie Excerpts

Friday 6th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goudie (Lab)]

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to congratulate my great friend Geeta Nargund—my noble friend Lady Nargund—on her maiden speech and on joining this House. We were brought together by one great friend of all of ours in this House, Margaret McDonagh, and every day we are very sad that she is not here with us to tell us what we should be doing. We miss her greatly. We were also brought together by my daughter in law, Vanessa Elliott, who is a consultant at Saint George’s; both she and my noble friend worked with Margaret when she was not well. Both of them were fantastic to her, and I think everybody in this House should know that.

Among other things, my noble friend is a great campaigner. She not only campaigned for better vaccinations in this country, but—for those who do not know—she campaigned during Covid to ensure that people had the right vaccinations not only for Covid. Her work with universities is enormous, as pro-chancellor of Portsmouth University, and on women’s health at City St George’s, University of London.

However, my noble friend’s main work, which she is really well known for, is her research on IVF. The IVF treatment that she has founded and worked on is helping people not just in this country but in African and other countries who never had such a choice, or who thought that it would be available. Through Geeta’s great work, this has been made available and she continues with that work. She will continue to give us hassle on this issue in this House, among other things. I thank her for being here with us—it is great.

Today, as we know, is International Women’s Day. I would like to thank everybody for having this debate and for our leadership on what we are doing for women. I declare my interest as a founder of, and an adviser and ambassador to, the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security. As we know, there are more women than ever today suffering the trials of war, and it is women who bear the brunt of war as we sit here today. We think of what they are going through and what they are having to do to look after their families in this situation.

The UN’s theme for International Women’s Day this year is “Rights. Justice. Action. For ALL women and girls”, and it is a theme I welcome as a strong reminder that rights do not maintain themselves; they depend on services, enforcement and political choices, and on us standing up for women and girls around the planet whose inherent rights are unfulfilled every single day.

I wanted to take time today to reflect on developments for women and girls over the last year. To me, three developments stand out. First, there is the squeeze on global sexual and reproductive health programmes. The United States Government have historically been the largest donor Government for family planning, but the drastic pivot from USAID that froze and then cancelled most global family planning projects in 2025 is still seeking to eliminate that funding for 2026.

We have already seen the consequences of that decision. A review led by the Clinton Health Access Initiative found that after USAID ended its reproductive health work in early 2025, partner countries faced funding and supply chain disruption, and women and girls found that their preferred contraceptive methods were sometimes unavailable. One family planning provider in West Africa told the initiative:

“It is heartbreaking to turn women away when I know they came from far distances just for this service”.


The UNFPA reported that in 2025, funding cuts forced more than 1,000 UNFPA-supported clinics and mobile health teams to shut down or come close to closure, and more than 250 safe spaces for women and girls to close. As the UNFPA stated, the impact is clear as these services are the front line of maternal care, providing midwives, post-rape treatment, supplies of pain relief, and emergency delivery kits.

Secondly, I must draw our attention back to Afghanistan, as one of our colleagues has already done this morning. Afghanistan remains the only country where secondary and higher education is forbidden to girls and women, and UNESCO and UNICEF estimate that 2.2 million adolescent girls are banned from secondary education. UNICEF has warned that in a context where women and girls can often be medically treated only by women, denying girls education today means denying women healthcare tomorrow. The GDP of Afghanistan, when it is eventually able to get going again, will be devastated without women being educated. The 2025-26 Women, Peace and Security Index—produced by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, and partners—ranks 181 countries. It finds that global progress is stalling and ranks Afghanistan last. I urge the Government to make use of this valuable document, which is produced annually.

Thirdly, I want to point out that international co-operation is still possible. In October 2025, France hosted the Fourth Ministerial Conference on Feminist Foreign Policies, bringing together participants from 55 countries. It concluded with a joint declaration signed by 31 states, reaffirming commitments to gender equality, and the United Kingdom joined the Feminist Foreign Policy Group alongside countries such as Morocco, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

Turning to the United Kingdom, I welcome the decision to remove the universal credit two-child benefit cap limit from April 2026. Government analysis suggests that this could mean 450,000 fewer children living on relatively low incomes by 2030. We all know that child poverty is not gender-neutral and that it lands first on mothers and carers, especially single mothers.

I also welcome the renewal of the women’s health strategy and the decision to include menopause questions in national health checks, which are expected to benefit nearly 5 million women. I welcome menopause action plans becoming part of employment policy by being mandatory from 2027; this is a huge move forward for all women and their families.

Finally, we must confront the fastest-growing threat to women’s equality: technology-facilitated abuse. Ofcom reports that 98%—as we heard the other night, it is even more—of intimate images reported to the Revenge Porn Helpline are of women and that 99% of deepfake intimate image abuse depicts women. The National Police Chiefs’ Council has warned that sexual abuse and deepfakes are thought to have increased in prevalence by nearly 2,000% between 2019 and 2024. The Government have brought into force the offence of creating or requesting non-consensual intimate images and are treating it as a priority offence online, but we need enforcement, victim support and platform accountability.

International Women’s Day is, of course, a celebration of the achievements of women every day, but it is also a reminder that rights require services, justice requires access and action requires political will. In reality, this takes place in government, in budgets, in diplomacy and in how we choose to keep women and girls safe.