The election of Joe Biden as the next US President will herald a new era for global family planning, universal health care and the empowerment of women.

Donald Trumps eccentric rantings disenfranchised the aid agencies and took the world family planning programme backwards. His intolerance to abortion and women rights did little to stem the emergence of groups of “fundamentalists jointly wedded to pre-enlightenment intolerance and united in their social conservatives” better known as the unholy alliance which would do anything to stop female empowerment and abortion rights. This alliance not only derailed women’s and gay lib rights in their path but also fostered, amongst other things, religious extremism. If President Trump had managed to engage with women’s rights to family planning and health care then the re-invigorated conservative social forces in the west, most notably the most reactionary part of the Catholic Church might not have prevailed as it does today. Poland’s recent through its constitutional court illegal ruling to make abortion Illegal except in cases of rape and incest is an example of this general ethical decline in standards of human rights and decency. What has happened in Poland beggars belief. We need to pose the question as to how it became possible that a fully fledged member of the European Union managed to pass such a law. It will be interesting to see if the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights will be powerful enough to overturn this court ruling.