No-one doubted that Donald Trump's ascendancy would deeply fracture the world as we know it. But few of us could have anticipated the swiftness with which his orders would impact some of the world's most disadvantaged citizens: vulnerable, impoverished women.
With just one signature, the newly-installed president snatched from these women access to services that are essential to their physical and mental wellbeing and their economic prospects — and, in so doing, endangering countless lives.
The global gag order signed by Trump on Monday requires health organisations that receive funding from the US to refrain from providing abortion services and advice on abortion, even if the money is not used to fund such services.
Since the bulk of these organisations' work involves the provision of contraception to communities in developing nations, Trump has effectively removed the right of millions of women to decide when to have children and how many they will have.
In denying these women contraception, he is effectively forcing them to carry, bear and raise every child they conceive, whether through traditional marriage or child marriage, rape or incest or consensual sex.
It's a deliberately spiteful and manipulative ploy: spiteful because he is hurting vulnerable women whose healthcare practitioners will refuse to submit to such coercion; manipulative because he is engineering a crisis among disadvantaged women that will set them back decades and strip them of the tiny bit of autonomy they currently have.
It's deliberate because he is assuaging conservatives and the religious right, who helped bring him to power and who are determined that America's landmark Roe versus Wade Supreme Court decision — which recognises a woman's right to make her own personal medical decisions, including the decision to have an abortion — be overturned.
And it ignores the basic fact of biology: that though it takes two people to conceive a baby, only one of them is required to bear physical responsibility for its growth and birth. Too often — especially in impoverished countries — this woman must bear financial responsibility for her offspring as well.
"Here was an obscenely wealthy man imposing his beliefs on women he will never meet, whose stories he will never hear and whose circumstances he will never seek to understand."
This grassroots reality makes the context in which Trump signed the order all the more galling: here was an obscenely wealthy man, one whose wife and daughters have access to the best care — and contraception —