In September 2021, a day after the state of Texas enacted the country’s toughest anti-abortion law, criminalizing abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, the satirical weekly The Onion ran a piece of news that reflected a zeitgeist: “The new Texas Law allows citizens to hold pregnant women hostage until childbirth.” The key to the legislation that went into effect this month in Texas was precisely that it shifted the prosecution of abortion from the state to individuals: the strategy was to turn it into a civil matter and provide a legal basis so that any citizen could sue any person who assisted another to have an abortion.
A year and two months later, across the continent, The Onion’s brutal joke became a prophecy in other latitudes as well. In December 2022, in Santa Fe, Argentina, a 12-year-old girl who had been raped by her father filed with her mother for a legal abortion. However, he did not show up at the hospital on the day scheduled for the procedure. After a search lasting more than 24 hours, the girl was found at a home run by the Catholic organization Gravida, where she was being held to prevent an abortion. “We want the political and economic connections of Gravida, who is hoping for the possible kidnapping of a girl, to be investigated,” a reproductive rights activist told EL PAÍS.
Between 2021 and 2023, the scenario of the struggle for reproductive rights in America is no longer the same, between an extreme of geography and legality, between legal strategies and direct citizen action. The dispute is not new, but it has spread and taken a place in the region’s political struggles, thanks to a long process of alliances, funding and the development of ultra-conservative lobbying strategies and evangelical churches. For José Morán, a researcher at Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council (Conicet), one of these strategies is to disqualify traditional progressive positions by equating them with a kind of “new communism”. In other words, an enemy image of conservatism, in which the struggle is not aimed at class struggle as in the 20th century, but at a culture war that concentrates the confrontation on questions of gender and sexuality.
“Retracing this path also involves understanding discursive constructions,” explains Morán. “They have tried to relate sexual and reproductive rights to something far beyond gender and sexuality, a kind of neo-Marxism.” This discourse has been ubiquitous in the continent’s election campaigns for the past decade: ever since the No popular vote won for the 2016 peace accords with the FARC in Colombia – the campaign led by former President Álvaro Uribe in which they spread untruths such as that the accords threatened the “traditional family” or attempted to promote a “gender ideology” into the constitution, and the evangelical vote was crucial to its victory – until Brazil’s second round of presidency in October last year. Then, in a desperate attempt to win the evangelical voice for Jair Bolsonaro, Lula da Silva sent a letter to church leaders stating that his project had “a commitment to fulfilling life in all its stages” because it was for him “life sacred, the work of the Creator’s hands.” Bolsonaro then ridiculed Lula’s shift in position on abortion to win evangelical votes, subconsciously pointing to an edge of the issue: “The left thrive on it, badly over our flags to talk, but on the campaign trail they’re passionate about her,” he said.
In recent years, the alliance between conservative politicians and Catholic and Evangelical groups — historic rivals who found a common agenda against reproductive rights, equal marriage and sex education — has managed to get representatives into parliament and has spurred mobilizations to ban books addresses sexuality in schools and works to thwart progress for LGBTI rights. The recent triumph of progressive governments on the continent has not solved the problem but has revealed its magnitude: while the fear fueled by the right has not been enough to win victories in societies plagued by more pressing social needs, it has a core formed power that can influence public policy and, in some cases, reverse progress.
For example, in the Honduran presidential election campaign, which ended in Xiomara Castro’s victory at the end of 2021, the opposition went viral with a banner featuring a cartoon of a politician stabbing a pregnant woman in the stomach. During his intense campaign to reject Chile’s new constitution in 2022, far-right politician José Kast — who lost the presidential election and gained ground by winning the last constitutional advisor election — falsely reiterated that the constitutional convention allowed abortion “up to the ninth month of pregnancy”.
The phenomenon is not new, but in recent decades, as the ultra-conservative lobbies in the United States began to lose ground, they expanded their battlefield on the continent: they expanded their networks in Latin America, where they found greater opportunities, results to be achieved in public policy and in fertile land to influence the regulation of reproductive rights. “We see that conservative evangelical churches have a fairly easy time attracting adherents,” says researcher Javier Corrales, a professor at Amherst College.
During the last World Congress of Families in October 2022 in Mexico City, Joe Grogan, former director of the United States Domestic Policy Council and assistant to former President Donald Trump, spoke of him as “a great defender of life,” “a great agent of change.” ‘ and the ‘three solid stones of the Supreme Court for the annulment of Roe v. Wade”.
From Washington to Latin America
Idalia Candelas
The verdict of June 24, 2022 should not have come as a surprise; a draft had already been leaked. Still, Rebeca Ramos, director general of the Grupo de Información en Reproducción Elegida (GIRE), a Mexican organization, reiterates that the overturning of the sentence was “a bucketful of cold water”. At that time she was in Lima, at a meeting that brought tears of pain and anger to many women’s eyes. Many countries in Latin America have pushed reproductive justice laws for decades. To describe this panorama, EL PAÍS spoke to academics, activists and lawyers to understand the implications of the end of a judgment that has been a reference in the fight for reproductive rights for almost fifty years.
Tania Reneaum, executive secretary of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, warns of the long-term risks of the Supreme Court ruling, which turns one year old this Saturday. “This resolution directly threatens the reproductive autonomy of women and pregnant people in the United States,” he says. In his opinion, the decision has implications not only for American reality but also for the rest of the continent, reflecting a trend of backlash and threats to reproductive rights. “What happened in the United States hasn’t been worked on in five or ten years, they’ve been working to reverse the Roe judgment since the ’70s. I can imagine that this will be the strategy in Latin America,” he explains.
The Supreme Court of the Nation of Mexico enshrined the decriminalization of abortion in September 2021, but access to legal abortion remains very precarious in some areas today. In Guerrero, for example, in 2022, a 10-year-old Me’phaa girl who was the victim of a rape was denied it. After filing a complaint with the public prosecutor, the minor managed to get the abortion.
let it be law
Idalia Candelas
The big difference between the progress made in Latin American countries and Roe v. Wade in the United States, alongside the initiative of the judiciary, consists of feminist and civil society organizations promoting changes in criminal law. Jenny Durán, a member of Católicas por el Derechos a Decidir and the women’s front Evita, explains that in Argentina it is a law that must be included in the country’s health plan, but there are other challenges. “Today we urge that this law be known, that the Ministry of Health inform that this law is also one of the basic contents of comprehensive sex education.”
Argentina was a pioneer country. In addition to sexual and reproductive rights, gender identity, equal marriage or the different regulatory frameworks that integrate these contents are at the forefront of comprehensive sex education. For the country, Durán adds, “Roe vs. Wade” represents only an uproar in the discourse of certain ultra sectors, but the legal bases are already irrefutable.
A similar thing happened in Colombia thanks to platforms like Just Cause for Abortion, the movement campaigning to have abortion removed from the penal code in 2022. For Mariana Ardila, lawyer for the organization Women’s Link Worldwide in the Andean country and director of Transnational Justice, Roe v. Wade very important back when there was nothing in Latin America, but today there are “many decisions even from…”. judicial powers that can be admired in Latin America and the Caribbean and elsewhere in the Global South as well.” The arguments on which there was progress were much more advanced. The US ruling granted freedom but did not guarantee access to abortion. On the other hand, these decisions in Latin America were very aware of the differences between women. “An Indigenous, Afro or migrant woman is not the same as a rich, privileged, urban white woman. And our advances have taken into account the impact of using criminal law to regulate abortion on these women, guaranteeing not only the decriminalization but also the legalization of abortion.” But we must not let up: A ruling by the Constitutional Court, announced last week, Again threatens access to abortion by denying the existence of this right. The judgment alone does not constitute case law, although it is an alarm signal.
Activists in Argentina, Colombia and Mexico agree that now is the time to band together and try to apply what they have learned in other countries. Because while Argentina managed in 2020 to pass Law 27.610, which enshrines women’s right to access an abortion up to week 14, Mexico has achieved decriminalization at the national level and Colombia has achieved decriminalization up to week 24, this is not the reality of the entire region . There are countries like Cuba, where there is access to abortion on paper but no access to contraceptives, and very restrictive countries like El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua or the Dominican Republic, where criminalization prevails.
The Central American Wasteland
Tania Reneaum recalls that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has affirmed that the outright criminalization of abortion “exposes women and people of childbearing potential to dangerous and even deadly practices that endanger their health and life, especially those who find themselves in such a situation”. situation of poverty and vulnerability. Central American countries have suffered fully from the reactions of anti-rights groups. They have made these countries their laboratory because the judiciary is not independent, social movements are heavily attacked, persecuted and criminalized, and this makes them the perfect breeding ground for passing their restrictive laws.
El Salvador punishes women who have abortions with the harshest penalties in the world, even for spontaneous abortions. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights presented the Beatriz case, which seeks to hold the state responsible for prohibiting early access to abortion in a situation where the life of the woman and the unviability of the fetus are at serious risk. with the hope of setting a precedent.
Adding to historically very restrictive legislation is a lack of political will. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele radically changed his speech. Marcia Aguiluz, legal strategist at Women’s Link Worldwide, explains it. Before winning the 2019 election, he supported the three causes, but now he opposes abortion with the idea of keeping the churches happy. The same thing happened in Nicaragua with the alliance Daniel Ortega forged with the Catholic Church before launching an unprecedented attack on religious freedom. This Central American country’s penal code upholds the ban on abortion in all circumstances, including the woman’s life.
As another example, Costa Rica passed an ordinance in 2019 allowing for therapeutic abortions, sparking resentment among parties most closely aligned with the churches. And Guatemala, in turn, was declared the “pro-life capital of Ibero-America” by a Christian convention in March last year after passing a controversial law increasing prison sentences for abortions from 1 to 3 years to 5. At least. Xiomara Castro from Honduras campaigned that she was in favor of decriminalizing abortion for the three reasons, but nothing has changed at the moment.
Countries like Chile are also affected by parliamentary balance sheets. Verónica Ávila, an expert on gender issues and public policy, explains that the obstacles in the South American country are created more by the machinery of the state than by pressure from groups of critics. The new constitution, which among other things provided for sexual and reproductive rights such as voluntary abortion, was rejected by a large majority last September. The government of Gabriel Boric, a young left-wing president, has restarted the constitutional process. However, on May 7, the election of the new Constitutional Council, which is to draw up a new text on the basis of a draft drawn up by a commission of experts, tipped the scales in favor of the extreme right, the big winner of this vote.
The Spirit of the “New Communism”
Each of these cases confirms that reproductive rights in Latin America are a political bargaining chip and have the power to change the fate of a candidate, campaign or project. It is the strategy of the “new communism” as José Morán defines it. Evangelical groups are advising Sebastián Piñera’s campaign in Chile and trying to determine the political balance in Peru on the left and right sides of the board. Fear is the main engine of this kind of mobilization. Pro-life, this scholar adds, are agitating the populace with a mix that “mixes popular radicalization” and a discourse that links sexual and reproductive rights to the right’s historic fear of communism.
A decade ago, progressive movements fought for societal conquest, as do anti-rightist movements today, which for political reasons have placed equal marriage and abortion at the heart of their agenda. The fear, for example, that a left-wing politician like Boric could introduce a “gay dictatorship”, as parts of the extreme right knowingly lied. More than a lie, this was a caricature, but this kind of unsupported slander follows the same modus operandi of the anti-vaccination and anti-immigration movements.
In parallel with the disinformation strategy, organizations linked to Vida Humana International and Heartbeat International are also operating on a political front. Heartbeat, who has close ties to former US Vice President Mike Pence and other Republican politicians, attends OAS meetings to campaign against reproductive rights. And it’s not the only one: Various movements against reproductive rights have emerged. The Hemispheric Congress of Parliamentarians, a platform bringing together more than 700 lawmakers from 18 countries, has denounced the multilateral organization for its abortion and gender agenda. In a 2017 document titled “Declaration of Mexico,” they express in black and white their “dismay at the aggressive and sustained efforts” of international organizations to impose “anti-life” measures on member states. Signatories include Jair and Eduardo Bolsonaro of Brazil, José Antonio Kast of Chile, former Costa Rican evangelical presidential candidate Fabricio Alvarado and Julio Rosas of Peru.
Mariana Ardila, an expert on women’s rights, also mentions the coalition promoted by Mike Pompeo during Donald Trump’s administration: the Geneva Consensus. An anti-rightist club of rulers that former Colombian President Iván Duque turned to in a last-ditch effort to push through his pro-life agenda. “Shortly after Colombia made the historic decision of the Causa Justa to have abortion, it became the country that made the most progress in the region and he brought Colombia into that club.”
And although the converse of Roe v. Wade worries all of Just Cause’s pro-abortion organizations, Ardila reiterates that “this colonizing approach needs to be demystified” given that countries in Latin America ultimately have their own constitutions, judges and democracies. On the other hand, according to Morán, the risk is because the Christian anti-rightist organizations that are rampant in the United States are also present in Latin America, where “not only do they have a social impact, at the level of mentality, but also the political repercussions at higher and higher levels in the domes of power.” A new form of political struggle in which progress and women’s rights are at stake alongside a management model.
This report was prepared with the support of the Internationale Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) as part of its program initiative Reproductive Health, Rights and Justice in America.