Sexual and reproductive health and rights Research Papers (original) (raw)

Abortion and Democracy offers critical analyses of abortion politics in Latin America’s Southern Cone, with lessons and insights of wider significance. Drawing on the region’s recent history of military dictatorship and democratic... more

With a focus on Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, the book’s contributors delve into the complex reality of abortion through the examination of the discourses, strategies, successes, and challenges of abortion rights movements. Assembling a multiplicity of voices and experiences, the contributions illuminate key dimensions of abortion rights struggles: health aspects, litigation efforts, legislative debates, party politics, digital strategies, grassroots mobilization, coalition-building, affective and artistic components, and movement-countermovement dynamics. The book takes an approach that is sensitive to social inequalities and to the transnational aspects of abortion rights struggles in each country. It bridges different scales of analysis, from abortion experiences at the micro level of the clinic or the home to the macro sociopolitical and cultural forces that shape individual lives.

This is an important intervention suitable for students and scholars of abortion politics, democracy in Latin America, gender and sexuality, and women’s rights.

Table of Contents

1. Abortion Rights and Democracy: An Introduction

Barbara Sutton and Nayla Luz Vacarezza

Part I: Comparative and Transnational Perspectives

2. Abortion and Political Parties in the Southern Cone: Electoral Costs, Platforms, and Feminist Activists

Cora Fernández Anderson

3. Feminist Lawyers, Litigation, and the Fight for Abortion Rights in the Southern Cone

Elizabeth Borland

4. Orange Hands and Green Kerchiefs: Affect and Democratic Politics in Two Transnational Symbols for Abortion Rights

Nayla Luz Vacarezza

5. Neoconservative Incursions into Party Politics: The Cases of Argentina and Chile

Juan Marco Vaggione and José Manuel Morán Faúndes

Part II: Uruguay

6. "Push and Pull": The Rocky Road to the Legalization of Abortion in Uruguay

Alejandra López-Gómez, Martín Couto, and Lucía Berro Pizzarossa

7. Women’s Bodies, an Eternal Battlefield?

Susana Rostagnol and Magdalena Caccia

Part III: Argentina

8. Rights and Social Struggle: The Experience of the National Campaign for the Right to Legal, Safe, and Free Abortion in Argentina

María Alicia Gutiérrez

9. Social Media Debate on #AbortoLegal in Argentina

Claudia Laudano

10. Transforming Abortion Access Through Feminist Community-Based Healthcare and Activism: A Case Study of Socorristas en Red in Argentina

Brianna Keefe-Oates

Part IV: Chile

11. Between the Secular and the Religious: The Role of Academia in the Abortion Debate in Chile

Lidia Casas Becerra

12. Exploring Alternative Meanings of a Feminist and Safe Abortion in Chile

Lieta Vivaldi and Valentina Stutzin

Afterword. Embodying Democracy: Abortion Protest and Politics in the Southern Cone

Sonia E. Alvarez