Latin America has long been hostile terrain to abortion rights advocates, even in the last few decades as legal abortion became available in most parts of Europe, North America, and other parts of the world.
But a grassroots feminist movement won a victory in Argentina on Wednesday when the Senate legalized abortion in a surprisingly sweeping vote. This made Argentina the first large country in Latin America to take this step.
Here are some of the forces behind the drive for change in Argentina and some of the questions that arise from it.
Why is this happening now?
The women’s rights movement has taken on a new urgency across Latin America in recent years, nowhere more than in Argentina.
A movement that emerged in 2015 over the murders of women – including the gruesome murders of a 14-year-old and a 16-year-old – grew over the years into a broad national campaign for rights called Ni Una Menos or not one woman less. Legalizing abortion became its primary political goal, largely driven by young activists who have become well organized, vocal, and staged repeated demonstrations.
The #MeToo movement, which broke out in the US in 2017 and spread around the world, has stepped up these efforts.
In some countries, such as Mexico, the focus was on violence against women. But efforts from state to state in Mexico to make legal abortion more accessible there have also gained ground. The state of Oaxaca was the second after Mexico City to legalize the procedure last year.
Increasing secularism in Argentina and many other countries, especially among young people, has also lowered the barriers to liberal ends.
A major factor in Argentina was the election of President Alberto Fernández last year, one of the most socially liberal leaders in Latin America. He campaigned for abortion rights, gender equality, and gay and transgender rights, and last month legalized the cultivation of marijuana for medicinal purposes at home.
What are the abortion laws like in the rest of Latin America?
About two dozen countries around the world have laws that not only prohibit abortion but make no exceptions, according to groups that closely monitor access to abortion.
These countries, especially in America and Africa, include Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica and Suriname. The ban was zealously enforced, with women whose pregnancy does not end with the birth of a healthy baby sometimes coming under suspicion and those sentenced to decades in prison for abortion.
From Mexico to Chile, a predominantly Roman Catholic region, most countries prohibit abortion early in pregnancy, but make exceptions if pregnancy puts a woman’s life at risk.
Some countries also allow abortions up to a certain point in pregnancy if the pregnancies are due to rape or incest, or if there are serious fetal abnormalities. Chile joined these countries in 2017 when it reversed one of the world’s toughest abortion bans.
Paraguay caught international attention when a pregnant 10-year-old girl who allegedly had been raped by her stepfather was unable to perform an abortion because her life was not in danger. The case led to calls for the Conservative government to liberalize the law, but it was not changed.
In all of Latin America, only three countries have legalized early pregnancy abortion for any reason, and all three countries are small and outliers in other important ways as well.
Ruled by the Communist Party for more than 60 years, Cuba legalized abortion in the 1960s. Guyana, a former British colony with a large non-Christian South Asian population, took this step in the 1990s. And Uruguay, where around 40 percent of people say they have no religious affiliation, did so in 2012.
What role does religion play?
Historically, more than 90 percent of the people in Latin America have been Catholic, and the Church, which strongly opposed abortion, exerted a powerful influence not only on religious beliefs but also on governments and ethical and social norms.
But the Church’s influence has steadily waned since the 1970s, and by 2014 less than 70 percent of Latin Americans called themselves Catholic, according to the Pew Research Center.
The sexual abuse scandals that rocked the Church have hit Latin America as hard as they have in many other parts of the world, driving some people from the Church and weakening their moral authority. A growing number of people who still identify as Catholic, especially young people, are not paying attention and are comfortable when they violate the teachings of the Church.
But evangelical Protestants, who are often more conservative than many Catholics on social issues, are on the rise and now make up about a fifth of Latin Americans. This explains why Central America, where the evangelical churches are strongest, has some of the strictest abortion laws.
At the same time, the number of people who have no religious affiliation and are more liberal on social issues has risen, although their ranks are still much smaller than those of the Protestant population.
Despite being the home of Pope Francis, America’s first Pope, Argentina is one of the most secular countries in Latin America. It’s unusual for polls to show that people without religion are more evangelicals.
Will the movement spread beyond Argentina?
The debate in Argentina has received tremendous attention in Latin America and is sure to stimulate discussion on abortion in other countries.
Recent efforts to facilitate access to abortion – successful in the case of Argentina, Chile and the Mexican state of Oaxaca and unsuccessful in the case of El Salvador, Brazil and Colombia – show that a region is emerging with changing social, cultural and political changes grapples.
The urge to change is often due to grassroots movements. Left-wing presidents who had taken power in Latin America over the past two decades showed little or no interest in changing abortion laws. These include Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff from Brazil, Andrés Manuel López Obrador from Mexico, Daniel Ortega from Nicaragua, and Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela.
The left Bolivian government decriminalized early abortion for “students, adolescents or girls” in 2017 – and repealed the change weeks later.
Argentine President Fernández represents a new generation and a change from his predecessors, as a leftist who has made access to abortion one of his top priorities.
