Abortion and democracy in Mexico, Argentina and Uruguay

As part of the series “Thinking about politics and contemporary societies from the critical left”, on February 18, Mexican anthropologist and feminist Marta Lamas gave the keynote address “Abortion and democracy in Mexico, Argentina and Uruguay”, commented on by Karina Batthyány, Executive Secretary of CLACSO.

The conference was held within the framework of the research line “Governance, Democracy and Sociopolitical Processes in Latin America”. Coordinators of the series: René Torres-Ruiz and Darío Salinas Figueredo.

Marta Lamas Encabo is also a professor of political science at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico (ITAM) and a professor/researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), affiliated with the Center for Gender Studies and Research (CIEG). Since 1990, she has edited one of the most important feminist journals in Latin America, "Debate Feminista." She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 and, two years later, received an honorary doctorate with a gender perspective from the University of Oaxaca (Mexico).

In her detailed presentation, Marta Lamas argued that “the three countries I want to talk about have had very different processes of struggle for the legalization of abortion. In Mexico Legalization only occurred in Mexico City in 2007. Then, just two years ago, in 2019, one of the remaining 31 states, Oaxaca, also decriminalized it, following the same model as Mexico City. There, the Church's intervention wasn't very overt. Mexico is a country that supposedly has a separation of powers, that had a socialist revolution at the beginning of the century, and where religious intervention wasn't very open. (…) The most overt political struggle took place after legalization in Mexico City and took the form—and continues to this day—of changing the constitutions in Mexico: there are 32 states, 32 federal entities, and each federal entity has its own Penal Code and its own state Constitution. The strategy was to introduce a reform to the constitutions protecting life from the moment of conception, thinking that in this way the existing grounds for non-punishment regarding abortion would no longer be accepted. We now have another one of these reforms, which is being called an anti-abortion reform, that was just passed two weeks ago. Interestingly, all the European countries that have decriminalized abortion have the protection of life because it is a general value that also admits exceptions, such as self-defense, as in the case of abortion. The way this process unfolded in Mexico is very interesting because it took place in Mexico City (formerly called the Federal District), where the left won the elections for the first time, and it was under the wing of the left, and very much in conjunction with the left, that the issue of legal abortion—called ILE in Mexico—was achieved. And it was also during the 2006 presidential elections, when the leftist candidate, who is now President López Obrador, lost by a margin of 0.1%. The votes weren't fully recounted, and the left, which thought it would win, was so angry, feeling that the presidency and the election had been stolen from them, that it was willing to do something that feminists had been fighting for for a long time: the decriminalization of abortion. And it could be done in a city like Mexico City. At that time, the mayor was Marcelo Ebrard, our current Secretary of Foreign Affairs. So the issue has been complicated in Mexico; it has been linked to a leftist stance and a struggle for democracy, and it has been, in a way, conditioned by this. I personally believe that if Andrés Manuel had won those elections, or if the count had been in his favor, there wouldn't have been decriminalization in Mexico City. It had a lot to do with the political conflict.

En Uruguay The process was different in Uruguay. The initiative had been under discussion for a very long time; it's one of the most interesting public debates. Furthermore, I believe Uruguay is the most secular country in Latin America. When the final abortion proposal was first brought to the Chamber of Deputies, it did pass by a narrow majority—47 votes in favor and 40 against—but it was followed by three days of extremely heated debate. When the Catholic Church realized there was a high probability the law would be approved in the Senate, it deployed a typical pressure tactic: personal calls to senators, letters sent, for example, to some whose children attended Catholic schools, warning them that if they voted for the reform, they would have to withdraw their children from those schools. Until then, pro-life groups had maintained a very low profile in Uruguay, but at that moment, groups of women, women dressed in white, began taking to the streets to collect signatures in favor of life and against abortion. The Archbishop of Montevideo, Nicolás Cotugno, declared that no legislator who called themselves Christian could vote for this law, and the main political leaders subsequently spoke out against it. The initiative was rejected in the Senate with 17 votes against and 3 in favor, and a senator from the Broad Front, Margarita Percovich, declared: "If the bill didn't have to be approved by a show of hands, if the vote were secret, the majority would have voted for it." In 2004, the victory of the left in the Uruguayan presidential elections rekindled hopes. The Socialist Party maintained a position in favor of legalizing abortion, and during Vice President Rodolfo Nin Novoa's campaign, he pledged in public dialogues with feminists that as soon as the Broad Front won, the abortion law would be one of the first bills they would support. However, President Tabaré Vázquez announced that while he was president of the Republic, there would be no abortion law and that if Parliament were to approve it, he would veto it. It was necessary to wait for José Mujica's victory for the law to be approved in October 2012.

En Argentina A bill was introduced during Macri's administration in 2018. Macri stated he would remain neutral, and even some female members of his party argued in favor. The bill passed in the Chamber of Deputies by a very close vote of 129 in favor and 125 against, but it lost in the Senate with 38% against and 31% in favor. What makes the Argentine case particularly noteworthy is the emergence of the "green wave," which had its roots in the 2015 "Ni una menos" (Not One Less) movement against violence against women. This movement brought hundreds of thousands of women, especially young women, into the streets and began to evolve into a powerful form of street-based political activism. Argentina is a country that endured a brutal dictatorship and underwent a 37-year transition to democracy, during which numerous human rights groups, unions, and groups of diverse political affiliations championed that democracy. This has resulted in a level of awareness of democratic politics that is clearly lacking at the popular level in Mexico. Furthermore, the women's movement has been holding a National Women's Meeting for 35 years. This meeting is not funded by any political party or organization; women attend using their own resources to discuss a wide range of issues, which has undoubtedly served as a unifying force. However, the green wave emerged in the eyes of more Latin American societies precisely with this first attempt at legalization in 2018, bringing a million people into the streets with their green scarves, a symbol of struggle that was largely appropriated by the mothers and grandmothers of the disappeared during the dictatorship. So what changes in Argentina now in 2020 with legalization? A long time ago, feminist political scientists talked about how achieving change required a golden triangle. This golden triangle meant having a strong movement in the streets at one corner, a citizenry constantly demanding rights. At the other corner, you have academia, university students, intellectuals providing arguments, statistics, and supporting those demands. And at the apex, you have government officials, the people who make the decisions. And in Argentina we see several things, we see that massive street movement that has been expressed since 2018 (...), you have an Academy working, researching the issue, and you will have at the forefront of decision-making not only a president who, since his electoral campaign – when he goes to visit Mujica in Uruguay, they are both wearing the green scarf and both Mujica and Fernández make a very important statement – ​​but you will also have this phenomenon of governance feminists, of feminist activists who, after a political struggle, come to occupy positions in the Government.”

Karina Batthyány, commenting on Marta Lamas's conference, highlighted that CLACSO is working hard on the issue of gender inequality and that "the issue of sexual and reproductive rights and abortion in Latin America and the Caribbean is one of our priority areas." As Marta rightly pointed out in her lecture, when one looks at the current situation in Latin America and the Caribbean, what we find is that abortion is either prohibited, highly restricted, or only slightly decriminalized. That is the situation she presented, she illustrated it for three countries, but she presented the situation in general throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. And this is a worrying issue because the countries that have decriminalized abortion – Cuba, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, Argentina and of course the states of Mexico City and Oaxaca in Mexico – are an exception to the rule that extends throughout our region and that except for these cases and due to some circumstances, there are even very strong penalties against women. Perhaps the most paradigmatic are the 5 Latin American and Caribbean countries that reject abortion under any circumstances: Dominican Republic, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador. El Salvador particularly surprises me because of the extremely aggressive way in which women accused of abortion are prosecuted; today we have more than 12 Salvadoran women in prison for having abortions, and some with sentences of more than 40 years in prison, even sentences that are longer, in many cases double, than the sentences or penalties for rape. This is truly dramatic because we also know that, as a crux of inequality, this is linked to other inequalities, and that it is particularly the poorest women, the youngest women, the victims of rape, who have to resort to these kinds of practices and put at risk not only their health but also their freedom in these countries. We must be fully aware that today 97% of Latin American and Caribbean women of reproductive age live in countries where abortion is not permitted, and despite the difficulties in accessing and verifying this data, it is estimated that between 5.000 and 10.000 women die in our region due to illegal, clandestine abortions. This is not only a public health problem – as was rightly said here and where Marta began her lecture – but also a political issue, since women cannot legally decide about their own bodies, and this is aggravated by the situations of poverty and violence in which many women live in our Latin American and Caribbean region. Marta put it very clearly: the fact that abortion is prohibited doesn't mean it doesn't exist; it has always existed and will continue to exist. It's simply that when abortion is prohibited, it's done safely by those who can afford it, those who have the resources, those who have the connections to terminate their pregnancy, while the vast majority of women have to do it risking their lives or their freedom.”