In Latin America and the Caribbean, more than six million pregnancies are voluntarily terminated each year. For most women, however, abortions take place illegally in hazardous situations with terrible consequences, from death to incarceration. As of the publication of this book, only Cuba, Uruguay, and Mexico City permitted abortion on demand. In most countries, abortion is allowed under specific circumstances, usually when the woman’s life is in danger but also in cases of rape and fetal malformations. In the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Suriname, abortion is criminalized always, even when the woman’s life is at risk or the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.
In the last decades, variation in legal standards has ranged from reforms that liberalized abortion in particular situations, such as Chile, to the total ban on abortion in Nicaragua. The modality and intensity of social mobilizations for abortion rights also varies across countries, considering the actors involved inside and outside the state: health experts and public officials, local and global NGOs, feminist grassroots organizations and their political allies. The struggle for abortion rights in Latin America seems an endless process shaped by an intricate set of actors, institutions, and networks.
This book centers on a broad, complex, and multidimensional public issue in a region characterized by gendered social inequalities and democratic deficits. Meanwhile, social and women’s mobilizations persist and have intensified in recent years. The major contribution of Marcus-Delgado’s book is the multicausal analysis to explain both opportunities for change in abortion laws and conservative backlashes successful in maintaining the status quo. Chapters of the book are organized to cope with three broad dimensions: the interplay between political actors and institutions, with examples of the role of judiciaries and presidents in allowing changes or keeping the restrictions; the role of civil society actors in mobilizing resources in support of women’s rights; and the development of global alliances and public discourses, which organize pro-choice versus pro-life camps.
Throughout the book, Marcus-Delgado offers a rich historical account of the political process of abortion reform. The role of political institutions and state actors, such as presidents and courts, is illustrated through case analysis from Chile and Colombia. In Argentina, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic, the complexity of political institutions and political interests resulted in stopping reform efforts or passing even more restrictive laws.
The second dimension highlights the role of different civil society actors in Bolivia, Peru, Mexico, and El Salvador. The book accounts for the role that feminist NGOs and networks of lawyers, doctors, and international actors have played in the struggle to legalize abortion, but also exposes the conservative mobilizations against it.
A valuable feature of the book is the extensive and richly documented recount of women’s personal stories of their attempts to find justice. Beatriz, Paulina, Leslie, Rosita, Esperanza, Belén, Manuela are the names of some of the women who have suffered discrimination, social and institutional violence, and state oppression. The book brings those dreadful stories into the network of political actors, institutions, and local and global stakeholders that paves the way for expanding social and political changes. Through the traumatic journeys of young women, often poor and vulnerable, the author explains the complex way these private cases interact with state institutions and enter the public arena, tracing the political process on different scales.
Global politics adds complexity to the abortion issue in Latin America. The global gender agenda is characterized by numerous international conferences, agreements, and declarations on women’s rights. After the concept of reproductive rights was endorsed at the Cairo Conference on Population and Development in 1994, a pro-choice versus pro-life division became visible in the global arena. The book clearly explains the major role that feminist actors have played in international conventions and forums to expand women’s rights and gender equality, but also the centrality that the Vatican, the conservative US foreign policy, and other allies occupy in blocking those attempts to reform. In some cases, institutions like the United Nations have proved to be critical for local NGOs to back reforms for women’s rights; for example, during the Zika crisis in Brazil. In other cases, conservative alliances, like that of the Vatican with Muslim states during the Cairo Conference, have succeeded in influencing national leaders and public officials to restrict women’s access to abortion services, even in cases specified by the law, as in Nicaragua and El Salvador. The global arena can be a place for the elaboration of public discourses in favor of women’s rights, but also a space where powerful international actors can exercise influence over Latin American politicians eager to make political moves that benefit them while in power.
The author suggests that there is no single strategy for politically advancing a reproductive rights agenda in Latin America, but gives more weight in the analysis to the role of nonstate actors than to the relevance of political structures. For example, Marcus-Delgado discusses a few institutional dimensions, such as government ideologies and presidential personal convictions, to argue that they were not relevant in affecting change. On the one hand, during the so-called Pink Tide, a shift to the left in the region, no significant changes occurred. On the other hand, women presidents have not prompted political changes, sometimes due to personal opposition, like that which Violeta Chamorro in Nicaragua or Cristina Kirchner in Argentina faced, and other times because of the high political costs concomitant to promoting this issue, such as affected Michelle Bachelet during her first term in Chile or Dilma Rousseff in Brazil.
Instead, the book draws more extensively on some elements that could contribute to the success of a reproductive rights agenda. While Marcus-Delgado ponders the role of organized religion, pressures from below offer an interesting perspective for analyzing cases in which feminist mobilization has grown over the years. Stakeholders were also important among health professionals, journalists, lawyers, and labor unions because all played key roles, depending on the specific context or country. They gave voice to women across Latin America, exposing the consequences of illegal abortions and even the incarceration of young women who were accused of criminal acts.
Marcus-Delgado’s major effort to shed light on the complexity of the issue in the region is effective. The book concentrates on mapping mechanisms, interests, and strategies while making clear that they are not necessarily conditions for success. The author points out that the legal frameworks on abortion are the result of a convergence of factors and interactions and are based on a thorough and extensive reading of previous work on the topic and fieldwork research.
The methodological framework is not what one expects of a classical comparative politics book because it is not organized around a question, problem, or hypothesis. With all the information collected, the author could have made the decision to answer what seems evident; that is, why, despite major efforts from pro-choice actors, no significant changes have transpired. In the end, Latin America is a mosaic of interests, ideas, and diverse political and moral values, a system of multiple vetoes at different scales that end up functioning to maintain the status quo; that is, effectively securing restrictions on women’s abortion rights. Instead of isolating common factors that could explain the outcomes (more failures than successes), the author brings up specific examples across the region to illustrate several processes with diverse outcomes, leaving the reader with a puzzle rather than a clear conclusion.
A way to build a comparative politics of abortion in Latin America would be to label the countries depending on the outcomes; that is, countries with a total ban on abortion, countries in which abortion is not penalized under specific circumstances, and countries with abortion on demand (generally during the first trimester of pregnancy). Then a process-tracing method in each group of countries could help to identify the common explanatory factors in particular outcomes. Consider the cases of Mexico City, Uruguay, and Argentina (after the publication of this book), the only countries that have legalized abortion on demand. It can be argued that they have in common the rise of a political opportunity structure, built over time by a collaboration of feminist grassroots organizations with political allies in legislatures—and only later in the executive—that led the way to reversing restrictive laws. Although feminist ideologies among women’s organizations are being disseminated across Latin America, such as in Chile and Peru, the emergence of such political opportunity structure is still pending. On the contrary, the political prevalence of organized religion, in societies with weak feminism at the grassroots level and clear democratic deficits, has the potential to explain conservative outcomes, such as those in El Salvador or Nicaragua.
This book is highly recommended for students who want to have at hand a roadmap of abortion politics in Latin America. This is definitely a captivating topic, and the book opens up new questions for future research and has the potential to inform wider debates among those interested in Latin American gender and politics.
