Abortion rights demonstrators celebrate outside the Palace of Justice in Bogotá, Colombia, after the Colombian Constitutional Court voted in favor of decriminalizing abortion up to 24 weeks of gestation on Feb. 21. GUILLERMO LEGARIA SCHWEIZER/GETTY IMAGES
May 6, 2022 – After Texas enacted the United States’ most severe abortion restrictions last September, Mexican abortion rights activists hatched a plan to help women across the border. They were also motivated by concerns that the U.S. Supreme Court might soon overturn the landmark abortion rights decision Roe v. Wade, which now appears likely after a draft majority opinion leaked from the court this week.
As the New York Times reported in December 2021, the Mexican feminist collective Las Libres has long helped women seeking abortions in their own country by sending them abortion-inducing pills and coaching them over the phone or in person about how to administer them. In January, they began concerted efforts to send the pills to Texas and other locations across the United States, according to someone involved in the project who spoke to Foreign Policy on the condition of anonymity.
In the last two years, Latin American advocates have worked to notch significant victories on abortion rights in their countries just as U.S. authorities have stripped them away. Argentina’s Congress legalized abortion in December 2020, Mexico’s Supreme Court voted to decriminalize abortion in September 2021, and Colombia’s Constitutional Court followed suit in February of this year. In Mexico, individual states must also rule on abortion for it to be effectively legalized, but the top court’s ruling sets binding precedent.
Political observers in all three of those countries credit the developments to street mobilizations by abortion rights activists, which are known as the “green tide” for the green handkerchiefs demonstrators often wear. But participants say that’s only part of their success. Off the streets, “Latin American feminists have constant spaces of dialogue and exchange with each other” both within and beyond their countries, said Colombian lawyer Mariana Ardila of the women’s rights organization Women’s Link Worldwide.
Many of the Las Libres activists as well as members of similar collectives in Argentina and Chile view their work on abortion not as a stand-alone issue but as just one direct-action component of broader feminist mobilization, according to a survey of 457 activists co-administered by four such groups and published Thursday. The larger feminist ecosystem in Latin America has brought together figures as diverse as legal scholars, doctors, and even some Christian groups and center-right politicians in recent years.
In Argentina, feminism “has become a mass movement” since large-scale protests against femicide began in 2015, said journalist Estefanía Pozzo. Its intellectual foundations, however, have been laid over decades through wide-ranging and inclusive grassroots organizing. From that base, Pozzo said, arguments emerged that “abortion is an economic issue and a class issue” as well as one of access to health care and autonomy.
Claims that legalizing abortion would not only promote privacy and individual choice (Roe’s linchpin) but also improve access to health care and decrease social inequalities have been key in victorious lawsuits in Latin America, said Ardila, the Colombian lawyer. “Here in the global south, we’ve had emblematic, bold arguments succeed in court that can be an example to the rest of the world.”
Argentine activists emphasized the messaging around health equity to win over even center-right politicians, who were crucial to their efforts to legalize abortion in Congress. Argentina’s broader feminist movement switched up tactics at times, staging society-wide strikes to protest gender-based violence or waging campaigns on social media and through mainstream media appearances to change public opinion.
“The fight doesn’t always have to be aggressive. It has to choose the right tactics,” Pozzo said.
When Colombian activists faced pushback from the religious right, they took their cue from the Argentines: They just kept going, “building leverage through political institutions”—like court decisions—“and public opinion,” international relations professor Ana María Arango of Colombia’s Externado University told Foreign Policy.
Despite these successes, though, abortion access remains hard to come by in much of the region. Some countries in Central America ban abortion under all circumstances, and Brazil still bans it in most cases. Activists in countries where abortion is newly legalized stress that some conservative doctors still object to carrying out the procedure. Still, the recent victories in Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia are significant—not least because their deep entwinement with the larger feminist movement has brought about other social changes as well.
In Chile, where a legislative effort at decriminalizing abortion was narrowly voted down in November 2021, mass feminist mobilizations in the previous two years successfully pushed for half of the country’s constitutional assembly to be composed of women and led to a presidential cabinet that is majority female. Argentina’s Congress is currently considering expansions to maternity and paternity leave, a key feminist demand.
And in Colombia, March congressional elections yielded the most women lawmakers in the country’s history. Three presidential candidates have also chosen Afro-Colombian women as their running mates, El Tiempo reported. One of the women, environmental lawyer Francia Márquez, first ran in a primary as a presidential candidate and garnered more votes than some well-known white, male political insiders.
Externado University international relations professor Magda Catalina Jiménez credits the popularity of Márquez and other Black women candidates to “an enormous participation of women activists over the years,” and especially to the cultivation of both an “intergenerational and intersectional feminism” in Colombia.
That feminist movement still faces plenty of hurdles, she added. But it could serve as an inspiration for activists elsewhere, including in the United States.
“Feminist movements are transnational,” she said.
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