Abortion in Argentina: Years in the Making?

By Emily B. Jackson

1. 2015-2020: Ni Una Menos and the legalization of abortion

In 2015, a feminist movement emerged in Argentina under the mantle Ni Una Menos (“Not one [woman] less”) to protest gender-based violence and inequality. As the movement spread across the continent, it also grew within Argentina to represent a multi-generational, multi-sectoral feminist coalition with various policy goals, including the legalization of abortion.[1] Feminists achieved a victory in December of 2020 when the legislature voted to legalize access to abortion on demand, a notable advancement since the majority of Argentines were opposed to legal abortion just six years ago.[2] Was this policy change the result of Ni Una Menos?

Using data from the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), I mapped support for abortion among the general public in Argentina from 2012 to 2019. The first figure shows the overall level of support for abortion in each year and a regression line that predicts support for abortion while controlling for year, gender, age, income, urban/rural location, and protest participation. The raw data show that support for abortion increased from 2012 to 2019. Further, the regression showed a statistically significant increase in support for abortion among both men and women, and among both individuals who report participating in protests and those who do not. In this case, mobilization does have an effect on public opinion: there was a statistically significant increase in support for abortion even among men and less politically active individuals before 2020, coinciding with the emergence of the Ni Una Menos movement in 2015.

The legalization of abortion, and the increase in public support for this policy change, was a watershed moment for Argentina’s feminist movement. But should we be so surprised? How much have public views on abortion and gender roles really changed in Argentina? Using archival sources from the Roper Center’s Latin American Data Bank, this post charts the evolution of public views on gender and fertility from as early as 1964, highlighting how feminist movements, emerging in times of broad social change, have pushed abortion and birth control forward in the political agenda.

2. 1960s: Social revolution and changing women’s roles

As in the United States and across the globe, the 1960s were a time of significant social and cultural change in Argentina. During the 1940s and ‘50s, women had earned rights to vote, join political parties, and access protection as workers, but remained largely relegated to the private sphere (Feijoo, Nari & Fierro 1996). The 1960s brought new opportunities for women to pursue employment and university studies, as well as increased access to popular culture and new consumer goods. In a 1964 poll of women in Buenos Aires, 84.7 percent believed that women should have the same working opportunities as men.[3] This expanded role for women outside the home was enabled by the availability of birth control.

Though questions on support for abortion specifically do not appear until later, survey data on women’s views of birth control are an early baseline to establish familiarity with and support for family planning. By 1964, 76.4 percent of women in Buenos Aires approved of married couples using family planning. Respondents’ most frequently cited motives for family planning were family welfare, personal finance, and “rais[ing] children better.”[4]

3. 1980s-1990s: Democracy, feminism revitalized, and abortion enters public debate

The military dictatorship of 1976 through 1983 brutally repressed leftist political movements and attempted to reinstate a traditional family structure. In the midst of widespread repression, one successful women’s movement emerged in the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, who donned symbolic white headscarves and carried pictures of their missing children to protest illegal detainments and disappearances. These women gained international attention which strengthened the human rights movement that brought the dictatorship down.

Feminists in Argentina found inspiration not only from local activists, but also from the United Nations Decade on Women (1975 to 1985) and the Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Encuentros, founded in 1981. The first annual Encuentro Nacional de Mujeres (National Women’s Meeting) was organized in Buenos Aires in 1986, followed yearly by meetings where “women of different ages, social classes, ethnoracial backgrounds, and histories meet, network, organize, reflect on their lives, and discuss the critical issues of the day.”[5] In 1988, the first workshop on abortion appeared at an Encuentro, and its participants established the Comisión por el Derecho al Aborto (Commission for the Right to Abortion).

At the International Women's Day gathering on March 8, 1984, a woman's poster read "No to motherhood, Yes to pleasure." Credit: https://www.anred.org/2015/03/10/8-de-marzo-de-1984/

In 1989, local pollster Hugo Kolsky put the abortion question to the general public. Though we do not have data on support for abortion prior to the Encuentros, the fact that these questions were raised by a political polling firm indicate that feminists succeeded in putting abortion on the agenda. Thirty-one percent of Argentines polled were in favor of legalizing abortion, and 53.5 percent believed that “therapeutic” abortion should be permitted in cases of a deformed fetus or threat to the mother’s life. In total, 84.5 percent of the population believed it should be legal in at least some cases, and only 9.2 percent thought it should never be allowed.

Through the 1990s, the Buenos Aires-based research firm Graciela Römer y Asociados asked the general public their views on abortion again. Between 1991 and again in 1996, the number of respondents who supported legalizing abortion increased from 27 to 37 percent, and the number who thought it should be illegal shrank from 18 to 12 percent. In both years, a majority thought that abortion should be permitted “in certain cases.” These are small shifts, but the presence of these questions in national polls is evidence that feminists successfully kept abortion on the agenda. From 1989 onward, it is clear that the public was sympathetic to abortion at least in cases of rape and health threats.

4. Conclusions

The Roper Center’s archival data show that Argentine women have supported the idea of birth control as a way of protecting their families’ welfare since as early as 1964. Data from the 1980s and 1990s show that the majority of the Argentine public has been in favor of abortion at least in “certain cases” (or for “therapeutic” reasons) for a long time, with a sizable minority of 37 percent favoring full legalization of abortion as early as 1996. In the 21st century, regression analysis showed that diverse, visible feminist mobilization starting in 2015 coincided with a statistically significant increase in support for abortion among the general public prior to the legalization of abortion in 2020.

Though we are limited by the availability of historical data on this salient political issue, we know that pollsters were asking questions about abortion in the late 1980s and 1990s, following the organization of Argentina’s National Women’s Encuentros and the appearance of abortion as a feminist political issue. Though these data cannot prove a direct causal link between the Encuentros and the observed increase in public support, the appearance of survey questions on the topic suggests that there was a public interest in the issue at the same time as feminists started to advocate for it. Abortion is not a new issue for Argentina’s feminist movement; they have been actively pushing for legalization since 1988, and the data here suggest that the public has been sympathetic to the cause for nearly as long.

Emily Jackson is a 2021 Kohut Fellow and Ph.D. student in comparative politics in the Department of Government at Cornell. Her research focuses on social movements and gender in Latin America and the US, with a particular focus on framing tactics and intra-movement dynamics. Her Kohut Fellowship project will analyze the evolution of public opinion on gender and reproductive politics in Argentina from the mid-twentieth century to today.

References

AmericasBarometer by the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), www.LapopSurveys.org.

Feijoo, Maria del Carmen, Marcela M. A. Nari and Luis A. Fierro. 1996. “Women in Argentina during the 1960s.” Latin American Perspectives 23(1): 7-26.

Daby, Mariela and Mason W Moseley (2021). “Feminist Mobilization and theAbortion Debate in Latin America: Lessons from Argentina”. Politics & Gender, pp. 1–35.

Pew Research Center (Nov. 2014). “Religion in Latin America: Widespread Change in a Historically Catholic Region”. https://www.pewforum.org/2014/11/13/religion-in-latin-america/

Sutton, Barbara and Elizabeth Borland. 2013. “Framing Abortion Rights in Argentina's Encuentros Nacionales de Mujeres.” Feminist Studies 39(1): 194-234.