Abortion and Democracy

Barbara Sutton is a professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany, State University of New York, United States. She is also affiliated with the departments of Sociology and of Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino Studies at the same institution.Nayla Luz Vacarezza is an assistant researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), Argentina. She is affiliated with the Gino Germani Research Institute and teaches sociology courses at the Universidad de Buenos Aires.

"Abortion and Democracy offers fresh insights into abortion politics in Latin America’s Southern Cone and its relationship to democracy and broader social movements. The volume brings together a mix of established and younger scholars and a range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives. The result is the most comprehensive analysis to date of contemporary abortion politics in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay – one that attends to both insider politics within democratic institutions and outsider politics of protest in a nuanced manner."- Christina Ewig, Professor of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, USA"This radical review of abortion in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay is an exciting, challenging and much needed collection for global body politics. The collection sweeps aside outdated views of abortion as confined to individual women’s struggles to rights and access to resources, to show how abortion is integral to collective bodies in protest, embodied resistance, and feminist practices of accompaniment and radical citizenship. I found it an extraordinary read. Theoretically and empirically it offers deeply contextualised understandings of abortion, offering new and important insights for transnational feminist studies and practice."- Wendy Harcourt, Professor of Gender, Diversity and Sustainable Development, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands."Focusing on struggles to decriminalise abortion in Latin America, this book makes a seminal contribution to our understanding of contentious politics. Stressing the importance of historical and political contingency, it casts new light on the strategies, alliances and discourses deployed by feminist activists to advance the democratic case for reproductive justice. Absolutely necessary reading." - Maxine Molyneux, Professor of Sociology, University College London, UK"A brilliant and inspiring guide to abortion struggles in Latin America’s Southern Cone, this book has much to teach students, scholars, and activists around the world about creative feminist ways of doing politics that advance abortion rights while simultaneously building strong coalitions for social justice, public health, and accountable democratic institutions."- Betsy Hartmann, professor emerita of development studies, Hampshire College, Amherst, USA, and author of Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control

• 1 Abortion Rights Struggles in the Southern Cone: An Introduction, Part I. Comparative and Transnational Perspectives, 2 Abortion and Political Parties in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 3 Feminist Lawyers, Litigation, and the Fight for Abortion Rights in the Southern Cone, 4 Orange Hands and Green Kerchiefs: Affect and Democratic Politics in Two Transnational Symbols for Abortion Rights, 5 Moral Neoconservatism and Contemporary Politics: Argentina and Chile in Comparative Perspective, Part II. Uruguay, 6 Abortion in Uruguay in a New Political Scenario, 7 Women’s Bodies, an Everlasting Battlefield?, Part III. Argentina, 8 Rights and Social Struggle: The Experience of the National Campaign for the Right to Legal, Safe, and Free Abortion in Argentina, 9 Social Media Discussion for #AbortoLegal in Argentina, 10 Transforming Abortion Access through Feminist Community-based Healthcare: A Case Study of the Socorristas en Red (feministas que abortamos) in Argentina, Part IV. Chile, 11. Abortion Legalization in Chile: The Academy as an Arena of Contestation, 12 12. “Multiple Meanings of a Feminist, Safe, and ‘Territorialized’ Abortion in Chile”, Conclusion