Anti-Abortion Mobilization in Latin America: Signs of a Field in Transformation

Gender and sexuality have become a focal point of the political divide in Latin Amer-ica. In many countries, religious actors, political leaders, pro-life and pro-family nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), among others, have come together to pro-mote a neoconservative shift in contemporary regional politics. Despite the constant public presence of religious actors and their long-standing influence on public policies in the region, recent challenges to sexual and reproduc-tive rights have come from a field in transformation. The anti-abortion mobilization shows important signs of adaptation and mutation on different fronts - networks, alliances, strategies, and frameworks. Finally, this process of renovation has led to the expansion of this dispute towards a broader anti-gender alliance, and the increasing importance of legal strategies and tools by anti-abortion actors is remark-able. The transformations in the anti-abortion field were globally put into action after the conservatives' defeat in the UN Conference in Cairo, and they also inter-acted with different local processes, in response to the relational dynamics between movement and countermovement. However, we can see important convergences among Latin-American cases. Drawing on evidence from case studies of countries in the region, this article analyses the main characteristics of contemporary anti-abortion activism in Latin America. It identifies significant commonalities among the cases and raises the hypotheses that shifts in the composition of the anti -abor-tion networks, in mobilization strategies and frames are inserted in a trend that has been transnationally diffused and subject to different processes of vernaculariza-tion. This article ultimately calls attention to the need for more empirical research to address the regional dynamics of transnational actors, diffusion processes, and local adaptations.