A conversation with three women—a doctor, a former senator, and an activist—who led the fight to abolish Argentina's restrictive reproductive rights laws.

JANUARY 25, 2023

The activists had been standing in front of the National Congress for 48 hours by the time the vote began at 4 a.m. on December 30, 2020. Inside the building, senators had finally concluded almost 12 hours of uninterrupted debate over whether abortion would become legal in Argentina.

As the votes were tallied, the girls and women waiting outside the National Congress held one another in expectation. Then the results came in: 38-29 in favor of the legalization of abortion. They jumped, danced, cried, sang and rushed to buy beer in celebration. After 15 years of organizing, abortion had finally been legalized in Argentina. Their victory would set off a wave of decriminalization across Latin America.

The bill that became law that day is officially called the Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancy Law. It mandates that both private and public health care systems guarantee the right to free, safe and legal abortions everywhere.

Before 2020, it was primarily only wealthy women who could obtain safe abortions in Argentina because the procedure required paying for medicine (generally misoprostol), ultrasounds and follow-up treatment. Poorer women were exposed to unsafe abortions and lacked access to quality treatments. A national taboo around abortion led to the creation of clandestine provider networks. Hundreds of thousands of clandestine procedures were performed in Argentina each year, and women feared going to public hospitals for help if something went wrong. More than 3,000 women and girls died between 1983 and 2016 as a result of botched underground abortions. A variety of criminal charges could be leveled against women who chose to pursue the procedure, including aggravated homicide and grievous bodily harm. As of December 2020, more than 1,500 women were in jail for having had abortions. At least 10 imprisoned women are still behind bars.

Even before the law was passed, the variety of criminal charges assigned to abortions in Argentina made it challenging to identify the exact number of detentions and prosecutions due to abortions.

The state’s continued refusal to acknowledge the necessity of safe access to abortion care functionally deprived millions of women of their rights. Arguments against legalization were seen as hypocritical by abortion-rights advocates: Even while the pro-life movement argued that they would adopt unwanted babies, the ongoing economic crisis in Argentina made it increasingly difficult for pregnant women and mothers to support their children. By the time the parliamentary debate over the bill finally arrived at the end of 2020, the arguments both for and against the bill were overwhelmingly religious.

An organization called Catholics for the Right to Decide was one of the leading advocates for the bill. Founded in 1994, the group worked to show that its faith demanded the protection of reproductive rights. Its work helped open a debate within churches across the country, far from the progressive bubbles of the big cities.

The abortion bill was introduced to Congress by President Alberto Fernández, fulfilling a promise he had made upon assuming office in December 2019.

The bill’s passage meant that Argentina, an intensely Catholic country of 47 million people, became a pioneer of sexual and reproductive rights legislation in the Americas. How did this seemingly paradoxical phenomenon take place? What political and social forces enabled it? What alliances pushed it forward? How did debates over abortion rights unfold across the country?

The Dial spoke to three abortion advocates to try to understand these questions: María de los Ángeles Sacnun, a former senator who voted in favor of the law; Laura Salomé Canteros, a journalist, activist and member of the National Campaign for the Right to Legal, Safe and Free Abortion; and Julieta Bazán, a doctor who is a part of the Network of Health Care Workers for the Right to Decide. What follows is a lightly edited and condensed version of their conversation.

THE DIAL: The movement to legalize abortion was called the marea verde, the “green wave,” named for the color of the scarves that women wore to signal their support for the bill. It is one of the biggest mass movements that our generation has seen, a truly transversal alliance. For the first time, many congressional representatives from different parties were seen together, all advocating for the same bill. How would you describe these movements in your own groups, organizations and jobs?

LAURA SALOMÉ CANTEROS, activist: The initiative of the feminist movement was led on the streets by the National Campaign for the Right to Legal, Safe and Free Abortion, an intergenerational, nationwide multidisciplinary group that emerged in 2005 and brought together more than a thousand political, human rights, student and trade organizations.

Inside Congress, the “green wave” of votes in favor of abortion rights was achieved through the strategy of political transversality — that is, the rupture and/or disobedience of legislators with their blocs or with the leadership of their political parties. The construction of a feminist politics reflected what was happening on the streets.

JULIETA BAZÁN, doctor: From the health and science perspective, the debate inside Congress and in academia focused on underscoring the high fatality rates for clandestine abortions. Most women who underwent them ended up in the hospital, which put their health, and in some cases their lives, at risk. If illegal abortions were so dangerous, our approach was to develop safe techniques within the public health care system to prevent them [from being necessary].

We worked on two fronts: We wanted to build a consensus on legalization within the health care system, and we also worked on the social decriminalization of abortion among doctors in order to stop the surrounding stigma.

The Health Care Workers for the Right to Decide worked to teach, protect and guarantee the protocols around abortion even when it was illegal. They were a network of health professionals available to aid women who were carrying out unsafe abortions during the times that it was illegal. During the congressional debate, they worked side by side to show how clandestine abortions were more dangerous and more expensive for women and the health care system than providing medications and preventive treatment safely. While there are still doctors who refuse to perform abortions, the new law requires public and private institutions to have non-objector doctors to ensure the procedure is available to all.

Another strong argument for the passing of the bill was exposing the huge cost of unsafe abortions. It is more expensive to treat women who have complications from clandestine abortions than it is to provide abortion pills and provide access to safe procedures.

THE DIAL: Many feminists have struggled for legal abortion for decades in Argentina. There were certain talking points — such as the idea that illegal abortions already happened in Argentina whether people liked it or not — that broke a historical silence around the topic. Many young girls approached their parents, grandparents and schoolteachers and worked on talking about this in order to change their elders’ minds. Several members of Congress changed their votes after the influence of their daughters, including Vice President and Senate leader Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who said her daughter, Florencia, had influenced her opinion. Still, many groups were hard to convince. How did you handle the conversations with the leaders in more conservative provinces, and with professionals who objected to performing abortions in their hospitals?

MARÍA DE LOS ÁNGELES SACNUN, senator: As senators and house members, putting aside our party differences was really key to debating the bill. We really did put gender issues before anything else. That’s what enabled an honest dialogue, filled with sorority, across Argentina.

We spoke with nonprofits and feminist organizations from all over the country, journalists, experts and scientists, who helped clarify and deconstruct the arguments for and against abortion. We didn’t just talk with whoever agreed with us, we also spoke to those who didn’t, which helped us understand their understanding of abortion and allowed us to include their concerns in the text of the bill.

Before the vote, our main tasks were to organize to see how many votes we had and how many we still had to gain, and to work side by side with members of the House and Senate from different political parties. We had WhatsApp groups [with members of Congress, journalists, activists and experts] where we discussed strategies and organized to gain more votes. We also worked alongside the National Campaign for the Right to Legal, Safe and Free Abortion to diagnose where we were at and what needed to be done. It was a joint effort.

CANTEROS: We worked to build political alliances, social support, feminist networks; we participated in parliamentary lobbying and became spokespeople to the national and international press. Breaking the silence, so that every Argentine dinner table could talk about abortion, was the first step toward securing the unprecedented social support that pushed Congress to pass the law. Intergenerational activism was fundamental.

BAZÁN: The bill was innovative in many ways. It includes the word "voluntary," which puts the focus on the right to individual autonomy. It allows people to be the protagonists of their lives. It is no longer up to health care teams to decide whether the abortion is legal or not. Each person decides whether or not to have an abortion, regardless of what the health care team thinks.

The abortion bill demanded that the procedure be included in Argentina’s Plan Médico Obligatorio — a list of medical services that have to be provided for free in the country, which includes everything from flu shots to rare disease treatments — just like contraceptives already are. That guaranteed that everyone would be able to access abortion, not just those who could afford it.

THE DIAL: The first time the law was brought to a vote was in 2018, when it passed the House but didn’t make it through the Senate. Which key points do you believe were important to “convince” our society that this was a very much-needed right in 2020? How should we think about the law now, two years after its passage?

SACNUN: After 2020, no new norm that contradicts this conquest can be introduced because you can’t legislate away rights that have already been established.

CANTEROS: The law on abortion in Argentina generated greater agreement within the regional feminist movement in regards to the importance of being permanently organized — in institutions, the streets and social networks — for the right to abortion in particular, and for the fulfillment of sexual and (non-)reproductive rights as human rights in general. It had immediate consequences, such as the mobilizations that led several states in Mexico to decriminalize abortion in 2021. In 2022, the Constitutional Court in Colombia legalized abortion up to the 24th week of pregnancy. In Argentina, we followed the path started by other feminists, and many others will now follow in our footsteps. Latin America and the Caribbean have a huge feminist movement claiming its rights, and it’s time for governments to listen.

© Anita Pouchard Serra, a French-Argentinian photojournalist and visual storyteller, based in Buenos Aires. Her work appears in The New York Times, TIME, Bloomberg, *Washington Post,* and *Le Monde*, among others. Her photography has been exhibited in Argentina, France, Uruguay, Mexico, Spain and the USA.

BAZÁN: At first, some doctors were scared about how this would play out in their workplaces. They were afraid of being harassed for being willing to carry out legal abortions. But the law is the law. And after 2020 demand grew a lot, which shows that by being able to assume that it is a right, people are encouraged to approach the hospital and stop pursuing unsafe abortions.

But today, two years after legalization, we still lack resources. In Argentina, we have nationally produced misoprostol, which is bought and distributed by the state. But there are many rural areas where there is no access, and we need to provide care that meets international quality standards.

THE DIAL: OK, we made it. Abortion is legal: Any woman can walk into any hospital in the country and can state that she wants to end her pregnancy. The hospital should provide pre-care, the meds and a follow-up appointment afterward. What are the challenges for this to work perfectly at this point?

SACNUN: The main challenge at this point, I would say, is the training of professionals to carry out the procedures. They must have proper training about the law. And the second issue is the implementation of the Integral Sexual Education Law, passed in 2010, which guarantees sex education in all school levels across Argentina. That’s key to preventing unwanted pregnancies. Lastly, it’s fundamental that everyone can access quality health care: It’s useless to have the law if you can’t access public health.

CANTEROS: The state should also promote awareness of the right, because no one demands a right that they’re not aware of.

BAZÁN: No matter what happens, we’ll continue working on the campaign until legal abortion is enforced everywhere. The law is a starting point that opened up greater access to care, but for it to be effective we have to overcome all barriers.