The green tide and the fight to legalize abortion in Argentina

MARÍA VICTORIA SECA

Conferencia; The Cultural Politics of Reproduction in Latin America; 2021

Institute of Latin American Studies (ILAS)

?Now we?re united. Now they finally see us.? This is the opening line to one of the songs from the nationwide women?s movement in 2018, which was led by young women.Young women have been part of the women?s rights movement since 2015 and their participation is growing. Their participation marks a watershed in the generation and gender of people involved in popular movements.The fight to legalize abortion in Argentina has a long history. In addition to strategies for influencing the government, for decades, feminist women have been active in deconstructing meanings related to abortion in the private sphere and taking concrete actions to guarantee access to abortion in certain situations (Bellucci, 2014). In places where the government is ineffective, there are communities of women that accompany and facilitate women?s own decisions about their own bodies. In 2018, the women?s and diversity movement created a range of symbolic and performative modes (Bonvillani, 2017): expressions used to make their demands public through eventstaging, festivities, and ceremonies, using an aesthetic that showed the body as an instrument for making the conflict visible.This paper seeks to understand the experiences of participation of young women who support the abortion rights in Mendoza (Argentina). Therefore, inquire about the process of identification as feminist, their practices and feelings during the time when the bill to allow for the Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancies (VIP or IVE in its Spanish acronym) was presented and debated in the House of Representatives (from March to August 2018). Finally, analyze the meanings built around their participation in the Green Wave. The methodology used in this paper is qualitative from an interpretative perspective and we made no-sexist interviews (Oakley, 1981) to four young womenwho perceive themselves as feminist activists and live in different areas of Mendoza. Through their testimony, we seek to understand the experiences of participation of young women who support the abortion rights in Mendoza (Argentina), analyse the process by which sexuality became a public issue and contribute to the scientific development of the region about feminist movements.