Radical Aims through Moderate Means: Legal Mobilization and Framing Transformation in the Process of Abortion Legalization in Mexico City

ALBA RUIBAL

Bruselas

Simposio; Simposio internacional The Use of Law by Social Movements and Civil Society; 2018

ARC Strategic Litigation, Universidad Católica de Lovaina

This paper intends to contribute to the understanding of the role of the law in framing transformation in contexts of movement/countermovement dynamics. Drawing on fieldwork research on the process of feminist legal mobilization for abortion rights in Mexico, it analyzes two under-studied questions in the scholarship on law and social movements: 1) the role of legal mobilization on framing transformation, and the role of the movement-countermovement conflict in this process, and 2) the relationship between legal framing processes and the movement?s organizational structure. Regarding the former, and following Reva Siegel?s general theory, the study contributes to the understanding of the ways in which legal mobilization can exert a moderating effect on movement claims, particularly within the abortion rights struggle. Regarding the latter, it shows that that the moderate framing developed by the more legalistic movement sector in Mexico was able to overcome intra-movement dissidence given the highly concentrated structure of the abortion rights movement, and the centrality of the legalized sector within that structure.