CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The arrival of sexual and reproductive rights on public agendas implies a new moment in the dynamics between law and society in Latin America. Despite important regional and international advances to guarantee sexual and reproductive rights, these have frequently provoked tensions between those favoring and those opposing their recognition, battles which are increasingly played out in the region?s courts. One of the most controversial issues is abortion, where both those opposing abortion rights and those favoring its legalization or decriminalization have made recourse to the national and regional courts to try and influence public opinion and policy.Since our first meeting in Mexico, the team of researchers working on the Abortion Rights Lawfare IRC have already contributed several publications analyzing the strategic uses of law and the role of courts in Latin America in determining access to legal, safe and free abortion services in different Latin American Countries. Works have been published in English (i.e., Volume 17.1 of the Harvard Health and Human Rights journal, co-edited by one of our organizers) and Spanish (in the recently published book El aborto en América Latina, Siglo XXI Editores, 2018, co-edited by two of the organizers and Professor Juan Marco Vaggione, and). in several international journals Bioética y Derecho Journal - 43: 91-107-; Península Journal -XIII, n. 2: 213-234-; Direito e Praxis Journal -9, n. 3: 1401-1423-????among others).Our project seeks now to expand our research along two dimensions. In the first place, we are focusing our empirical observations of abortion lawfare outside the terrain of courts including multiple societal and state legal mobilization forums such as the work before parliaments, national election campaigns, political parties, executive governments or the private and public health system. In this regard, some of our studies will focus on new forms of conservative legal counter-mobilization strategies and politization in these contexts. The second goal of our current project seeks to explore intra-region comparisons based on our national case-studies and new data collection efforts. For such purpose, we plan to pursuit a number of comparisons exploring, for instance, the dynamics of abortion lawfare in federal countries, the diverse strategies of national feminist organizations, and the comparative domestic role of transnational networks.The larger project in which this IRC is based is part of the Sexual and Reproductive Rights Lawfare iniciative at the Center for Law and Social Transformation at the University of Bergen and CMI Institute which includes other researchers from Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador, Peru, Argentina, and Brazil, as well as new global initiatives and other projects focused also in Africa and Europe.The IRC will involve one panel to present the results of different case studies on abortion legal mobilization (Argentina, Colombia, Peru and Brazil) and one round table, involving social scientists and legal scholars from Latin America, the USA and Europe on The emergence of conservative agendas and its effects on Sexual and Reproductive Rights.