Abortion and Democracy

"Abortion and Democracy offers fresh insights into abortion politics in Latin America’s Southern Cone and its relationship to democracy and broader social movements. The volume brings together a mix of established and younger scholars and a range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives. The result is the most comprehensive analysis to date of contemporary abortion politics in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay – one that attends to both insider politics within democratic institutions and outsider politics of protest in a nuanced manner."

- Christina Ewig, Professor of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, USA

"This radical review of abortion in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay is an exciting, challenging and much needed collection for global body politics. The collection sweeps aside outdated views of abortion as confined to individual women’s struggles to rights and access to resources, to show how abortion is integral to collective bodies in protest, embodied resistance, and feminist practices of accompaniment and radical citizenship. I found it an extraordinary read. Theoretically and empirically it offers deeply contextualised understandings of abortion, offering new and important insights for transnational feminist studies and practice."

- Wendy Harcourt, Professor of Gender, Diversity and Sustainable Development, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands.

"Focusing on struggles to decriminalise abortion in Latin America, this book makes a seminal contribution to our understanding of contentious politics. Stressing the importance of historical and political contingency, it casts new light on the strategies, alliances and discourses deployed by feminist activists to advance the democratic case for reproductive justice. Absolutely necessary reading."

- Maxine Molyneux, Professor of Sociology, University College London, UK

"A brilliant and inspiring guide to abortion struggles in Latin America’s Southern Cone, this book has much to teach students, scholars, and activists around the world about creative feminist ways of doing politics that advance abortion rights while simultaneously building strong coalitions for social justice, public health, and accountable democratic institutions."

- Betsy Hartmann, professor emerita of development studies, Hampshire College, Amherst, USA, and author of Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control