“The framework for the Irish campaign for abortion rights was about compassion and how Ireland needs to be the compassionate face of Euro...
“The framework for the Irish campaign for abortion rights was about compassion and how Ireland needs to be the compassionate face of Europe,” said Marie Berry, a political scientist at the University of Denver. who studied the Irish countryside. “That it is more compassionate than the UK because the UK has become more and more conservative, especially under the Conservative government. That we are in the EU, we represent a progressive Europe.
But perhaps the key to the movement’s success was combining this appealing message with the organizing experience of more radical feminist groups. “What shocked me when I researched with activists there was that in fact the organizing crux of the whole ‘Repeal the 8th’ campaign for abortion rights came from anarcho-feminist movements, which were more rooted in environmental movements than the liberal women’s rights movement,” Dr. Berry said. “The bulk of the people who voted for him, of course, were unaffiliated to the leftmost organizer nodes. But it was really the heart of the movement that made this possible.
In Argentina, the Ni Una Menos (“Not a Woman Less”) movement also combined sustained, long-term organizing with a framing that placed abortion rights within the broader context of a just society, presenting lack of access to safe and legal abortion as is only one aspect of the larger problem of violence against women. A 2018 bill to legalize the procedure failed, but in 2020 the country legalized abortion, making Argentina the largest country in Latin America to do so.
In the United States, by contrast, legal abortion has been the status quo since the Roe decision in 1973, making it a difficult target for this type of sustained mass organization.
“I think the Indigenous Mobilization, some of the more progressive racial justice work, Occupy, all kinds of left-wing nodes within those movements, haven’t centered abortion in their advocacy because it’s been , constitutionally, more or less a problem solved since the 70s,” Berry said. And for other organizations focused on the intersection of reproductive rights with race and class, “abortion has always been there, but it’s not the only demand,” she said.
Centrist organizations and Democratic politicians, by contrast, have often framed abortion as a matter of unfortunate but necessary health services that should be “safe, legal, and scarce,” and have focused their activism on access issues. This was often vital for women in rural areas or states whose restrictive regulations had made abortion essentially unavailable in practice, but it did not generate the kind of identity-based mass appeal that was effective in countries like Ireland.
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