September 28 was collectively chosen in 1990, when the fifth Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Encounter (EFLAC) was held in San Bernardo, Argentina. At that EFLAC, activists from the region joined forces and launched the Declaration of San Bernardo, where they defined strategies for transnational collective action. These included the establishment of national campaigns for abortion rights, the strengthening of existing campaigns within countries, and the promotion of a regional campaign for the legalisation of abortion, today known as the 28S Campaign, which draws on the experiences and articulation between the multiple expressions of the feminist movement.
In addition, at that fifth EFLAC, Brazilian feminists shared a finding that would change the course of regional struggles for the right to choose: in the mid-1980s, they had discovered that one of the side effects of the drug misoprostol (usually used to treat ulcers) is uterine contractions. This meant that the drug could be used as an abortion pill. In the words of Ninde MolRe, this finding prompted a reproductive revolution because it vindicated our rights while bringing us closer to full freedom and autonomy through safe and self-managed abortion. Together, the 28S Campaign, autonomous abortions, and different initiatives coming from feminist activism in the region constitute strategies targeting the legal and social decriminalisation of abortion, which have been strengthened since the 1990s. The effects of these strategies have had an impact on local and global scale, as in the Plan of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) agreed upon in Cairo in 1994. This moment clearly defined sexual and reproductive rights as human rights.
Since then, the reproductive rights landscape in Latin America and the Caribbean has changed substantially. While some countries have advanced towards liberalisation, protection, and recognition of the right to abortion – such as Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay – in others, feminists have mostly worked to block the attempts to criminalise abortion rights – such as the Brazilian, Peruvian and Costa Rican cases. It is by observing this context that we, activist-researchers based in different latitudes with different research agendas but shared political commitments, decided to briefly review the situation of abortion rights in our region. We reflect on advances, as well as remaining issues, highlighting the achievements of the feminist movement over the years and the challenges we face in light of regressive ‘anti-gender groups’ – groups that work against gender equality – chipping away at sexual and reproductive freedoms. We emphasise the importance of strengthening transnational collaborative networks and recognising the power of organising, evaluating, and renewing our struggles every September 28th.
Abortion rights from a Latin American and Caribbean perspective
The Argentine experience of the National Campaign for the Right to Legal, Safe, and Free Abortion inspired the emergence of the Green Tide, a transnational movement that brings together generations of activists around the demand to decriminalise and legalise abortion in Latin America and the Caribbean. According to Nayla Vacarezza, the green scarves were used for the first time in 2003 during the XVIII Encuentro Nacional de Mujeres (National Women’s Meeting) held in the city of Rosario, Argentina. Years later, in 2017, during the fourteenth EFLAC in Montevideo, Uruguay, the green scarf was collectively chosen to represent the struggle and collective identity of the regional campaign since becoming a powerful transnational symbol. Since then, the strength of Argentine feminists has become a tsunami that has crossed borders, languages, and oceans, demanding the recognition and assurance of access to safe abortion and, with it, settling what we consider a democratic debt so far ignored by most governments in the region. The green scarves have occupied the streets, squares, and monuments and disrupted the social imaginary and sociocultural norms that have made us believe that motherhood is a project we should all pursue just because we are women. It is this same conservative sociocultural understanding, even though evidence disproves it, that continues to consider abortion a dangerous and unsafe practice with irreparable consequences when, in reality, criminalisation and clandestinity cause real damage.
Collective and transnational efforts become extremely relevant in a scenario where scarce access to abortion continues to be a reality for Latin American and Caribbean women. The lack of guaranteed access to abortion, the institutional resistance to modify normative frameworks that impede the free exercise of our autonomy, and the constant threats of conservative regression demonstrate why, today more than ever, we continue to fight for our rights. The adverse contexts experienced in the region harm women's health and freedom, while hiding situations of social exclusion, sexual violence, and, of course, economic inequalities because, as the feminist movements in the region have constantly claimed through the slogan “the rich have abortions and the poor die”, marginalised women are those who die in unsafe procedures due to government neglect of reproductive health and rights. Nevertheless, the Green Tide represents a beacon of hope promising that another world is possible.
From North to South of the continent, the abortion acompañantes (activists who voluntarily help people access abortion, usually at home, by providing medication and emotional support) put their bodies on the line to ensure free abortions, challenging the legal frameworks that criminalise them, as well as the notions that equate clandestine with a lack of safety. Doctors and medical allies challenge the hegemonic medical model and facilitate procedures even when this may jeopardise their professional position. With creativity and cleverness, feminist activists share information and answer questions, even in territories where the government, due to lack of capacity or will, is unable to guarantee access. All the above has influenced political and social processes and debates at multiple levels and, above all, has contributed to the destigmatisation and social decriminalisation of abortion. In other words, thanks to these coordinated collective efforts, abortion “came out of the closet,” out of the pedagogical clandestinity, shedding its stigmatised connotation, and thus came to the forefront of people's daily debates of the media and the public agenda in many countries in the region and other parts of the world.
In recent years, the historical transnationalism of Latin American and Caribbean feminism for the legalisation of abortion managed to renew and deepen after the long period of mobilisations and counter-mobilisations that followed the decriminalisation of abortion in Mexico City in 2007 and in Uruguay in 2012. In Argentina, it led to the enactment of Law 27.610 in 2020, which nationally legalises the voluntary termination of pregnancy up to 14 weeks of gestation. This achievement materialised the hopes of feminists around the world and, although it does not represent the end of the struggle for reproductive justice, significantly strengthened and motivated the regional defense of the right to abortion. Beginning in 2019, Mexico has seen a wave of decriminalisation at the state level, resulting in 17 out of 32 states currently having regulations that allow voluntary abortion up to 12 weeks of gestation. In addition, the Supreme Court has positioned itself as a strategic ally of the feminist movement by ruling that the criminalisation of voluntary abortion, as well as the legal system that regulates the crime at the federal level, are unconstitutional. In Colombia, more than 90 organisations and 200 activists came together under the Causa Justa movement to demand the elimination of abortion from the Penal Code. In response, the Constitutional Court ruled in favor of decriminalising abortion under any circumstances during the first 24 weeks of gestation.
In the defense of sexual and reproductive rights, feminist organisations and collectives located in diverse geographies – from Baja California to Tierra del Fuego – collaborate transnationally. They have developed different strategies with varying scopes and successes. We cannot fail to mention feminist support networks of acompañantes, political advocacy in different branches and levels of government, feminist monitoring of public policies related to abortion, the production of data to impact the region politically, strategic collaboration with international organisations, and mass protests for legal, free, safe, and free abortion, among others. These feminist tactics, which have spread throughout the continent and served as inspiration for activists in other regions, have sometimes resulted in necessary – although not sufficient – legislation, such as the decriminalisation of abortion under the aforementioned time limit systems or the expansion of the grounds for abortion. Examples of the latter include the 2012 Brazilian law on anencephaly, the approval of a 2017 law in Chile that decriminalised abortion in three circumstances, and the 2022 decision by the Ecuadorian National Assembly to allow the termination of pregnancy in case of rape.
Continuing struggles: regional challenges on the right to abortion
In addition to renewing hope and inspiring other feminist movements in the region, the Green Tide struggles for the right to abortion are continuously shaped by the reality that women live in Latin America and the Caribbean. In other words, from our bodies, reproductive experiences, and existences in a world marked by patriarchal and capitalist injustices, the 28S Campaign and its different regional articulations outline their raison d'être. It is the continuous abuse of our bodies, treated as objects either for reproduction or sexual purposes rather than autonomous and free, which informs the urgency of our struggle. To cite a few examples, in Brazil, government data analysed by the Rede Feminista de Saúde (Feminist Health Network) show that from 2010 to 2019, 252,786 girls between the ages of 10 and 14 became mothers, amounting to 70 girls every 24 hours. According to Brazilian legislation, those cases should be considered as rape, one of the three grounds for which abortion is allowed. However, instead of guaranteeing the procedures and changing the devastating reality of “child mothers,” in 2024 conservative groups sought to influence the Legislative Branch to urgently approve a law that would equate abortion after 22 weeks of gestation with the crime of homicide. In the case of approval, it would worsen the situation experienced by pregnant girls who, due to a lack of knowledge of their bodies and the multiple forms of violence to which they are subjected, generally discover their pregnancy late. For now, with the strength of the campaign “A girl is not a mother,” Brazilian feminists have managed to block the vote on the bill.
In Argentina, fundamentalist sectors act on both micro and macro scales. On the one hand, they use direct action strategies to persuade and harass those seeking abortions, providing false information and offering supposed care that, in reality, are tortuous disciplinary procedures. On the other hand, Javier Milei's government has clearly shown its anti-abortion stance by issuing a series of opinions that serve as support for anti-rights groups and, above all, by depriving health centers of the resources necessary to perform voluntary terminations of pregnancies. In Mexico, local congresses continue to impose serious restrictions on the right to decide, either by refusing to legislate on the matter or by setting back the achievements that feminist collectives and organisations have made, even when their actions are contrary to what was mandated by the highest court of justice in the country.
Although abortion is practiced all over the world regardless of the law, the above examples reveal it to be a persistent issue, with our rights always in the spotlight and never to be taken for granted. Even in the places where we celebrate the rights we have recently won, there are serious threats to overthrow everything that feminists have fought for for decades. However, our resistances, rebellions, and organised disobediences continue to remind us of the importance of coordinated struggles, multi-situated solidarity, constant collective reflection, and the strength we emanate when we are together.
28S: A current, urgent and (still) necessary struggle that knows no borders
The realities imposed by conservative sectors, which seek to exercise control over our bodies and reinforce reproductive violence, demonstrate why feminist struggles for the right to abortion persist in Latin America and the Caribbean and why every September 28 we flood the streets with cries of hope and dignified rage.
We demand justice before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights for Beatriz, who paid with her own life for the consequences of the absolute criminalisation of abortion in El Salvador. This and many other cases remind us that while we should celebrate and defend the rulings and legislations in Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico, we must not forget that most countries in the region continue to seriously restrict freedom and autonomy over the decision to have children. This is the case in Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, and Peru, where there is a restricted interpretation of the right to abortion and it is only allowed on certain grounds. In countries like Nicaragua, Jamaica, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Dominican Republic, and Suriname, abortion is prohibited entirely, causing preventable deaths, as in the case of Beatriz.
The regulatory frameworks that limit the right to abortion respond to the lack of political will on the part of States and, above all, to the continued pressure exerted by conservative and anti-right groups in the region. Their influence on legislation constitutes one of the most prominent transnational strategies against abortion rights. International actors such as the Catholic Church and evangelist neoconservatives deploy a legislative lobby to maintain restrictive abortion laws and prevent progress in public policies in line with the times, even against what has been recognised and recommended by international organisations, such as the World Health Organisation, the CEDAW Committee, among others.
These fundamentalist actors, in addition to trying to spread conservative and regressive laws and social practices, are constantly reconfiguring themselves to give strength to their discourses against the – misnamed – gender ideology and attract followers through disinformation. In doing so, they sustain the international patriarchal regime that opposes the freedom, autonomy, and emancipation of women and LGBTIQ+ people. Although these anti-gender and anti-reproductive rights policies are often blocked by feminist organisations, it is undeniable that one of our greatest challenges is to stop the conservative threat not only against the right to abortion but against any attempt to destabilise patriarchal systems that have historically placed us in unequal and subordinate positions.
Although we have made great progress, Latin America and the Caribbean continue to be one of the regions with the greatest inequalities and difficulties in accessing safe abortions due to the prevailing absence of adequate policies on access to information and sexual and reproductive health services. This leads to forced pregnancies, unwanted maternity, unfinished life projects, girls forced to gestate and give birth, women deprived of their freedom for having aborted, even spontaneously, and other types of injustices that disproportionately affect those who are young, impoverished, racialised, and vulnerable.
The misogyny sectors opposing abortion are the very same that reproduce hate speech and deny gender, racial, and environmental inequalities. These anti-rights positions perpetuate practices that have been, are, and will continue to be denounced, repudiated, and transformed by us, Latin American and Caribbean feminists, on this and every September 28th. We know that the right to abortion generates resistance and important political polarisations. However, from Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and beyond, we use September 28th to remind ourselves that we are not alone. We have a transnational community that embraces and supports us and will not rest until every woman, girl, and pregnant person is completely free to make decisions about their own bodies.