{"id":16473,"date":"2020-12-30T17:58:26","date_gmt":"2020-12-30T22:58:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/2020\/12\/30\/womens-movement-wins-victory-as-argentina-legalizes-abortion\/"},"modified":"2020-12-30T17:58:26","modified_gmt":"2020-12-30T22:58:26","slug":"womens-movement-wins-victory-as-argentina-legalizes-abortion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/2020\/12\/30\/womens-movement-wins-victory-as-argentina-legalizes-abortion\/","title":{"rendered":"Women\u2019s movement wins victory as Argentina legalizes abortion"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By ERWIN FREED<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Early in the morning of Wednesday, Dec. 30, Argentina\u2019s Senate passed the Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancy Bill in a 38 to 29 vote, with one abstention. President Alberto Fern\u00e1ndez has stated he will sign this bill into law, legalizing abortion for the first 14 weeks of pregnancy. The legislative victory is a concretization of the massive, decades-long struggle for reproductive justice and women\u2019s rights in Argentina, represented in movements such as the Campa\u00f1a por Aborto Legal, Seguro y Gratuito\u2014which has worked since 2005 for the right to legal, safe, and free abortion\u2014and Ni Una Menos, begun in 2015.\u00a0There are currently only three other Latin American countries with legalized abortion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Women workers lead m<\/strong>ovement in Argentina <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Capitalism everywhere enforces gender-based hierarchies through mechanisms that include sexist attitudes, violence, and reproductive control. Fights against \u201cspecial\u201d oppression are central areas of class struggle and can furnish the spark that lights even wider flames of an organized fightback. In Argentina, working-class women have taken their historic place at the head of the struggles against these conditions. While Argentine feminists have fought against the stranglehold of the Catholic Church and other paradigms of reaction for decades, the last five years have seen a massive upswell in proletarian participation, tactics, and internationalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Latin American women\u2019s movement was shaken awake by an ongoing wave of femicides in 2015, epitomized by the murder of 14-year-old Chiara Paez. Paez was killed by her boyfriend and his mom after becoming pregnant. Some 200,000 people, mostly women, demonstrated in Buenos Aires alone amidst region-wide protests that summer. The nascent mass movement found an independent organizational form in the Ni Una Menos collectives\u2014coalitions of parties, organizations, and activists governed through open assemblies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The modus operandi of the movement has been mass demonstrations, often convoking the language and reality of the feminist strike. In October 2016 a nationwide work stoppage was convened in protest of the killing of 16-year-old Luc\u00eda P\u00e9rez, the first of its kind in the country. According to the Buenos Aires Herald<\/em>, the strike received immediate support from over<\/a> 50 social organizations, such as the CTA, CGT, Ctera, Sipreba, Ademis, ATE, Sitraju and UTE trade unions. On March 8 of the next year, Argentina was home to one of the largest mobilizations in a collection of International Women\u2019s Strike demonstrations that saw millions in the streets in the Spanish State and all around the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Democratic assemblies, theoretical sharpness, and mass participation of youth have given the Argentine feminist movement a fighting inclusiveness that is important to recognize. Along with demands for abortion rights and against gender-based violence, the movement has adopted a broad range of social demands. These are exemplified by Ni Una Menos\u2019 program <\/a> \u2014 which calls for separation of church and state, anti-carceral feminism, and trans rights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A high level of consciousness and organized fights on the job and in the streets led to the government\u2019s being forced to start an open discussion and vote on abortion legalization in 2018. The road to that vote was paved through hundreds of thousands of conversations, mobilizations, and, significantly, propaganda from revolutionary parties. In 2015, for example, the Workers\u2019 Left Front (FIT), an electoral coalition of Trotskyist parties, garnered 732,851 votes on a program that included the demands of the feminist movement as well as demands such as nationalizing basic industry under workers\u2019 control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Legislative weakness<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 2018 legalization bill did not pass, but it did represent an essential moment in the accelerating struggle for reproductive justice in Argentia. The Pandora\u2019s box of discussion about the real possibility of accessible abortion was opened. Tens of thousands had demonstrated during the legislative proceedings armed with green bandanas as opposed to a relatively minor showing of anti-abortion opposition. Bourgeois politicians, especially those of the ostensible \u201cleft-wing,\u201d needed to appear friendly to the movement in order to retain \u201cprogressive\u201d credentials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That tension manifested in the presidential candidacy of Alberto Fern\u00e1ndez. Fern\u00e1ndez ran on formal support of abortion rights while his running mate, Christina Kirchner, had quashed multiple attempts to legalize abortion during her own time as president. Amidst a series of anti-worker actions and bills, Fern\u00e1ndez is using the Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancy as a type of political maneuver to save face among his more left constituency. Within that legislation, there are a number of loopholes that allow \u201cconscientious objector\u201d exceptions, which empower anti-abortion health-care professionals and facilities to refuse to offer abortion procedures. Likewise, the legislation keeps abortions performed after 14 weeks, a truly arbitrary cut-off date, illegal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lessons of the victory for the global working class<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the specific legislation is distorted through the bourgeois channels within which it was created, abortion legalization in Argentina is a massive victory for all workers everywhere in the world. In the United States, where abortion is formally legal but often inaccessible to working people, the win shows that rights are won not through elections but through mass mobilizations of workers and the oppressed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rapid spread of green handkerchiefs (which has spread across Latin America as a symbol of the fight for women\u2019s rights) and Ni Una Menos collectives, along with the powerful international women\u2019s strikes, are both symptoms and cause of the new global conjuncture. In every corner of the world, the working class is beginning to rediscover its power and is testing its strength. From the massive mobilizations in Iraq to the Fuera Pi\u00f1era movement in Chile and India\u2019s largest strike in history, there is a definite uptick in class struggle. All of these fights have been shaped by the participation of women and other oppressed groups; the need to directly fight all manners of capitalist abuse will become sharper as the class struggle itself deepens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lessons from the most independent, powerful, and working-class-based social movements need to be understood by activists who are serious in their commitment to creating social change. The recent Argentine experience shows the centrality of independent working-class organizations capable of mobilizing people to fight the bosses and their state. Along with this is the method of the united front, which brings together coalitions of action on a common basis through democratic discussion. Last is the international dimension of capitalism and the fights against it. Now is the time, with only years left before climate collapse, to internalize these lessons and to build the fighting organizations that can defeat capital, its state, and the repressive societies that they produce.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Illustration by General Strike Graphics <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By ERWIN FREED Early in the morning of Wednesday, Dec. 30, Argentina\u2019s Senate passed the Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancy Bill in a 38 to 29 vote, with one abstention. President Alberto Fern\u00e1ndez has stated he will sign this bill into law, legalizing abortion for the first 14 weeks of pregnancy. The legislative victory is a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13882114,"featured_media":15444,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[30835,27637,30861],"tags":[27712,27738,29828],"class_list":["post-16473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health-care","category-latin-america","category-women","tag-abortion","tag-argentina","tag-ni-una-menos"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"es","enabled_languages":["en","es"],"languages":{"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"es":{"title":false,"content":false,"excerpt":false}}},"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/workersvoiceus.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/Argentina-abortion.png?fit=1500%2C766&ssl=1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdQxqk-4hH","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13882114"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16473\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}