How young women in Argentina won the fight to legalize abortion
Yael holding a sign that reads: “Deciding about my body should not be a class privilege.” (Courtesy of Yael Crupnicoff)
18-year-old student Yael Crupnicoff writes about her involvement in the movement for sexual and reproductive rights.
When I was 15, I asked my mother if I could join a group of older girls from my school who were going to march in support of legalizing abortion. Those girls were making history through their activism as much as the lawmakers themselves, and I didn’t want this amazing milestone for girls and women to happen while I wasn’t looking. I wanted to be involved in the fight and surrounded by other girls like me in the moment when we would all become freer. But my mother said I absolutely could not go to the demonstration. I was too young, she explained, and marches were dangerous. There was no way I could go alone. I said, "Alright. Will you take me then?"
My mom hadn't participated in a demonstration since Argentina's democracy was restored in 1983. But she agreed, and so we went to stand in front of Congress while the lower house discussed the abortion bill. It’s a day I will never forget, standing with my mom in the crowd that spanned nine blocks, a thousand voices singing as one. Strangers smiled at me as I quickly memorized the chants and sang along with them. Above all, I will never forget my mom's surprise as she looked around us and said, "Wow. This place is full of kids.”
(Courtesy of Yael Crupnicoff)
That was in August 2018. That year the bill passed in the lower house of Congress but the Senate turned it down. It took the movement until December 2020 to finally succeed and legalize abortion in Argentina. And through it all, it was us young people who were at the forefront of the fight.
I was a sophomore in high school when the movement for reproductive rights gained increased momentum. It is often referred to as the "green wave" because of the green handkerchiefs that we wore in support of it. These called for abortions to be legal, free and safe.
We wanted abortions to be legal because about 500,000 of them were already being performed every year — but clandestinely since both the women and the doctors involved could face prosecution. We called for abortions to be safe because illegal abortions performed in unsanitary conditions were a leading cause of death for pregnant Argentinian women. We demanded that abortions be free because many of the women who were dying were among the poorest in our nation and had no option but to resort to untrained providers or self-induced abortions. Having control over our own bodies, we argued, was not a privilege reserved for a fraction of us. Abortions had to be available in our public hospitals to anyone who needed them.
“Having control over our own bodies, we argued, was not a privilege reserved for a fraction of us. Abortions had to be available in our public hospitals to anyone who needed them.”
Getting a country with deeply conservative roots and a large Catholic population to think of reproductive freedom as a human right was no easy task. We were met by enormous backlash, a lot of which was rooted in misinformation and misogyny. It was especially disheartening when it came from our own lawmakers. Opponents responded to our demands by saying legalizing abortion was not the real solution, that instead of "murdering unborn children," women ought to be smarter about our sexual choices. We countered that our campaign was centered not just on abortion, but also on sexual and reproductive health as a whole. There were many laws already in place to protect women’s autonomy over their bodies, but in practice they weren’t being implemented and we wanted to change that. For example, a 2006 law made sex education compulsory for the entire country, but in 2018, 79% of high school students said they had not received it. Our goal was for women and girls to have choices and knowledge before reaching an unwanted pregnancy. This is why the slogans on our green handkerchiefs read: "Sex education to decide. Contraceptives to avoid abortion. Legal abortion to avoid death.”
The 2018 ruling was a tough blow for us because for a while it had looked like we would finally win. But even though we hadn’t been successful in Congress yet, we were all starting to feel the ripples of our movement in other areas. The topic of reproductive freedom permeated talks in family dinners, hangouts with friends, TV shows and classrooms. And sure, many of those conversations did not end (or even start) with kindness and a genuine will to listen to others. But a lot of them did. The ones I took part in allowed me to understand different viewpoints from my own and taught me the value of true dialogue based on facts and civility. And for many of the people who participated in these dialogues, it was the first time they stopped to think about the structural oppression of women in our society, the first time they heard the word feminism.
(Courtesy of Yael Crupnicoff)
At my school, the green wave made a huge impact. Signs started appearing on the walls that read “My body, my choice,” “Keep religion and law separate” and “Women united will never be defeated.” Text chains began to circulate, arranging for students to march together. Upperclasswomen were taking the lead and guiding the younger ones. For the first time in my school’s history, conversations about politics flooded our classrooms and could not be contained inside them. We had an assembly about the importance of the issue and got the headmaster to agree to let us march from the school to Congress.
Together, thanks to this green wave, young women across Argentina learned to navigate the waters of activism, to harness the power of organization. The green wave carried us to our first marches. It brought songs and signs and lots of glitter. It led us to meet people we would have never met had we not been united by our wish to create a better world. It made us wear green with pride, doodle little green hearts and green fists everywhere we could. It brought lots of hugs, looks, pats on the back, shared sorrow and joy with countless women. Through the power of demonstrations, art, education and most importantly, meaningful conversations with others, we made abortion a public issue. Reproductive rights went from being something that only a handful of people cared about to an issue that dominated the public conversation. We gained so much traction that by 2020 it seemed impossible that Congress could vote against us.
“Together, thanks to this green wave, young women across Argentina learned to navigate the waters of activism, to harness the power of organization.”
On the bright summer day when the bill finally passed in December 2020, I watched it all happen alone from my house, because the pandemic kept me from standing in front of Congress again. I longed to be there, to get to celebrate after so many marches of not being able to. I felt an acute need to hug someone. To hug the great women who paved our way and kept this campaign alive since 2003. To hug the younger girls I'd had the pleasure to guide in our activism and the teachers and mentors who guided me. I even wanted to hug that 15-year-old girl who'd dragged her mother to her first march, who had written so many times about defeat and imagined writing about victory.
On that day, I thought about the girls who would come after me, who will someday, hopefully, think of abortion the way I think about voting or education or divorce, shocked that there was ever a time when women had to fight for these things. I wanted every girl to know that we'd swum these tumultuous waters for them just like I knew that the women before me had done it for us. I felt them all within me then, surfing the same green wave towards equality. From here on, we can only swim onward.
Read more
