Out Of The Closet And Into The Streets
By: Belén Arce Terceros
Tags: Gender, Abortion, Health, Features, Women

On May 28, thousands of women wearing green scarves gathered in front of the National Congress in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Faces adorned with green glitter, many of them held signs in support of legal, safe, and free abortion.

The women came out to show their support for a bill that had been submitted before Congress. Over the past eight years, similar bills in favor of the legalization of abortion have been introduced, with no success.

The legalization of abortion remains one of the most politically divisive issues in this traditional, Catholic nation. Successive feminist movements have championed women’s right to choose since the 1970s to no avail, in part because the Catholic Church continues to have huge influence on public policy, especially in matters related to sexual and reproductive rights.

However, in recent years, the debate has become mainstream, in large part due to the efforts of the Campaign for the right to legal, safe and free abortion — a coalition of organizations, social leaders, and movements.



The Campaign was created in 2003 during the Women’s National Encounter, an annual gathering where Argentine women come together to discuss gender issues. “One of the ideas that came up was to [create] a big national, federal, plural, and diverse campaign to unify the struggles in favor of the right to abortion,” says Martha Rosenberg, one of the campaign’s founders. Rosenberg is an 83-year-old activist, doctor, and psychoanalyst who has been on the frontlines of the battle of women’s rights for decades. “We took abortion out of the closet,” she says.

In 2005, the organization was officially launched, its slogan reading: “Sexual education to decide, contraceptives to prevent abortions, legal abortion to prevent deaths.” This slogan has become a rallying cry for women across the nation. “Over the past 15 years, the campaign became an important political actor,” says Rosenberg. “We placed the right to abortion in the media and the political agenda, after years of being left aside and being considered a marginal topic that had no political weight.”

When I asked her how they were able put what has been considered a taboo issue on the public agenda, Rosenberg explains that the campaign “used all possible strategies.” Some women wrote editorials for the news outlets and filed lawsuits in the cases where the legal right to abortion was denied. Others taught courses on abortion at universities or handed out green scarves on the streets.

“The green scarf is a construction, a symbol,” Rosenberg says. “It’s not just the right to abortion, but also the resistance to a male-centered, patriarchal society, and a demand for equality of all women.” At first, the campaign distributed the scarves for free at assemblies and demonstrations. Over the last year, however, as the debate became more mainstream and its popularity grew, street vendors started selling the scarves on the streets for 50 Argentine pesos (about $1.20). In response, those on the opposing side created a light blue scarf to express their opposition to the legalization of abortion.

The #NiUnaMenos (not one woman less) movement that born in 2015 to denounce gender violence and the government’s lack of action helped pave the way for the debate on abortion. What started as a hashtag on social media promoted by a group of feminist journalists, led to massive demonstrations on the streets across Argentina. “Feminism stopped being something for a few women [and became] something that involved a lot of women,” says journalist Ingrid Beck, one of the journalists who started the movement. “It became a massive phenomenon … It made violence against women, which was hidden and naturalized until then, visible.”