Reproductive Justice and Anti-Gender Reforms in Latin America

Abstract

This panel examines how reproductive politics has become a terrain through which gendered violence is produced, normalised, and contested in Latin America. Engaging debates on anti-gender projects, backlash, and punitive governance, it shows how conservative actors do not only seek to roll back rights but to proactively re-found policy on ‘family’ and ‘morality’, expanding state power to discipline bodies through criminalisation, stigma, and punishment framed as protection. The panel links macro-level reforms and partisan strategy to institutional practice—especially in healthcare—where obstetric violence and the fear of prosecution shape access to care. It also centres feminist agency: legal and political mobilisation across local, national, regional, and international arenas; solidarity networks that enable cross-border access to services; and the ways punitive attitudes can reshape gender-policy preferences and women’s representation. Together, the contributions argue that struggles over abortion and sexuality are simultaneously struggles over democracy, citizenship, and whose suffering counts as political harm.

Title	Details
Chemical castration as gender justice: How punitive attitudes inform gender policy preferences and voting behavior among Brazilian women	View Paper Details
Leaving the Nation-State in Search of Reproductive Self-Determination	View Paper Details
Between the streets and the parliament: the legalization of abortion in Brazil and Argentina	View Paper Details