Mobilizing the Womb: Anti-Abortion Activism and the Institutionalization of the Anti-Gender Movement in Croatia

In this paper, we use the case of anti-abortion activism to trace the development and the institutionalization of the Croatian anti-gender movement. We show how the failures of the 1990s anti-abortion mobilizations contributed to a larger anti-gender turn in discursive and mobilizational strategies of the religious-conservative actors between the mid-2000s and early 2010s. The new anti-gender actors temporarily put abortion as an issue aside in favor of other “easier” targets. However, they strategically returned to it when the 2012/2013 mobilizations against sex education and, particularly, the 2013 mobilizations against same-sex marriage paved the way for the growth and expansion of the Croatian anti-gender movement. This movement is now institutionalized and holds the strongest mobilization in the region, encompassing states of the former Yugoslavia. Thus, following on the successes of the anti-gender turn in Croatian public and political arena, anti-abortion mobilizations after 2014 entered a new phase of proliferation of protests and discourse. In this phase, in contrast to the 1990s mobilizations, anti-gender actors are more likely to use abortion as an issue to secure votes and seek political office. In our analysis of the development the Croatian anti-gender movement, we pay a particular attention to the legacies and continuities with the 1990s anti-abortion mobilizations, but we also specify the key shifts in the networks of actors, discourses and repertoires of action that made the new anti-abortion mobilizations a more salient issue and contributed to the institutionalization of the anti-gender movement in Croatia.