The Abortion Talk in the Age of Anti-Gender Mobilizations

Abortion is one of the more recent targets of anti-gender mobilizations in Croatia. In the context of abortion being a long-established right, going back to the socialist period and especially the 1974 constitutional provision enshrining "the right to freely decide on childbirth", even the removal of this this clause from the new 1990 Croatian constitution and the religious and conservative campaigns against abortion in the 1990s failed to seriously threaten the widespread support for the right to abortion, regardless of many new obstructions 'on the ground' introduced in the meantime. However, with the rise of the anti-gender movement in Croatia in the 2010s, a new wave of campaigning against abortion has entered the Croatian public spaces since 2014, one that is better adapted to sway minds and hearts of people with new ways to frame the issue, including, for example, the innovative frame of social welfare responsibility characterizing the Croatian Marches for Life. This paper, therefore, asks the question of how successful are the new attacks against the right to abortion. This question will be answered through the analysis of the justifications for banning or limiting abortion, or defending it, among Croatian citizens of different ages. Based on the data from 18 focus groups with "ordinary people", that is, the individuals who are neither political active nor members of any political parties, I examine how people in various group conversations (some with strangers, some with friends or acquaintances; some gathering people with similar educational backgrounds; some mixing them up) talk to each other about abortion and what they consider acceptable or persuasive arguments for their perspectives. In these examinations, I am particularly interested in the use and appropriation of new anti-gender messaging about abortion, as opposed to the 'old' religious-conservative framing, and I also pay particular attention to how social identifications, personal experiences and the perceived climates of opinion play into how the individuals evaluate the issue of abortion. I use this analysis to identify the successes – and the failures – of the anti-gender anti-abortion framing on a Croatian case.