Backlash Against Abortion but not Same-Sex Marriage? Explaining Variation in Resistance against Contentious Gender Policy in Latin America

Anti-gender movements target a variety of gender equality policies. In Latin America, such actors resist liberal abortion policies, sexual education, and same-sex marriage, among other issues, in the attempt to safeguard conservative morals and traditional family constellations. Abortion and same-sex marriage not only concern intimate, gendered aspects of life but also challenge core aspects of Catholic doctrine, which sparks particular resistance. Yet despite these shared features, policy trajectories have differed across the region. LGBT rights have typically experienced little backlash whereas attempts to roll back reforms have quickly followed abortion liberalizations. This paper comparatively examines variation in resistance against abortion and same-sex marriage drawing on the case of federal Mexico, where a majority of states adopted restrictive amendments in response to Mexico City’s 2007 abortion liberalization. Less than a handful however pursued legislation resisting the legalization of same-sex marriage three years later. What explains this variation across similarly contentious gender policies? This paper argues that legal opportunity structures, more specifically local constitutions’ openness to change, set these issues apart and shaped anti-gender actors’ capacity to reform policy. Most Mexican states could restrict abortion, for example by removing the rape exemption or by elevating the “right to life” to constitutional rank. By contrast, few states could pursue further restrictions against same-sex marriage. Most local constitutions already defined marriage as strictly between a man and a woman, which in practice banned same-sex marriage and only the handful of states that did not already consider marriage a heterosexual institution could attempt restrictive reforms—and did so. Consequently, there was no need for parties, civil society organizations, or movements to mobilize against marriage equality—anti-gender actors were simply unable to further limit possibilities for gay marriage in most states. Rather than differences in issue characteristics or mobilization structures, the provisions of existing legal frameworks help explain the relative lack of restrictive same-sex marriage reforms. This finding suggests that differences within legal frameworks that govern abortion and same-sex marriage contribute to variation in resistance and highlights the importance of institutional features in addition to actor-driven explanations when analyzing contested gender equality policy.