Honors Theses
Date of Award
Spring 5-9-2020
Document Type
Undergraduate Thesis
Department
Croft Institute for International Studies
First Advisor
Douglass Sullivan-González
Second Advisor
Oliver Dinius
Third Advisor
Robert Brown
Relational Format
Dissertation/Thesis
Abstract
In August of 2018, thousands of protestors waited to hear results of the vote on the Voluntary Termination of the Pregnancy bill in the Argentinian Senate. Though the bill failed by seven votes, the near passage of the bill and the outpouring of protestors indicated that the issue of abortion had gained an increasing foothold in the legislature and in public discourse. This project seeks to explore in greater detail the emergence of activism on abortion legislation in the decades following the re-democratization of Argentina in 1983. Particularly throughout the 2000s and 2010s, advocates for both the expansion and repression of abortion rights used similar language to argue for their respective agendas, leaning on the local significance of “human rights” in the aftermath of the dictatorship that lasted from 1976-1983. My thesis seeks to answer the question: how have feminist organizations and religious organizations historically utilized talk of human rights to shape the debate on abortion, and how do they continue to do so today? I use a qualitative approach to explore the emergence of human rights language in the history of abortion activism from both sides of the abortion debate. I find that the Catholic Church’s involvement with the human rights abuses of the dictatorship taints the legitimacy of their human rights claim, while feminist women’s organizations tailor their claim to local sentiments in the aftermath of the dictatorship and align their human rights language with larger, international organizations that advocate for expanded abortion legislation.
Recommended Citation
St. Amant, Ysabella Carmen, "Whose Right is it Anyway? A Study of Human Rights Language on Both Sides of the Abortion Debate in Post-Dictatorial Argentina" (2020). Honors Theses. 1379.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/hon_thesis/1379
Accessibility Status
Searchable text
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Included in
Latin American Studies Commons, Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Politics and Social Change Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons, Women's Studies Commons