PARA NO MORIR

Para No Morir

The rhetoric of life and choice in the United States' and Argentina's abortion rights movements

For three years of high school and for much of my first year at Brown, I held onto a particularly bold piece of bedroom wall decor. It was a bright green bandana—pañuelo is the Spanish word—affixed at its three corners with Scotch tape. At the center of the cloth was an image of a white headscarf, meant to recall those worn by Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo— mothers of children who had been “disappeared” during the Argentine military dictatorship. Above the image are two lines of horizontal text, also in white. They read: Campaña Nacional Por el Derecho al Aborto Legal, Seguro, y Gratuito (National Campaign for the Right to Legal, Safe and Free Abortion). Lower, circling the image of the white headscarf, are more words: Educación sexual para decidir; anticonceptivos para no abortar; aborto legal para no morir. Roughly translated, this means: Sexual education so you can decide; contraception so you don’t have to abort; legal abortion so you don’t die.

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The pañuelo verde originated in Argentina in 2003 with the founding of the National Campaign. It has since become a symbol of contemporary feminism and abortion rights advocacy across Latin America and beyond (U.S. activists have recently begun to encourage the use of the color green in protests)—and “symbol” might be an understatement. The pañuelo—inscribed with exactly the same text and insignia—has been printed and worn by hundreds of thousands of people, who, congregating on streets and in front of statehouses, make up what’s been referred to as Latin America’s marea verde, or green wave. When a piece of visual or textual rhetoric is reproduced to such a degree, it stops simply representing a movement—it comes to define it.

No symbol used in the United States abortion rights movement has reached the same level of ubiquity. Here, the closest rival to the pañuelo verde might not be an item but a phrase: “My Body, My Choice.”

The U.S. movement that conceived of this catchphrase has had a rough go of it this year. In June, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overruling the constitutional protections around abortion first established in Roe v. Wade and capping off decades of slow rollbacks in access at the state level. Since Dobbs, 13 states have fully banned abortion, with new restrictions enacted in many more. But it’s not like this everywhere: in Latin America, things have been moving in a very different direction.

I got my pañuelo in Argentina in 2018 during the semester I spent studying in Buenos Aires. At the time, abortion was illegal except for in cases of rape, incest, or a threat to the mother’s life. That year, a bill to legalize abortion passed the lower chamber of Congress for the first time before narrowly failing in the Senate. The night of the vote, my family and I watched on TV as thousands of abortion rights supporters, clad in green and each with their pañuelo tied around their neck or wrist, flocked around the Capitol Building. I wanted to be there, but my mother wouldn’t let me go, thinking of the violence that anti-choice extremists have employed during abortion rights protests in the U.S. In fact, the night proceeded peacefully, and while legalization didn’t pass in 2018, abortion rights advocates didn’t have long to wait: in December of 2020, both houses voted ‘yes’ on a bill sponsored by the executive branch to make abortion legal for up to 14 weeks. Argentina was soon joined by Mexico, whose Supreme Court ruled in September of 2021 that it was unconstitutional to punish abortion as a crime, and by Colombia, whose Constitutional Court made abortion legal up to 24 weeks in February of this year.

Less than three months later, POLITICO released a draft of the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson. The leak made it all but certain that by the end of the Court’s term in June, Roe v. Wade would be overturned and dozens of states would have free rein in their efforts to restrict abortion. The week that the draft came out, I, along with dozens of other Brown students, marched to the statehouse to express our rage and to demand that the legislature take steps to expand abortion access in Rhode Island. We settled on a smattering of chants, mostly call and response:

Abortion is a right! Fight, fight, fight! and

My body—my choice!

As impassioned as we were, the words felt stale. Protesters have been shouting about choice for years, if not decades now; the rhetoric of autonomy and free decision-making has dominated the speeches, articles, fundraising emails, and amicus briefs of the 21st-century U.S. abortion rights movement. But we’ve been losing. And while rhetoric isn’t everything, it matters—both as a tool for changing minds and energizing supporters, and as an indicator of a movement’s central values and strategies. So it’s worth asking: how did we get here? What are the downsides to the way we speak about abortion in the US? And what has Argentina been getting right?

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To gain popular support and change policy, social movements generally have to reach two different groups of people. First, there are those who already agree with the movement’s goals. In the Argentine abortion rights context, these people are called los verdes, or “the greens”; in the U.S., these are your staunch pro-choicers. Movement leaders need to make sure that los verdes stay engaged with the movement and excited about it—enough to get out onto the streets or to the polls. Then there are the moderates, the agnostics, the undecideds. Here, advocates of reproductive rights are tasked with framing their mission in a way that acknowledges the discomfort that many people feel with the concept of abortion, but then demonstrates how other concerns (bodily autonomy, human rights, the life of the mother, etc.) ought to supersede that discomfort.

The language printed on the pañuelo verde is singularly effective in accomplishing the latter task. It reads, again, in translation: Sexual education so you can decide; contraception so you don’t have to abort; legal abortion so you don’t die.

There’s important context for this statement. In Argentina, as with any country, prohibiting abortion never stopped it from happening: hundreds of thousands of women had illegal abortions each year even when the procedure was criminalized. Wealthy women often had the resources to ensure that their abortions were safe—whether by traveling to regions where the procedure was legal or through other means. But poor women could be forced to self-manage their abortions using unsafe methods (catheters, needles, herbs, and toxic drug combinations) with sometimes lethal consequences. In 2010, 60,000 women were being hospitalized annually in Argentina because of an illegal abortion, and dozens died. From 2016 to 2017, at least 43 women in Argentina lost their lives to clandestine abortion. Mortality was so central to the debate about abortion in Argentina that many of the activists involved in the national movement to end femicide, Ni Una Menos or Not One Woman Less, have become intuitive leaders of the marea verde.

Understanding this reality, it becomes possible to find abortion distasteful or even morally wrong but still agree with the pañuelo’s statement. “Aborto legal para no morir” casts abortion as a last resort, whose frequency should be minimized, but which ought to be legally sanctioned to minimize the human costs of its inevitable occurrence. While other rhetorical models refuse to see abortion as having anything to do with life (the contested life of the fetus, that is), the phrase on the pañuelo directly engages with life but redirects the issue towards the life of the mother. “Sexual education so you can decide; contraception so you don’t have to abort; legal abortion so you don’t die”: the words cast a wide and well-constructed net.

Again, the United States finds itself lacking in an equivalent: a piece of rhetoric capable of wooing those who don’t already think of abortion as a right and a blessing. Perhaps the strategy most targeted at people on the fence, these days, is to emphasize abortion’s medical nature (“Abortion is Healthcare!”). Framing abortion as a medical procedure not unlike a wisdom tooth withdrawal dulls and diminishes the moral content of the debate, or at least tries to. While I am perfectly willing to understand abortion according to these terms, it is hard to believe that the “Abortion is Healthcare” line would be seen by an abortion agnostic as anything other than a transparent and uncompelling attempt to pretend that abortion is not different—that it is not seen and experienced differently than other procedures, that it has nothing to do with life. It’s also worth noting that unlike Argentina, the U.S. government does not guarantee people healthcare, so including abortion as part of the medical package would still fall short of ensuring universal access.

Aside from “Abortion is Healthcare,” the U.S. is left, again, with “my body, my choice”— our go-to, one-size-fits-all rallying cry. This framing doesn’t reflect the full range of voices that have pushed for different, often more radical approaches to reproductive activism, especially from racially marginalized communities. It should also be a surprise to no one that “my body, my choice” has done little to bring over people who are undecided on abortion rights. By zeroing in on choice, the mainstream movement has left their opponents free to lay claim to the rhetoric of life, which, taken alone, is inarguably more compelling.

Imagine, for a moment, that some part of you believes—even wonders whether—a fetus might be, if not exactly comparable to a child, alive in some meaningful way. Then you’re asked to decide what’s more important: the “life” of the fetus, or the mother’s “choice”? Under this framework it would hardly be a question. Argentina’s “para no morir,” on the other hand, might make the decision harder. When maternal mortality enters the picture, it becomes clear that there are questions of life and death on both sides—and since abortions happen no matter what, you might come to see decriminalization as the truly “pro-life” approach.

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There’s a wrinkle to all of this. As effective as the pañuelo’s language has proven to be in Argentina, the demand for “sexual education to decide, contraception so you don’t have to abort, and legal abortion so you don’t die” is, to some activists there, now dated. It’s not only that Argentine women finally can (under many circumstances) access legal abortion, limiting the instances in which they must resort to clandestine procedures. It’s that illegal, self-managed abortions are typically not that dangerous anymore—neither in Argentina, nor in the U.S. The “abortion pill” (actually a series of pills: one mifepristone, followed by four misoprostol) is safe, effective, and accessible even to women living in areas where surgical termination has been outlawed. Already, some activists in Argentina argue that it’s more important to develop structures of information and support (such as “accompaniment networks” like the feminist collective La Revuelta) so women can safely self-manage their abortions than to demand the procedure’s legal sanction.

All of these developments are good, no doubt—but they do mean that abortion rights advocates in both Argentina and the U.S. will need to do more than emphasize the dangers of illegal abortion in the coming years. Neither region should lose sight of its recent history. Nor should they disregard the other real and present danger that’s associated with illegality: women dying as a result of being deprived abortions necessary for their health. While exceptions for the preservation of a woman’s life are included in most restrictive abortion policies in the U.S. (and apply to post-14-week abortions in Argentina), a restrictive and highly criminalized landscape can make doctors hesitant to perform the procedure until it’s too late.

Abortion rights activists in the U.S. should center these stories and attempt to reclaim the rhetoric of “life” from their opponents. Argentina should not relinquish the claim it’s already laid. But both regions also need to look further. The “para no morir” framework is both dated and limited in the sense that it implies abortion is something to be begrudgingly accepted, which doesn’t allow much room for more radical approaches. “My body, my choice” does little to convert a skeptic. It’s an individualistic statement, not a collectivist one.

We have to acknowledge that some people do and will continue to conceptualize fetuses as individuals themselves, and in a world in which motherhood is often considered more valuable than mothers, a rhetoric that pits the rights of a woman against the rights of a ‘child’ is doomed for failure. Yet there is another category of rights, which go beyond the specific limitations placed on an individual and extend to the conditions that shape, regulate, and restrict the behaviors of a collective.

“My body, my choice” also reflects a very American conception of liberty—liberty as freedom from state interference with personal (or individual) decision-making. Isaiah Berlin, the 20th-century philosopher, referred to this type of freedom as “negative liberty.” Its alternative, positive liberty, takes the collective, rather than the individual, as its subject. It involves having the resources and power necessary to control your own life and accomplish your fundamental goals.

The project of securing positive liberty for a country’s residents is necessarily broader and more radical than a movement framed around removing a single state-enforced prohibition. Through the lens of positive liberty, it is possible to view the right to abortion as inseparable from other forms of social, economic, and political justice. The Richmond Reproductive Freedom Project, part of the National Network of Abortion Funds, urges us to shift our focus to “reproductive oppression”—or “the control and exploitation of women, girls, and individuals through our bodies, sexuality, labor, and reproduction.”

The opposite of reproductive oppression is reproductive justice, which has three pillars: the right to have a child, the right not to have child, and the right to raise a child in a safe and healthy environment. This framework has the advantage of making room for both moderate and radical viewpoints on abortion. Reproductive justice is relevant and necessary even for people who might never need or want to end a pregnancy, but who’ve been impacted by other forms of reproductive oppression. And as a project driven by the pursuit of positive liberty, it’s conducive to the formation of solidarities and coalitions between the abortion rights movement and other movements—for gay liberation, disability rights, environmental justice, immigrants’ rights, and anti-racism.

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Last year, before the march down to the Rhode Island statehouse after the Dobbs leak, one of the protest organizers circulated a simple demand: wear green.

The crowd that congregated on North Campus certainly took them up on it. We were awash in green—green T-shirts, green fleece vests, green headbands, and green banners. I was the only one, however, with a pañuelo. And somewhere between College St. and North Main, I realized the pañuelo wrapped around my wrist had come untied. It was gone.

It was an oddly symbolic accident. The whole scene reflected a growing trend in countries around the globe, where abortion rights activists have adopted the color green while leaving behind the precise language printed on the Argentine scarf. That omission leaves us with an opportunity. Now it’s on us to decide: what will the marea verde come to represent?

LILY SELTZ B’25 is rooting for Argentina in the World Cup.