The Pro-Life Movement and the Fight for the Constitution in Argentina: Between Law and Transcendence

Abstract

The constitutional history of abortion in Argentina is long and complex. This paper overviews a small part of it: how Catholic legal academia developed, since the early 1980s, constitutional arguments to dispute with the feminist camp the meaning of the Constitution. This process has two dimensions. One is linked to the intellectual history of Catholic ideas over reproduction and how they were adapted to the peculiarities of Argentinean law. The other is related to the way in which these arguments formed the framing of the “pro-life” movement in Argentina. Exploring this normative world reveals the “depth of field” with which social movements seeking constitutional change work (Cover, 1983). It also reveals the stakes involved when the battle is waged in that terrain. This article explores what this means for constitutional theory.

Keywords

• Constitutional theory
• democratic constitutionalism
• abortion
• feminism
• Catholicism
• social movements