Sex and the State: Abortion, Divorce, and the Family under Latin American Dictatorships and Democracies

Abstract

In Sex and the State, Mala Htun makes an important contribution to the literature on Latin American gender politics, offering a detailed history and analysis of the battles over family, divorce, and abortion laws in twentieth-century Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Dictatorial military governments in all three countries liberalized family laws (such as those related to marital property and parental rights), a surprising outcome given that, as she noted, “[d]ictators did not intend to grant women more rights” and instead “aimed to usher in a return to traditional family values” (p. 67). Yet, even though they embraced patriarchal values, they all ended up liberalizing family laws, because they also saw themselves as modernizing forces. Under the dictatorships, family law ended up being framed as a technical issue in need of modernization, as a matter of concern for experts. And the “closed nature of these governments insulated technical decisions from societal input, thus expediting change” (p. 5).Another major factor that shaped gender policies was the relationship between the state and the Catholic Church. A close relationship between the government in power and the church effectively blocked the liberalization of gender policies, while tensions between the two bodies allowed for reform. Ironically then, the Catholic Church’s strong opposition to the Pinochet government, its support for human rights, and its close ties to those who led the transition to democracy helps explain why women did not gain new rights with democratization. Until 2004, Chile was one of the few countries in the world that forbade abortion and divorce under all circumstances. In Argentina, where the church implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) supported the military dictatorship, politicians in the democratic era have felt much less constrained by the church’s position on gender policies and have legalized divorce. Similarly, tensions between the Brazilian church and the military dictatorship allowed for the legalization of divorce while the military was in power.To her credit, despite her close analysis of the role of the church in politics, Htun does not simplify Latin American political culture into Catholic culture. The chapter entitled “Four Normative Traditions” is an impressive overview of Latin American liberal, feminist, socialist, as well as Catholic thought regarding gender roles; all these traditions framed the legal battles she analyzes later in the book.Abortion is the one area of gender policy Htun considers in which there was no movement toward liberalization under either dictatorial or democratic regimes. She suggests that some governments were willing to challenge the church on divorce, but did not do so in the case of abortion because (1) the issue was framed in more absolutist terms, (2) there was a much broader coalition in favor of divorce rights than that in favor of abortion rights, and (3) the general lack of enforcement of punitive abortion laws “means that the middle classes have safe access to abortion in private clinics” (p. 154). In contrast, the middle classes could not divorce or remarry so long as divorce remained illegal. Finally, the timing of abortion battles matter. The Vatican, Htun observes, “became a more committed and effective opponent of abortion . . . in the 1990s,” and “the antiabortion movement mobilized on a global scale in reaction to liberalizing changes in North America and Western Europe” (pp. 168–69). Those who seek to legalize abortion in Latin America (and elsewhere) today face a harder battle than did reform advocates in earlier decades.The book will be invaluable for anyone interested in law and gender in Argentina, Brazil, or Chile, and it provides important guidelines for explaining the relationship between gender-related laws and regime change elsewhere, especially in countries with a strong Catholic Church. Htun says that her arguments would best apply to countries “that have experienced political transitions and preserved hegemonic religious institutions” (p. 175), but it is not clear to what extent her findings can be applied to all countries with hegemonic religious institutions or apply only to Catholic countries. Her choice of cases makes it impossible to know, since Argentina, Brazil, and Chile are all countries in which the Catholic Church has historically played a key role in politics. In conclusion, she looks comparatively at several cases—Uruguay, Poland, Spain, and Argentina (pp. 175–79)—which, like her main cases, all are characterized by a politically influential Catholic tradition. She notes that a review of gender policies in those countries suggests that the “strength of illiberal tendencies and power of religious ideas is not unique to Latin American democracies” (p. 175). But are they unique to Catholic countries? That is not clear from this book. Of course, no book can address every question; perhaps in a follow-up Htun will broaden her scope to include non-Catholic countries.