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Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court officially rolled back abortion rights by overturning Roe v. Wade, and many states have already imposed strict bans on abortion. This is part of the advance of an increasingly radical far-right that’s also attacking trans and LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, democratic rights, and labor rights. The Supreme Court is a profoundly anti-democratic institution, and it’s helping push forward this reactionary agenda.
But elsewhere, abortion bans have been lifted. Last September, the Mexican Supreme Court decriminalized abortion up to 12 weeks. In Chile, the new constitution will drop the ban on abortion. Meanwhile, abortion up to 14 weeks of pregnancy has been legal in Argentina since December of 2020.
These victories were not gifts from center-left governments — they were won by militant movements on the streets going back decades.
The international socialist feminist organization Pan y Rosas (Bread and Roses) played a leading role in all these movements. This group exists in 14 countries around the world, including Argentina, Mexico, Chile, France, Germany, among others. And comrades in this group, which exists in 14 countries around the world, including Argentina, Chile, Mexico, France, Bolivia, the Spanish State, and others, have been involved in key movements and working-class struggles in addition to the fight for abortion.
In this episode of All That’s Left, we interview three comrades from Pan y Rosas — Celeste from Argentina, Yara from Mexico, and Ale from Chile — who will talk about how reproductive rights victories were won in their respective countries and the important role played by the feminist movement. The guests also describe what’s next in the struggle: in Argentina, Mexico, and Chile, feminists are fighting to truly make abortion free and accessible everwhere.
As this episode’s guests all make clear, this is not just a fight for abortion — it’s part of a larger struggle against the oppression and exploitation that we face under capitalism. It’s a fight for free universal healthcare, for comprehensive sexual health education, for the separation of church and state, for a living wage, for an end to imperialism. It’s a fight to end capitalism, a system in which any right that we win can be taken away at any moment. Legalizing abortion isn’t the end point of this struggle — it’s just the beginning.
Listen to the episode on Spotify on Apple Podcasts.
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