Finding a voice: Abortion claim-making during Portuguese democratization

SynopisIn the mid 1970s, illegal abortions in Portugal were estimated at about one to two hundred thousand per year and were one of the main causes of death among women of childbearing age. When the authoritarian regime was overthrown in 1974, abortion reform emerged as a grievance of women's organizations. The process of abortion claim-making was influenced by the previous legal and social history of illegal abortion, the rise of women's collective agency, the democratic transition, and the abortion trials. Using theories of political opportunities and mobilizing structures in the study of social movements, I show how the process of claim-making is shaped by opportunities and constraints offered by a revolutionary democratic process and by the context of increasing women's mobilization. I use content analysis of newspaper articles, interviews, and archival data to reconstruct the contentious process of abortion claim-making. The findings suggest that the process of abortion claim-making was contentious and that abortion claims were framed largely as a social justice issue affecting poor, working class women rather than understood as a gendered process.