Social Europe

politics, economy and employment & labour

  • Themes
    • Strategic autonomy
    • War in Ukraine
    • European digital sphere
    • Recovery and resilience
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Dossiers
    • Occasional Papers
    • Research Essays
    • Brexit Paper Series
  • Podcast
  • Videos
  • Newsletter

The uneven battlefield of reproductive rights

Andrea Pető 17th May 2022

Progressives have been too slow to appreciate the attack on reproductive rights in eastern Europe and the US.

reproductive rights,abortion,hungary,eastern europe,united states,us,poland
‘I’m dependent’—an anti-abortion billboard in Bialystok, promoted by the Nasze Dzieci (Our Children) foundation (Jan Kaminski / shutterstock.com)

News of attacks on reproductive rights in the United States fills the headlines. Meanwhile, white mothers with cute white babies smile down from expensive billboards advertising motherhood—from Hungary to Poland, Germany to Denmark, Russia to Serbia—and condemning abortion.

In the US, due to the well-planned and successful Republican takeover of the judicial system, the Supreme Court criminalisation of abortion is close. In Europe where regulation of reproductive rights varies from country to country, the public discourse is more about demographic decline. As a result, not only was a European commissioner (Dubravka Šuica) appointed with ‘demography’ in her portfolio but illiberal governments have introduced several familialist measures to incentivise marriage—offering joint loans to bind spouses and encouraging couples to have children via income-tax exemptions.

Social inequality

Why have reproductive rights become such a battlefield, when the number of abortions is steadily declining and is clearly linked to social inequality? Surveys by the Hungarian Central Statistical Office show that poor, underage women and women who already have multiple children consider abortion as the only affordable means of birth control, since social-security systems do not support any other. To make the picture even more complex, new family policies are not only securing solid electoral support—as in the recent general election in Hungary—but at the same time traditional tools of classical leftist, redistributive welfare politics are being applied by illiberal governments.

Attacks on reproductive rights aim to unite globally very different forces, from conservative politicians and fundamentalist religious actors to illiberal pragmatists and warmongers such as Vladimir Putin. Their aim is to create an ostensibly attractive alternative to liberal democracies: much more is at stake here than the right to abortion. In Texas relatives and neighbours are expected to report if they happen to have information about abortion and are authorised to sue to enforce a law, even if they are not harmed, which represents the insertion of an illiberal paradigm into the liberal legal system.


Our job is keeping you informed!


Subscribe to our free newsletter and stay up to date with the latest Social Europe content. We will never send you spam and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Sign up here

The winds of change regarding reproductive rights have been blowing for more than a decade, together with intellectual and institutional preparation for this contest. Yet progressive political forces missed the obvious signs that reproductive rights were destined to become the battlefield. Illiberal forces have not merely criticised the various legal frameworks but, at the same time, have been building alternative institutions and capturing existing ones, replacing discourses of rights with a new language about reproduction—all largely under the radar of progressive actors.

Interconnected levels

This contest does offer space for a discussion on crucial issues of gender equality. But it is happening on three interconnected levels—transnational, national and local—and especially on the local level.

Even a national legal framework for abortion can be disabled if, for example, certain hospitals in Poland and Hungary receive European Union funding via their respective governments to improve their gynaecology departments only on the condition that they become ‘family-friendly’—code for not performing abortions. When a public hospital in Hungary or a small municipality in Poland can declare itself to be outside the jurisdiction of universal human rights, international treaties, EU directives or national law, without any real legal or practical consequences, a new conceptualisation of citizenship is required: certain citizens then have access to public goods while others do not.

The same is happening in the US, as far as differences among states are concerned. A brave midwife in a hostile state can however ensure that a women can control her fertility. As this contest is global, requests for abortion-inducing medication by mail can circumvent legislation, alongside international companies such as Amazon financing the journey by an employee to get access to healthcare not available in the area.

American Christian-fundamentalist narratives and branding are, though, also exported. For example, the ‘heartbeat’ principle—a pregnancy cannot be terminated once the foetus’ first heartbeat is detected in the sixth week of pregnancy—has not only been adopted by some conservative states but has been associated with reductions of reproductive rights abroad.

Transnational network

A transnational network of illiberal non-governmental organisations and government-supported ‘GONGOs’ has been set up to that end. The World Congress of Families has already organised four so-called Demographic Summits, in 2015, 2017, 2019 and 2021, where politicians gathered with religious leaders to share strategies for raising birth rates. In October 2020, the Hungarian government co-sponsored with five other countries a virtual gathering for the signing of the ‘Geneva Consensus Declaration on Promoting Women’s Health and Strengthening the Family’.

This document is meant to be an alternative to the Council of Europe Istanbul convention on violence against women and domestic violence and the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) mechanism. The Geneva declaration, initially signed by 32 countries, stated that ‘there is no international right to abortion, nor any international obligation on the part of States to finance or facilitate abortion, consistent with the long-standing international consensus that each nation has the sovereign right to implement programs and activities consistent with their laws and policies’.

The universal human-rights paradigm focuses on the individual rights of women. It does not mitigate the injustices stemming from the economic order imposed in east and central Europe after the transition of 1989 or the austerity policies pursued following the 2008 financial crash which have affected women’s everyday lives.


We need your support


Social Europe is an independent publisher and we believe in freely available content. For this model to be sustainable, however, we depend on the solidarity of our readers. Become a Social Europe member for less than 5 Euro per month and help us produce more articles, podcasts and videos. Thank you very much for your support!

Become a Social Europe Member

The illiberal contestation of reproductive rights is thus not only a political movement against universal rights, masked as a moral force creating an alternative to liberal values—it also has a material basis. Since resources are becoming more and more scarce, women take them from wherever they are available, which also explains why illiberalism is so popular among women. Reproductive rights, maternalism and the family as an institution can be a resource when no others are available from a dysfunctional state apparatus.

Lisa Brush has called maternalism ‘feminism for hard times’. When the electoral support of traditional progressive parties is stalling while social and economic problems are increasing, a rethinking of maternalism might be the way to stop illiberal contestations of reproductive rights appropriating the institutions and values of progressive politics.

A French version of this article was published by Le Monde

Andrea Pető
Andrea Pető

Andrea Pető is a historian and professor at the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University, Vienna and a research affiliate of the CEU Democracy Institute, Budapest. Recent publications include: The Women of the Arrow Cross Party: Invisible Hungarian Perpetrators in the Second World War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and Forgotten Massacre: Budapest 1944 (DeGruyter, 2021).

You are here: Home / Politics / The uneven battlefield of reproductive rights

Most Popular Posts

Russian soldiers' mothers,war,Ukraine The Ukraine war and Russian soldiers’ mothersJennifer Mathers and Natasha Danilova
IGU,documents,International Gas Union,lobby,lobbying,sustainable finance taxonomy,green gas,EU,COP ‘Gaslighting’ Europe on fossil fuelsFaye Holder
Schengen,Fortress Europe,Romania,Bulgaria Romania and Bulgaria stuck in EU’s second tierMagdalena Ulceluse
income inequality,inequality,Gini,1 per cent,elephant chart,elephant Global income inequality: time to revise the elephantBranko Milanovic
Orbán,Hungary,Russia,Putin,sanctions,European Union,EU,European Parliament,commission,funds,funding Time to confront Europe’s rogue state—HungaryStephen Pogány

Most Recent Posts

reality check,EU foreign policy,Russia Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—a reality check for the EUHeidi Mauer, Richard Whitman and Nicholas Wright
permanent EU investment fund,Recovery and Resilience Facility,public investment,RRF Towards a permanent EU investment fundPhilipp Heimberger and Andreas Lichtenberger
sustainability,SDGs,Finland Embedding sustainability in a government programmeJohanna Juselius
social dialogue,social partners Social dialogue must be at the heart of Europe’s futureClaes-Mikael Ståhl
Jacinda Ardern,women,leadership,New Zealand What it means when Jacinda Ardern calls timePeter Davis

Other Social Europe Publications

front cover scaled Towards a social-democratic century?
Cover e1655225066994 National recovery and resilience plans
Untitled design The transatlantic relationship
Women Corona e1631700896969 500 Women and the coronavirus crisis
sere12 1 RE No. 12: Why No Economic Democracy in Sweden?

Eurofound advertisement

Eurofound webinar: Making telework work for everyone

Since 2020 more European workers and managers have enjoyed greater flexibility and autonomy in work and are reporting their preference for hybrid working. Also driven by technological developments and structural changes in employment, organisations are now integrating telework more permanently into their workplace.

To reflect on these shifts, on 6 December Eurofound researchers Oscar Vargas and John Hurley explored the challenges and opportunities of the surge in telework, as well as the overall growth of telework and teleworkable jobs in the EU and what this means for workers, managers, companies and policymakers.


WATCH THE WEBINAR HERE

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

The winter issue of the Progressive Post magazine from FEPS is out!

The sequence of recent catastrophes has thrust new words into our vocabulary—'polycrisis', for example, even 'permacrisis'. These challenges have multiple origins, reinforce each other and cannot be tackled individually. But could they also be opportunities for the EU?

This issue offers compelling analyses on the European health union, multilateralism and international co-operation, the state of the union, political alternatives to the narrative imposed by the right and much more!


DOWNLOAD HERE

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

The macroeconomic effects of re-applying the EU fiscal rules

Against the background of the European Commission's reform plans for the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), this policy brief uses the macroeconometric multi-country model NiGEM to simulate the macroeconomic implications of the most relevant reform options from 2024 onwards. Next to a return to the existing and unreformed rules, the most prominent options include an expenditure rule linked to a debt anchor.

Our results for the euro area and its four biggest economies—France, Italy, Germany and Spain—indicate that returning to the rules of the SGP would lead to severe cuts in public spending, particularly if the SGP rules were interpreted as in the past. A more flexible interpretation would only somewhat ease the fiscal-adjustment burden. An expenditure rule along the lines of the European Fiscal Board would, however, not necessarily alleviate that burden in and of itself.

Our simulations show great care must be taken to specify the expenditure rule, such that fiscal consolidation is achieved in a growth-friendly way. Raising the debt ceiling to 90 per cent of gross domestic product and applying less demanding fiscal adjustments, as proposed by the IMK, would go a long way.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ILO advertisement

Global Wage Report 2022-23: The impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power

The International Labour Organization's Global Wage Report is a key reference on wages and wage inequality for the academic community and policy-makers around the world.

This eighth edition of the report, The Impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power, examines the evolution of real wages, giving a unique picture of wage trends globally and by region. The report includes evidence on how wages have evolved through the COVID-19 crisis as well as how the current inflationary context is biting into real wage growth in most regions of the world. The report shows that for the first time in the 21st century real wage growth has fallen to negative values while, at the same time, the gap between real productivity growth and real wage growth continues to widen.

The report analysis the evolution of the real total wage bill from 2019 to 2022 to show how its different components—employment, nominal wages and inflation—have changed during the COVID-19 crisis and, more recently, during the cost-of-living crisis. The decomposition of the total wage bill, and its evolution, is shown for all wage employees and distinguishes between women and men. The report also looks at changes in wage inequality and the gender pay gap to reveal how COVID-19 may have contributed to increasing income inequality in different regions of the world. Together, the empirical evidence in the report becomes the backbone of a policy discussion that could play a key role in a human-centred recovery from the different ongoing crises.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ETUI advertisement

The EU recovery strategy: a blueprint for a more Social Europe or a house of cards?

This new ETUI paper explores the European Union recovery strategy, with a focus on its potentially transformative aspects vis-à-vis European integration and its implications for the social dimension of the EU’s socio-economic governance. In particular, it reflects on whether the agreed measures provide sufficient safeguards against the spectre of austerity and whether these constitute steps away from treating social and labour policies as mere ‘variables’ of economic growth.


DOWNLOAD HERE

About Social Europe

Our Mission

Article Submission

Membership

Advertisements

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641

Social Europe Archives

Search Social Europe

Themes Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

Follow us

RSS Feed

Follow us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on LinkedIn

Follow us on YouTube