Latin America's Abortion Rights Breakthrough

In recent years, Latin America has experienced an abortion-rights breakthrough that stands in striking contrast to the wave of criminalization of abortion afoot in the United States. It also ended some of the world's most draconian abortion bans. At the root of this breakthrough is the framing of abortion not as an issue of personal choice but as a human-rights matter. This strategy, borrowed from previous campaigns for equality and justice in Latin America—especially the struggle for same-sex marriage—capitalized on the resonance of human rights in Latin American politics and society in the postauthoritarian era.