Jocelyn Viterna
Speaker
Professor of Sociology, Harvard University
Abortion Politics and Democratic Backsliding: Lessons from Latin America
Date and Time
October 27, 2026
12:00PM - 01:30PM EDT
Location
CGIS South, Room S216
No registration required to attend in person.
Abortion is a polarizing political issue across the American continent, yet US-focused scholars seldom interrogate the consequences of abortion politics for democratic institutions. Latin America scholarship has done better. Moving beyond the typical US focus of explaining abortion liberalization or abortion politicization, Latin America scholarship investigates how conservative actors strategically isolate and amplify the antiabortion position as a means of consolidating alliances and deepening elite control over legislative and judicial institutions. More provocatively, this scholarship also suggests that elites use the unique liminal legality of the fetus to blur, and ultimately weaken, national commitments to legal and judicial equality, which powerfully facilitates democratic backsliding. We build these arguments by first comparing abortion politics over time and across the region, and then by focusing specifically on the cases of El Salvador, Peru, Argentina, and Colombia. We conclude that legal access to safe abortion is not only critical for the life, health, and human rights of women and girls around the world; it is also central for creating and maintaining healthy democracies.
This event is presented in collaboration with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
Steven Levitsky
Moderator
Director, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies; David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies; Professor of Government, Harvard
Bios
Jocelyn Viterna is Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. Her research examines how social mobilization affects gender norms and practices in states, in warfare, in institutions, and in communities. Viterna’s current project investigates how anti-abortion-rights activism in El Salvador fundamentally transformed the Salvadoran judicial system, and more specifically, its processes for litigating gender. Viterna has also worked in collaboration with Salvadoran doctors to investigate how strict anti-abortion legislation generates preventable maternal health complications, especially for women occupying low socioeconomic statuses. Viterna’s manuscript-in-progress elaborates how these lessons from El Salvador foreshadow institutional changes to US legal and health care systems under Dobbs. To date, Viterna’s articles have been published in the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, Politics and Gender, and the Latin American Research Review.Her award-winning book, Women in War: The Micro-processes of Mobilization in El Salvador was published in 2013 by the Oxford University Press.
Steven Levitsky is David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government and Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. He is Senior Fellow at the Kettering Foundation and a Senior Democracy Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions, with a focus on Latin America. He is co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die, which was a New York Times Best-Seller and was published in 30 languages, and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. He has written or edited 11 other books, including Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press 2003), Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Lucan Way) (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (with Lucan Way) (Princeton University Press, 2022). He and Lucan Way are currently working on a book on democratic resilience across the world.
Professor Levitsky has written for New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and The New Republic, and he has been a columnist for La Republica (Peru) and Folha de São Paulo (Brazil).