What We Can Learn from Latin American Reproductive Rights Activism

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What We Can Learn from Latin American Reproductive Rights Activism

Global Research Bytes with Katy Quissell
Katy Quissell headshot

Katy Quissell, professor of public health in the School of Medicine and the Global Studies program, discusses her research project on moral social movements and policy change in Latin America, funded by a CGII grant. The project, co-designed with students, explores how activism in Latin America has led to policy changes in reproductive rights, contrasting with the U.S. context.

Audio file

*Gay marriage was legalized, not decriminalized, in Brazil in 2013. It was legalized in the U.S. in 2015.

Transcript of Interview with Katy Quissell

Emily Mellen 00:07 

Welcome to Global Research Bytes. I'm Emily Mellen, and I'm here with Katy Quissell, Professor of Public Health in the School of Medicine and in the Global Studies program. Katy, congratulations on receiving the CGII Faculty Research with Undergraduates grant for your project, "Understanding the role of moral social movements and policy change operation advocacy in Latin America." Could you start by giving us a brief overview of the project and what inspired you to pursue this research? 

Katy Quissell 00:32 

Yeah, sure, and thank you so much for having me on the podcast. Well, this research project relates to some ongoing research that I've been doing around moral, contentious debates in politics. I am a political scientist by training. I have been writing some theory pieces related to understanding how new international or global norms spread or fail to spread across different countries. And part of that area of research is looking at norm contestation, or different ideas that are potentially controversial and that lead to a lot of political discontent when different actors are engaging around them. So, I published a research theory paper two years ago looking at basically understanding the role of values and morality in international relations and using that as a lens to study these contentious political conversations. I also happen to have a background in reproductive and sexual health and rights. I am currently teaching in the global public health track of the Global Studies program. I did public health work before I became a political scientist, and I teach a class on grounds, PHS 4050, where we cover a lot of controversial global public health topics. And so, this idea for the research project came out of a discussion I had with a couple students in my class. We had been talking about reproductive justice when the Dobbs decision happened, the students came to office hours, we began discussing a bit further. And in many ways, this project came out of those conversations, and it was co designed with my students. For their interests, I think they wanted to explore a bit more about the green wave of activism that's been happening in Latin America. These students happen to come from Latin American countries, and so together, we looked at ways of combining some of my research interests with some of their research interests. 

Emily Mellen 02:26 

Can you tell us a little bit about the landscape here versus in the countries that you've been looking at?

Katy Quissell 02:32 

I think that's a great question, since that was a bit of the motivation for how we started thinking about this project. The Dobbs decision, I think, was very concerning to many of my students who grew up in a context of having access to different reproductive and sexual health services, and the idea that we would lose rights was very concerning to them. Meanwhile, they had seen really successful activism happening in countries that we often typically think of as being more politically conservative or more religious, and that seemed to be counterintuitive, that you wouldn't have necessarily expected to see a regression of rights in the United States, where you were seeing rights being extended and expanded across countries that again, come from more conservative or religious background. So, in thinking about that, I think my students and I also were hoping that we could learn from activism in these other countries that might help give us greater insight into what can be done in the United States to further advance reproductive rights. So, some of the differences that we've seen right now: Brazil is the country where we've collected the most data from. One of my students came from Brazil and was in my undergraduate program. We started there because we were also interested... Brazil, historically has moved pretty quickly to expand reproductive and sexual health rights, much more than you would expect from a middle-income or upper middle-income country. They were really quick to respond to HIV AIDS. They [legalized] same sex marriage before the United States did, but they have not yet fully expanded access to abortion services in the country, and so that case was really interesting to us to understand what was going on there.* And politically, they have a much more robust history of organizing around healthcare rights than we have in the United States. So, we certainly see that in the activism that's happening around abortion rights access. But it also to us, was an interesting case, because in some ways you would have expected Brazil to have moved faster on abortion rights than some other countries in Latin America that we've also seen, more recently change laws. So, our other countries that we're going to be looking at are Colombia, which also recently expanded access to abortion and potentially Chile, which has not yet expanded access to abortion services. So, we’re trying to balance out cases that we've seen more recent legal and policy change with ones that we haven't but where you might have anticipated it happening. 

Emily Mellen 05:15 

Tell us a little bit about your research process. What do you do? What do the students do? What does that look like? 

Katy Quissell 05:23 

So, as I mentioned, this project was in many ways, co designed. I bring some of the theoretical and methodological skills, and I work with my students to help build their understanding of research design and how to ask a research question and how to study very specific things. But Latin America has not traditionally been a region that I work in. My language is French, not Spanish or Portuguese. I do most of my work in Eastern and Southern Africa currently. So, my students have been really instrumental in providing the language and the cultural skills, and so we work together to figure out, you know, how do we want to ask this question, what's the most sort of culturally appropriate way of asking this question and studying it? We co-wrote our in depth interview guides together. They've been doing all of the work with translating things from English to Spanish or Portuguese and back again. I've also been working with them and training them in how to do in-depth interviewing. And we've done a couple other types of qualitative methods, including a media analysis, and we got to do a little bit of participant observation in the trip that we took to Sao Paulo, Brazil over last spring break. So, I trained them in what to do and how to take in information and how to analyze it, but they've been taking the lead in the interviewing that we've been doing. And, you know, in the email outreach to recruit interview subjects to begin with, I really couldn't do it without my students. They've been instrumental in thinking up the ideas and then executing them in the field. And they've been doing a really wonderful job. 

Emily Mellen 07:00 

That's fantastic to hear. So, it sounds like you're about halfway through the research that you've initially planned, correct? 

Katy Quissell 07:08 

Correct. 

Emily Mellen 07:08 

So, what have you found so far? 

Katy Quissell 07:11 

Interestingly, and all of these initial findings are largely from the Brazil case that we've been working on. And to date, we have done a good amount of the media analysis, looking at major newspaper coverage of key actions and moments that have received a lot of coverage around the abortion rights conversation. And then we've also conducted, I think, 11 interviews to date, which we've now coded. There is hope that we'll be able to do a couple more interviews by Zoom, because I think we still have some areas where we're trying to fill in information. So, to date, I don't think that I can give a clear answer to what sort of advocacy strategies have led to particular outcomes. We're really more just gathering a sense of activist perceptions of what is working, what is not working, what they see as major political barriers or potential opportunities and trying to get their in-depth perspective on what happens when they encounter people in the community who have beliefs very strongly against abortion. How do they engage with people who see the issue very differently? How do they have conversations with them? And what ways of interacting on these different beliefs have they identified as being successful strategies for activists to use to lead to belief change over time? Because often it doesn't happen quickly. 

Katy Quissell 08:45 

So, what we've seen and what they've described to us is that their engagement on the issue looks really different from how we talk about it in the United States, that they have found that talking about things like bodily autonomy and choice don't resonate with many people in the community, and in part, it's because their society is less individualistic. They have stronger communitarian values, but they also, as I mentioned, have very strong health rights and ideas of healthcare as a human right, and so their framing and discussions are much more grounded in sort of broader human rights, less in more libertarian negative rights, like we have in the United States. 

They also engage very much on the moral complexity of the issue. And I often see that skipped over in the United States, that instead of talking about something as choice, they have found that even having a conversation about it being a right for someone to decide something that just that small rhetorical shift changes the meaning quite a bit, because choice is often a consumeristic idea, this idea that we choose what we want to eat for lunch, and that doesn't quite encapsulate the difficulty of making reproductive healthcare decisions, that many pregnant people, when they find themselves in a position where they're trying to decide whether or not to carry pregnancy to term, they're grappling with really challenging things. It might be that there's a potential desire to have a child, but they have serious health concerns, or they have significant financial constraints. They already have children that they're taking care of, that they're trying to figure out how to balance these many different needs and responsibilities, and in doing that, they are making a very difficult decision regardless of what they decide to do. 

And so, the activists we've spoken with have said that discussing it as the right to decide makes it much more obvious that people are making difficult decisions, and that they have full moral agency, and that if you are to treat people with dignity, that you recognize that they have the capabilities to make difficult decisions for themselves, and that it is really only them who should be making these difficult decisions, and not other people outside of the person who is the one who could carry the pregnancy. So, we've seen really interesting engagement around these ideas of human dignity, around the right to decide, the right to make difficult choices. We've also seen it rooted really strongly in their sense of health rights and justice, that everybody should be guaranteed equal access to health care. 

Katy Quissell 11:24 

And so, what they've also found to be effective is discussing how in Brazil, currently, higher income women can leave the country if they need to access care, or they have greater access to get safe abortion care, whereas lower income women do not. And so, the realities of pregnancy risks, as well as the risks of illegal abortion are much more obviously seen and felt, and it becomes more problematic because of the equity problems underlying that. And so, talking about the inequitable health outcomes of the status quo has been effective in changing people's minds about access. People are getting a strong sense that that is unfair to have that level of disparity and what services people can get access to. It has been effective in more rural communities, for example. 

And so, I think we're seeing lots of different approaches and conversational strategies at play, and I think some of them, some of them, could be interesting to experiment with in the United States. Others, I think, you know, we don't have as strong of a notion of health care as a right in the United States, and so that may not be as useful to activists here, although I think if we did broader and stronger health rights organizing, that could open up potential avenues for advocacy here in the future. 

Emily Mellen 12:45 

That sort of leads into my next question, what do you see as the next steps for this project, either in terms of future research or practical applications of your findings? 

Katy Quissell 12:56 

Yeah, our hopes are with this research that we're able to understand how activists are working in very challenging environments to advance these types of rights, and that we might be able to draw lessons, not only for, say, activists here in the United States, but also potentially activists working in other places in the world. As I mentioned, most of my research is in southern and eastern Africa. I know a lot of activists all over the continent from my research and from other work that I do, and in Africa, there are not as many social movements that have as much mobilization occurring and as strong a connections in the community as we've seen in countries like Brazil, in part because topics like abortion are still so controversial that activists are more hesitant to take them on as a primary issue. So, many of my African activist colleagues and friends, they are doing gender-based violence research and see, you know, expanding reproductive and sexual health care services as a connection of that, but they really focus on gender-based violence first, because it's just too controversial to talk about abortion in the community. I also hope that maybe we can facilitate interactions between some of the activists we are meeting in Latin America with some of the activists I know in the African continent, for idea sharing, because in many ways, the context in which they're working, both politically and then with the degree of religiosity and conservatism in the broader population of their countries, is more similar. So, I would love to think about ways of connecting activists together for more idea sharing. 

Emily Mellen 14:31 

That sounds like a great future CGII project. 

Katy Quissell 14:34 

Well, we would love that. 

Emily Mellen 14:35 

Well, thank you, Katie. We really appreciate you coming here today. 

Katy Quissell 14:38 

Yeah, of course. Happy to.

*Gay marriage was legalized in Brazil in 2013. It was legalized in the U.S. in 2015.