Adoption and Implementation as a Two-Stage Process: Feminist Strategies and Conservative Resistance in the Quest for Legislative Abortion Reform

Women’s reproductive autonomy matters for gender equality, but abortion laws rarely pass without limitations and restrictions on access. Legislative abortion reform also triggers conservative resistance, forcing feminists to develop new strategies to protect rights. While scholars often study abortion laws’ adoption and implementation separately, we identify patterns in feminists’ decisions during adoption, on the one hand, and conservative actors’ responses and feminists’ strategies during implementation, on the other. We propose an analytic framework that maps different decisions during adoption onto different strategies during implementation. During adoption, we distinguish between acceptable conditions and strategic sacrifices. During implementation, the latter allows feminists to play offense while the former forces feminists into playing defense. We develop this framework through in-depth primary research in Chile and Uruguay alongside evidence from three additional Global South cases. Our framework helps scholars and policymakers alike anticipate how decisions during adoption affect actors’ behavior during implementation.