Argentina’s law on the termination of pregnancy dates from 1921. Until the Act to grant women the right to the voluntary termination of pregnancy was passed on 30 December 2020, abortion was a crime punishable by up to four years in prison, except in the case of rape or risk to the life or health of the mother.
1 Penal Code of the Argentine Nation, Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, Presidency of the Nation, 1984; http://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/15000-19999/16546/texact.htm [accessed 29 November 2020]. The Act affects the intimate lives of millions of women. Reports show that, prior to the Act being passed, tens of thousands of women underwent clandestine abortions each year, of which around 40,000 required hospitalisation for complications.
2 Mar Centenera, ‘El aborto legal vuelve a la agenda política en Argentina’, El País, 20 November 2020; https://elpais.com/sociedad/2020-11-10/el-aborto-legal-vuelve-a-la-agenda-politica-en-argentina.html [accessed 29 November 2020]. Amnesty International estimates that the law caused the deaths of more than 3,000 women in a period of 30 years and risked the health and lives of an additional 49,000 women each year in Argentina.
3 Amnesty International, ‘Proyecto de ley por el aborto legal: nueva oportunidad para saldar una deuda de derechos humanos’, 27 May 2019; https://amnistia.org.ar/proyecto-de-ley-por-el-aborto-legal-nueva-oportunidad-para-saldar-una-deuda-de-derechos-humanos/ [accessed 29 December 2019]. In August 2019, the bill for the Act was rejected in the Argentinean Senate with 38 votes against, 31 votes in support and two abstentions.
4 BBC News Mundo, ‘Argentina: el senado rechaza la nueva ley de aborto’, 9 August 2019; https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-america-latina-45124522 [accessed 29 December 2019]. In early March 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic caused the submission of the bill to congress to be suspended. In October 2020, feminist movements initiated marches and campaigns calling for President Alberto Fernández to reactivate the bill. Finally, in November 2020, the government declared that the debate would be resumed in December 2020, and the bill was ultimately passed.
Claudia Piñeiro was a leading voice of the ‘Marea Verde’ (‘Green Wave’), which took to the streets en masse to demand a change in the law. In July 2018, she made a speech in the senate before the first vote for the bill in the Chamber of Deputies. There, she condemned the double discourse on the sexuality of young Argentinian women. Although, in principle, Argentinian society does not disapprove of girls engaging in sexual practice from a young age, the system abandons them in the event of an unwanted pregnancy. Piñeiro made her position clear in favour of modifying the law: ‘I wonder in what society we live in, when we imagine daughters who can be raped but not daughters who have a free sexuality and can fail in their contraceptive method’.
5 Spanish original: ‘Me pregunto en qué sociedad vivimos, cuando nos imaginamos hijas que pueden ser violadas pero no hijas que tienen una sexualidad libre y pueden fallar en su método anticonceptivo’; Clarín, ‘Debate en el senado. Claudia Piñeiro y el aborto legal: “si ustedes me dicen que no pueden votar porque el cura los reta, tienen que dedicarse a otra cosa”’, 31 July 2018; https://www.clarin.com/sociedad/claudia-pineiro-aborto-legal-ustedes-dicen-pueden-votar-cura-reta-dedicarse-cosa_0_ryfRU4AE7.html [accessed 20 December 2019]. With these words, she showed that the bill to grant women the right to the voluntary termination of pregnancy had also opened up national debates on life and death, State power, gender inequality, sexuality, and public health. These are particularly tricky themes in a country where, as pointed out above, the Catholic Church has a say in the design of policies for protecting the wellbeing of women.
Although the change in law was not approved on that occasion, Piñeiro expressed her satisfaction at having contributed to bringing the term ‘abortion’ into public discourse:
When I was a girl and until a few years ago, that word was not said. The terms that we used were: ‘She took it out,’ ‘she will take it out,’ ‘she will not have it’. We won a word and by winning it, we made that exist.
6 Spanish original: ‘Cuando era chica y hasta hace unos años, esa palabra no se decía. Los términos que se usaban eran: “Se lo sacó”, “se lo va a sacar”, “no lo va a tener”. Ganamos una palabra y al ganarla, lográs que eso exista’; Camila Miele, ‘Hoy hay voluntad política para que el aborto sea ley’, Revista Sendero, 20 December 2019; https://revistasendero.com.ar/2019/12/20/hoy-hay-voluntad-politica-para-que-el-aborto-sea-ley/ [accessed 21 December 2019].The confrontation on this issue took place on legal and discursive grounds between opposing ideologies on women’s bodies and sexuality. Piñeiro says: ‘It is our responsibility, that of writers and communicators, to keep saying it. That word and so many others’.
7 Spanish original: ‘Está en nuestra responsabilidad, la de los escritores y los comunicadores, seguir diciéndolo. Esa palabra y tantas otras’; Scher, ‘Quién sí y quién no’. For Piñeiro, normalising the public use of the terms ‘abortion’ and ‘interruption of pregnancy’ was the first step in destabilising the Church-State’s political bloc that supported patriarchy and opposed the free and secure interruption of pregnancy. At the same time, being able to approach the issue publicly supported those in the left wing, who called for the separation of Church and State when it came to decisions about women’s fundamental rights. Piñeiro thus aligned herself with feminist scholars, such as Gayle S. Rubin, Christine Delphy and Monique Wittig,
8 See Gayle S. Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’, Towards an Anthropology of Women, ed. by Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 157–210; Christine Delphy, Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression (N.p.: Verso, 1986); Christine Delphy, The Main Enemy: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression, trans. by Lucy Roberts and Diana Leonard Barker (London: Women’s Research and Resources Centre Publications, 1977); Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992). who perceive patriarchy and capitalism as reinforcing violent dynamics against women in the modern world.
I have said before that Piñeiro sees violence against women as prolonging the political violence of Videla’s government, mostly at the hands of a military junta. Videla also halted the functioning of the courts, political parties and labour unions. During the so-called ‘Dirty War’ against subversion, hundreds of alleged left-wing guerrillas were arrested in the last week of March 1976 alone, and thousands of people ‘disappeared’ over the next few years or suffered torture, imprisonment and death. The official estimate of the number of people who disappeared was 9,000, but other sources raise this number to between 15,000 and 30,000 people.
9 María Alejandra Vitale, ‘Public Memory and the Contemporary Epideictic Genre: Death Notices Devoted to Jorge R. Videla’, Res Rhetorica, 1 (2015), 54–64. Videla retired in 1981, and General Roberto Videla succeeded him. Argentina returned to civilian rule in December 1983. The practices used against opponents to Videla’s regime included kidnapping newborn children, who were later given to members of the army and State officials. Tortured militants were thrown from planes and helicopters into the River Plate so their bodies would never be found. They received the name ‘desaparecidos’ (‘the missing ones’) and, since then, their mothers have campaigned to find their remains and meet their lost grandchildren.
With the exception of her novel
Un comunista en calzoncillos (
A communist in underpants),
10 Claudia Piñeiro, Un comunista en calzoncillos (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2013). which describes her childhood memories, Piñeiro’s references to Videla’s regime are metaphorical and collateral to the main plot. In her interview with González, Piñeiro refers to the remains of that State repression in current Argentina: ‘There is no day in which the press does not report the participation of a police officer or former police officer in a criminal act’.
11 Spanish original: ‘no hay día en que la prensa no informe de la participación de un policía o ex policía en un acto criminal’; Enric González, ‘Claudia Piñeiro: “La novela negra nació para denunciar las injusticias”’, Babelia, El País, 19 January 2019; https://elpais.com/cultura/2019/01/18/babelia/1547826210_171101.html [accessed 14 April 2021]. Piñeiro has publicly affirmed her atheism and feminism as tools for fighting repressive mechanisms against women in reference to the conservative front formed by the Church-State in the defence of the traditional family: ‘That we are normal people and that we believe that religion should not govern the State. If we are not attentive to disarming speeches, as a form of resistance, we will move straight towards a non-rational State’.
12 Spanish original: ‘Que somos gente normal y que creemos que la religión no debe regir el estado. Si no estamos atentos a desarmar discursos, como una resistencia, vamos derechos hacia un estado no racional’; Scher, ‘Quién sí y quién no’. In this fragment, Piñeiro claims that the most rational option is separating the Church and State in decision-making on the safety, health and wellbeing of women in Argentina. She vindicates her dissidence as a legitimate force against the ambiguity, silence and double standards – part of the heritage of State repression in contemporary Argentina. Yet she argues that becoming a dissident is a necessary step for advancing in society, which entails a long process of renegotiating one’s identity and freedom. The latter is crucial to fighting the dynamics of violence and repression against women.
Next, we will look at how the feminist ideology is reflected in the four selected stories, which are contextualised in a corseted and conservative socio-political system that affects women in particular.