Feminism By Other Means: Reframing The Abortion Debate In Portugal

Abstract

On February 11, 2007, Portugal posed a referendum aimed at decriminalizing abortion and making it free on demand during the first ten weeks of pregnancy—the referendum passed. There was a noticeable shift in the arguments of the Yes campaign between the referendums in 1998 and 2007. Feminist discourse was intentionally and explicitly excluded from the 2007 Yes campaign after being blamed for the failure of the first referendum, even though the Yes campaign lost by less than a 1% margin in 1998. I will discuss this decision from within the Portuguese feminist movement, analyze why certain discourses were used and others silenced, and suggest that the decision to excise traditional feminist discourse from the movement was a strategy used by feminists to achieve the goal of abortion reform.