Mysu

Gender, Communications, and Reproductive Health in International Development

To this day, women globally are subjected to forms of control over their bodies, and their ability to exercise their reproductive rights in particular is still constrained. Amid a rise of challenges to the advancement of women’s rights, including the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade in the United States, sexual and reproductive health rights are at the forefront of conversations about the advancement of gender equality. To determine how communications are used strategically to shape policy, Carolina Matos explores fifty-two feminist and health NGOs from across the world and how they are improving discourse on sexuality and reproductive health in the public sphere. She investigates how these organizations are making use of communications amid various contemporary challenges, including the proliferation of misinformation about women’s rights and health in the public sphere due to the actions of oppositional far-right nationalist groups. Through original in-depth interviews within the NGOs and empirical research of the institutions’ online presences, Matos unpacks the complexities of the relationship between women’s health, communications, and development, contributing to the fields of development, health communications, and gender studies, and advancing the debate on the role of feminist NGOs in advocating for women’s rights. With a postcolonial critique of the role of NGOs in development, Matos illuminates the strategic use of communications in the mediation and advocacy of gender equality and reproductive health.

Fighting for Abortion Rights in Latin America

Although they share similar socio-economic and cultural characteristics as well as their recent political histories, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay differ radically in their abortion policies. In this book, Cora Fernández Anderson examines the role social movements play in abortion reform to show how different interaction patterns with state actors have led to three different policy outcomes: comprehensive abortion reform in Uruguay; moderate abortion reform in Chile; and no legal abortion reform in Argentina. Synthesizing a broad range of literature and drawing on in-depth field and archival research, she analyzes the strength of the campaigns for abortion reform, their relationships with leftist parties in power and the context of Church–state relations to explain this diverging trajectory in policy reform. A masterly analysis of how social movements, the power of institutions and Executive preferences have strong explanatory power, Fighting for Abortion Rights in Latin America is a perfect supplement for classes on gender and global politics.

The Wide World Magazine