Lhe contemporary judicialization of abortion in Latin America is a pendulum that oscillates between the litigation promoted by the feminist movement and the conservative movement. The impacts of these litigation have meant, for the most part, a jurisprudential advance for the human rights of women: equality and non-discrimination, reproductive freedom and autonomy, the right to free development of the personality and the right to health. By endorsing the decriminalization of abortion for reasons or within a certain term, the constitutional courts promote the advancement of reproductive justice, setting important judicial precedents in the region, as in the cases of Colombia (2006), Mexico (2002, 2008) and Chile (2017). The decisions of the courts of these countries have promoted access to legal abortion services in public hospitals and better guidelines in reproductive health. However, they have also sparked a social countermobilization that promotes the "protection of life from conception" with greater fervor from the pulpit to legislatures and other state agencies. It cannot be said that the judicialization of abortion always has positive results for the advancement of reproductive rights in the region. Constitutional judgments tend to be minimalist in terms of understanding the meaning and scope of women's reproductive rights at stake, having great differences towards the protection of prenatal life. At other times, they leave a sufficient margin of action for health professionals to make confusing interpretations, which is why they are often fearful of practicing pregnancy terminations in order not to commit a crime. Consequently, the judicialization of abortion has contradictory and contingent results for the rights of women in Latin America.

Lhe recent elections of Trump (2016), Bolsonaro and López Obrador (2018) demonstrate the seduction of populism in the region, whether of the right or the left. I include López Obrador because he does not seem to support the ideology of a liberal left when it comes to women. None of the three presidents is in favor of abortion, nor does they have a clear policy of promoting the sexual and reproductive rights of women, adolescents and girls. This conservative populism represents a serious threat to sexual and reproductive rights due to its proximity to traditional ideas about the family and discriminatory for women, emphasizing their social destiny to be “good mothers and wives”. In the cases of the far-right Bolsonaro and Trump, their public and cynical misogyny views women's bodies as available material for male sexual subjection and dominance. In their hands, the sexual and reproductive rights of women are - and will be - in constant threat of being restricted through their public health policies and their worrying alliances with religious hierarchies, both Catholic and evangelical. Beyond the administrative impact that their policies have on the budget cuts for sex education programs, the obstruction of the financing of reproductive health organizations and clinics and the regressive attempts to limit it in the field of justice, the most serious blow of these governments it is cultural: the idea that women are reproductive entities and their denigration as sexual objects in public discourse, an issue that widely legitimizes machismo and toxic masculinities inside and outside, in Brazil and the United States. In short, even in the face of the green wave of social mobilization that shook Argentina and that has fervently escalated to other countries in the region, promoting public debate on the decriminalization of abortion, the resistance to the advancement of reproductive rights in the Americas they are strong and have increased with the coming to power of populist governments.

Lhe intersectionality reflects the historical concern of including the experiences of racial discrimination (especially of Afro-descendant women) in the analyzes of gender violence and inequality. Therefore, it proposes to analyze and understand discrimination at the crossroads of gender, race and class, mainly. As a result of this criticism of racial blindness in the review of cases of violence and discrimination against women, other categories equally suspected of violating equality have been added in Latin America: ethnicity, sexual orientation, age , and so on. Perhaps intersectionality can be better understood as a question. How can the experiences of women based on their race, gender and class be better incorporated into analyzes of discrimination? How to highlight particular experiences when analyzing the structural inequality that women or some historically discriminated populations go through? The answer is contextual and casuistic in constitutional interpretation exercises. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has tried to make intersectional interpretations in recent judgments. For example, in the case of Talía Gonzáles Lluy, a girl who was infected with HIV when she was three years old by a blood transfusion in a hospital in Ecuador, the Court considered that the discrimination that Talía experienced was derived from multiple factors, as a result from the intersection of her age, gender and poverty situation, which was aggravated by having been infected with HIV (Inter-American Court of Human Rights, 2015).

However, the answer becomes more complicated when an attempt is made to include differential identity markers in the design of public policies, since the state budget and limited resources come into play, as well as the difficulty of incorporating the needs of very population groups into general norms and strategies. different. Applied to the field of sexual and reproductive rights, intersectionality can provide the necessary questions to analyze the discrimination that indigenous and Afro-descendant women have experienced in the region. How has the lack of access to sexual education and reproductive health services affected them in particular? What specific obstacles have you faced in making autonomous decisions in the area of sexuality and reproduction? What specific forms of discrimination do they suffer when trying to access public health services? According to ECLAC (2011), there are higher pregnancy rates among young indigenous women in the region, who also present high levels of educational backwardness and exclusion, compared to non-indigenous women. It has also been documented how indigenous and Afro-descendant women, due to the intersection of gender with race and / or ethnicity, are exposed to a greater risk of violations of their human rights in the face of the justice and health systems, in the absence of interpreters. in access to these services in cases of sexual violence (Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, 2011). Maternal mortality due to poor prenatal care and delivery is also another phenomenon that disproportionately affects Afro-descendant women in the region.⁶ In this context, faced with the regressive attacks of the current political conjuncture, intersectionality is a mandatory question to rethink (old) problems of structural discrimination in the sexual and reproductive sphere.