We have spent the last two years conducting fieldwork on abortion rights movements in the United States and Latin America, building from our previous work on abortion policies, movements, organizations, and activists across the Americas (Beisel and Kay 2004; Calasanti 2015; Calasanti, Kay, and Ostermann 2023; Fernández Anderson 2017, 2020, 2022; Ruibal and Fernández Anderson 2018). In the wake of the 2022 US Supreme Court decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, we have noted a palpable shift in the dynamics between organizations, new challenges in establishing contacts, and a heightened need to safeguard participants’ identity. While the ramifications of Dobbs have been felt most keenly in the US, there have been reverberations through the connections between movements across the Americas. We find organizations in the US to be inextricably linked with and informed by networks originating in Latin America. Indeed, much of our present approach to research in the US has been informed by our knowledge and experience researching abortion rights movements outside of the US.

The Southern Cone has been at the forefront of the fight for abortion rights in Latin America. Due to the legacies of Hispanic legal traditions and the overwhelming political influence of the Catholic Church, the region historically has been known for its restrictive policies on abortion and reproductive rights more broadly.1 However, in the past 15 years, Southern Cone countries began to challenge those restrictions and embarked on a feminist revolution that led to what is now widely known as the “Green Wave” because of the color embraced by abortion-rights activists. Uruguay began this trend of legalizing abortion on demand in 2012, followed by Argentina in 2020. Chile experienced a moderate reform in 2017 when it moved from a total ban to a system of exceptions. Feminists have been trying ever since to pass abortion on demand through both legislative and constitutional reforms, which have not yet yielded the expected results.