How are human rights used in abortion debates?
Marta Bucholc
Abortion laws are at the heart of today’s human rights diversity: they provide compelling evidence of how the meanings of human rights are interpreted differently across local contexts and how little harmonisation international human rights frameworks actually achieve.
Abortion is also a subject crucial to political and cultural identities. Over the last two decades, many countries worldwide have experienced intense debates on abortion, reflecting social polarisation over the matter. However, these debates also reveal how context and culture shape the arguments used either for more restrictions or greater liberalisation. The widely discussed overturning of Roe v Wade by the US Supreme Court in 2022 is just one example in a long list of recent successful challenges to existing abortion rights across the globe.
Research design
The Abortion Figurations project examines how abortion laws are modified using a specific argument: the human rights argument. Our starting point is straightforward: while many might expect references to human rights to favour a particular stance on abortion, these rights are, in fact, being invoked with equal success to argue both for liberalising and restricting abortion laws. Rights rooted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and numerous other human rights documents—such as human dignity, the right to life, freedom from torture or cruel treatment, the right to privacy, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion and protection of family life— have all been cited both in favour of and against abortion. Though the opposition between pro-life and pro- choice stances can serve as a proxy to map these arguments, it fails to capture the intricate communication processes in which the meanings of human rights are forged, negotiated and contested.
Abortion laws are at the heart of today’s human rights diversity: they provide compelling evidence of how the meanings of human rights are interpreted differently across local contexts and how little harmonisation international human rights frameworks actually achieve. The Abortion Figurations project explores this diversity by analysing recent and ongoing abortion debates in three pairs of countries representing three regional human rights systems: Mozambique and Senegal (African Union), Poland and Ireland (Council of Europe), and Argentina and Honduras (Organization of American States). Despite belonging to the same human rights systems, these countries’ abortion laws have evolved in vastly different directions over the past 20 years. By investigating how the meanings of human rights operate at the national level, within regional human rights organisations, and at the United Nations, the project identifies the powerful centrifugal and centripetal forces shaping the global legal governance of abortion (Bucholc, 2024).
The outcome of Abortion Figurations will be a multi-dimensional model for the comparative, transdisciplinary study of human rights. We are working toward integrating the structure, composition and embedding of arguments with group perspectives, emotions and the identities of actors in debates into one explanatory model. This effort aims to revisit the role of human rights in today’s world. Can human rights still fulfil their promise of universal equality, protection and solidarity? Or have they become a universal toolbox for manipulative ideologies and demagogues? Does the semantic ambiguity and polyvalence of human rights, as demonstrated in abortion debates, signal their weakness and exhaustion—or, quite the opposite, highlight their hidden energy and adaptability to diverse cultural realities?
Three pillars of the project
The project employs a unique theoretical framework drawing on the historical sociology of law, sociology of human rights, feminist theory, and human rights law (Bucholc, 2022). It uses a custom-designed mixed- methods approach that aligns with its three disciplinary pillars: law, sociology and computational linguistics.
Human rights law
The first pillar examines the development of abortion as an independent issue in human rights law and investigates ongoing legal debates about the recognition of abortion as a human right. The study emphasises the links between abortion laws and broader agendas for advancing reproductive rights and justice (Peroni, 2024). It recognises the centrality of women’s rights in the legal discourse on abortion, connecting it to critical issues like sexual violence, domestic violence, and gender equality (e.g. Peroni, 2016, 2018; Niemi, Peroni, Stoyanova, 2020). However, the analysis also moves beyond a women’s rights framework to explore how legal approaches to abortion include or exclude gender perspectives. This approach highlights the intersectional importance of abortion within human rights systems.
Data for this pillar include international human rights documents, decisions from international human rights bodies and courts, and the laws, regulations and court rulings from the six focus countries.
Local meanings of human rights in abortion debates
The second pillar explores the interpretations of human rights in ongoing abortion debates within local contexts. This involves individual and focus group interviews conducted in the local languages of the six case-study countries. These interviews include a broad range of participants, such as academic experts, activists, public intellectuals, journalists and politicians, offering diverse professional and advocacy perspectives.
The aim is to capture the variety of human rights meanings and contextualise them within the historical and cultural background of each country. Historical factors, such as colonialism and decolonisation, democratic transitions, secularisation, religious resurgence, nationalism, and challenges to democracy and the rule of law, are all considered. These transitional experiences deeply influence the direction of abortion debates in the studied societies.
Computational linguistics and abortion debate language
The third pillar analyses the language used in abortion debates, employing tools from computational linguistics. This analysis draws on existing corpora of legal texts, media articles and parliamentary debates. Additionally, new corpora of abortion laws and jurisprudence are created in their original languages, and interview data is reexamined from a linguistic perspective.
The focus is on identifying how human rights arguments are structured within the broader argumentation framework: How are these arguments connected to others? What is their relative significance—are they central or merely symbolic? Which clusters of human rights arguments frequently appear together?
Sentiment analysis is also employed to create a ‘heat map’ of human rights within abortion debates, identifying the intensity of the topic’s discussion and its prominence.
Team and partners
To answer these questions, we have been working since October 2022 as a highly interdisciplinary and diverse team of seven researchers, set to grow by two additional members in 2025. We represent four academic disciplines and five countries. Our varied paths in academia and beyond have made us acutely aware of the challenges of researching abortion, as well as the risks of imposing pre-designed analytical frameworks on cultural contexts we approach as outsiders. In each of the six countries we study, we collaborate with outstanding local institutions, including law, sociology and medical university departments, as well as non- governmental organisations.
Our partner in the linguistic pillar of the project is CLARIN-PL, a Polish scientific consortium that develops scientific and technological infrastructure for language resources and tools for automatic natural language processing. CLARIN-PL is part of the European Research Infrastructure, CLARIN ERIC.
Ethics and research standards
Maintaining the highest standards of research ethics has been our priority from the very beginning of the project. Due to the sensitive nature of our study, we have been required to obtain ethics approvals in all six fieldwork countries. This process has provided a unique opportunity to reflect on different models of ethics regulation in the social sciences, as well as the limitations of existing resources on best practices in research ethics within the European Union.
Our Ethics Advisory Board provides invaluable support, especially for fieldwork conducted in Africa and Latin America. Together, we initiated a lively global exchange on research ethics, which culminated in the conference Red Lines, Red Tapes: Ethical Challenges in Sensitive Research in Social Sciences and Humanities, held at the University of Warsaw from 30 November to 1 December 2023.
Challenge of adapting to changing realities
We aim to contribute to best practices in research methods and ethics while addressing new challenges arising in our fieldwork countries. In recent years, political developments in these countries have generated entirely new research interests. Poland’s democratic backsliding has stopped, and the debate on abortion law is as intense as ever. Honduras does not seem to move as far away from conservative domination as had been expected after Xiomara Castro’s presidential victory in 2023. Argentina has entered a new political path with the election of Javier Milei as the country’s president in 2023. In Mozambique, protests, violence and civil unrest are not slowing down as the year 2024 is ending. To stay up-to-date, we discuss relevant current events through the Abortion Figurations videoblog.
At the beginning of 2025, our key observation regarding the increasing salience of abortion remains well- supported. Similarly, the ambivalence of human rights is clearly demonstrated: our ongoing research reveals the same recurring arguments presented by applicants and third-party interveners in human rights courts, reiterated in parliamentary debates, and echoed by the media, advocacy organisations and protest movements. Furthermore, in our fieldwork countries, we observe the profound instability of abortion regulation, which is closely tied to societal dynamics.
Abortion, as a focal point of human rights debates, allows us to examine how civil, political, social, cultural, economic, and environmental rights interact, creating unique patterns of meaning. These patterns are deeply shaped by histories marked by traumatic events and societal upheaval. Identifying an underlying architecture within this semantic diversity is a challenging task. However, we believe that the existence of such an architecture is crucial to sustaining even a conditional validation of human rights in our world.
Funded by the European Union.
Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
References
Bucholc, M. (2022) ‘Historical sociology of law’, in McCallum, D. (ed.) The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 561–576.
Bucholc, M. (2024) ‘Legal governance of abortion: Interdependencies and centrifugal forces in the global figuration of human rights’, Historical Social Research, 49(2), pp. 133–155.
Niemi, J., Peroni, L. and Stoyanova, V. (eds.) (2020) International law and violence against women. London: Routledge.
Peroni, L. (2016) ‘Violence against migrant women: The Istanbul convention through a postcolonial feminist lens’, Feminist Legal Studies, 24, pp. 49–67.
Peroni, L. (2018) ‘The protection of women asylum seekers under the European convention on human rights: Unearthing the gendered roots of harm’, Human Rights Law Review, 18(2), pp. 347–370.
Peroni, L. (2024) ‘Mobilising in times of gender equality backsliding: International human rights responses to anti-gender discourse’, Utrecht Law Review, 20(3).
PROJECT SUMMARY
The project scrutinises the use of human rights as arguments for changing abortion laws. We contrast abortion debates in six countries representing three regional human rights systems: Mozambique, Senegal, Poland, Ireland, Argentina and Honduras. Our goal is to explore the sources of ambiguity in human rights as an argumentative instrument, using mixed methods from sociology, law, and linguistics.
PROJECT PARTNERS
Collaborating institutions: University College Dublin, Ireland
International Centre for Reproductive Health-Mozambique
West African Research Center (Sudan) Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras
University of Cordoba, Argentina CLARIN-PL
PROJECT LEAD PROFILE
Marta Bucholc is a Professor at the Faculty of Sociology (University of Warsaw), associated researcher (UCLouvain Saint- Louis Bruxelles, West African Research Center, Dakar), leader of research projects funded by ERC, Poland’s National Science Center and Volkswagen Stiftung, member of Core Groups of two COST-Actions. Author of over 100 publications on the sociology of law and sociological theory. For more, see: https://ws.uw.edu.pl/en/zespol/bucholc-marta-2/.
PROJECT CONTACTS
Prof. Marta Bucholc (Project lead)
Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw, Karowa 18, 00-324 Warsaw, Poland
+48 606 279 503
Dr Agnieszka Nowakowska (Project manager)
Email: nowakowskaa@is.uw.edu.pl
Web: abortion-figurations.uw.edu.pl/
Instagram: @figurationsabortion
Facebook: /ERCAbortionFigurationsProject
FUNDING
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101044421.