South America's populist pro-life movement

This column was first published at The European Conservative

In 2022, 62% of voters in Chile rejected a pro-abortion constitution backed by the country’s young leftist leader, 36-year-old President Gabriel Boric. The new 388-article constitution, drafted by a constituent assembly, would have locked many progressive agenda items into law, including the legalization of abortion as a fundamental human right. In November of the following year, pro-lifers triumphed again in Peru with the passage of Law No. 785, which affirmed that life begins at conception and recognizes the right to life of unborn children.

The American pro-life movement is internationally renowned due to its outsize influence on U.S. politics and the consequent overturn of Roe v. Wade; European pro-life movements are less well-known, but still receive occasional press coverage. The growing “Light Blue Wave” movement in South American and Latin America, however, is largely unknown in the West despite its size and growing political influence. It is perhaps the only continental populist movement the mainstream media is disinterested in covering.

The Blue Wave movement began in 2018, when pro-life and pro-family forces converged in response to attempts to legalize abortion in Argentina by abortion activists who referred to themselves as the “Green Wave.” From Chile to the Dominican Republic, huge crowds poured into the streets sporting blue bandanas, waving banners, hoisting balloons, and setting off blue smoke bombs. The aesthetic was as potent as their mobilizing power. In the months leading up to the 2018 senate vote on abortion in Argentina, pro-lifers mobilized millions, and wearing blue became, one activist told me, a “sign of resistance.”

Their slogan is simple: “Save Both Lives.” The Blue Wave movement is a continental, grassroots backlash against Western-funded abortion groups. One powerful photo captured the symbol: a young woman, her fist thrust in the air, a blue bandanna tied about her wrist. Pro-lifers gathered a million signatures opposing abortion legalization; abortion activists managed only 70,000. During one day of action, a staggering 3.5 million people marched in the streets across the Argentina—footage of these marches show a sea of joyous, breathtaking blue:

As Camile Duro, a young Argentine pro-life activist, told me:

We were able to consolidate as a movement and we acquired an identity. We’re more connected, and we need to work hard to see our ideas represented in the public and in politics. This blue flag isn’t a whim. We’re fighting to see a Culture of Life in our countries, and we need to be in this together. There’s a new pro-life generation that wants societies without abortion and respect for all human life.

María Amelia Moscoso Cardoso, a pro-life activist and lawyer, told me that during the fight to block abortion in 2018 it “became clear that the main organizations promoting legal abortion in Argentina were financed internationally; IPPF (International Planned Parenthood Federation), Casa Fusa, Fundación Huésped, Amnesty International, Catholics for Choice; undoubtedly, international pressure has played a big part in this debate.” Pro-lifers outnumbered abortion supporters by a vast margin, but Western money poured into abortion activist coffers.

In addition to international forces, the Blue Wave movement was—and is—up against the mainstream media. The press pushed the standard narrative that legalization was necessary due to the number of back-alley abortions, claiming that half a million took place annually in Argentina, which Cardoso noted was “impossible to prove, and impossible to believe due to the number of births and total population. It was said to be the main cause of maternal mortality, when in reality it ranks number 40 on the list of causes.” But the media wouldn’t cover pro-life rebuttals—even from celebrities who joined the anti-abortion cause.

The Blue Wave movement’s work initially paid off. Huge crowds, which were watching the vote on a jumbotron outside the Senate in August of 2018, went wild with celebration when abortion legalization was defeated, greeting the news with fireworks and dancing. Green-clad abortion activists reacted with violence, and the Blue Wave seemed ascendant. The same year, tens of thousands marched for the pro-life cause in Brazil; almost a million marched across Mexico. Suddenly, it seemed as if the abortion movement was meeting blue across the continent.

In September 2018, abortion activists in Guatemala pushed for looser abortion laws. 20,000 people poured into the capital and marched to the legislature sporting blue and waving signs, photos of babies in the womb, balloons, and banners. The government backed down and abandoned the legislation. Guatemala’s commitment to protecting pre-born life has teeth: in 2017, a Dutch ship showed up to distribute illegal abortion pills. The military blocked the invading vessel, announcing that they would defend “human life and the laws of our country.” The ship left.

That same month, politicians in the Dominican Republic attempted to open the door to legal abortion. Thousands of pro-lifers gathered outside the National Congress on September 9. Abortion remains illegal in the Dominican Republic (another bill was overwhelmingly rejected in 2021). Later that month, pro-lifers rallied in front of the National Palace in Chile to protest a plan to expand abortion access; young pregnant women held bullhorns to their bellies, their babies’ heartbeats pulsing across the crowd. In 2019, the National Assembly of Ecuador voted to retain protections for pre-born children after a massive push by pro-lifers; enraged abortion activists in green hurled rocks at police and threw burning torches at the parliament building.

In 2020, the Blue Wave movement suffered its first crushing defeat, when several Argentine senators were pressured into switching their votes by leftist President Alberto Fernández. Abortion was legalized in Argentina (although the new president, Javier Milei, is pro-life and has stated that he is open to a national referendum on the issue). The press jubilantly predicted that the Green Wave would now sweep the continent. Instead, it provoked a blue backlash.

In February 2021, for example, the Congress of Honduras passed the “Shield Against Abortion in Honduras” law by a margin of 88-28, affirming that “it is considered prohibited and illegal by the mother or a third party to practice any kind of interruption of a life that is about to be born” and raising the threshold necessary to change the law to 90 votes. As the Guardian grimly observed, this made it “virtually impossible to legalise abortion in the country—now or in the future.” Hondurans saw what happened in Argentina, and took steps to ensure that it could not happen in their own country.

Indeed, Western progressives have expressed dismay about the fact that even many left-wing politicians run on what are increasingly socially conservative platforms. Consider, for example, how a resurgence of left-wing social conservative politicians in Latin America was covered by the Americas Quarterly in 2021:

It’s no secret that the Latin American left has a strongman problem. From Havana to Caracas to Managua, self-proclaimed socialists are notorious for taking office only to never step down. But while left-wing autocrats and their human rights abuses garner much media attention, an emerging crop of leftist politicians in Latin America poses a more insidious threat: they’re embracing regressive social values. If they continue to fail in elevating the causes of equality, diversity and individual freedom, the new leaders on the left will leave the region’s most vulnerable and underrepresented communities at great risk.

In short, dictators are bad—but leftist politicians with social conservative views are even worse. Leftist politicians who hold the view of marriage that every nation on earth held prior to 2000, and who believe that children in the womb should be protected under law, are an “insidious threat.” The authors of the Americas Quarterly piece, Will Freeman and Paul Angelo, are deeply concerned that “socially progressive causes began to lose their luster in the mid-2010s,” which they chalk up primarily to the growth of evangelical groups and their mega-churches growing as a voting bloc.

Freeman and Angelo ignored two prominent factors: first, that progressives became far more radical in the 2010s, moving on from the redefinition of marriage to attacking the sex binary. Some leftist politicians simply weren’t willing to go that far. Additionally, the Blue Wave movement has effectively mobilized social conservatives into a very visible, pan-continental bloc that must be reckoned with. Silent majorities, unfortunately, are too easily ignored. The Blue Wave movement is ensuring that the majority is silent no more.

The Blue Wave movement is up against powerful and well-funded activists, and there have been several significant setbacks since it exploded onto the scene in 2018, almost all delivered by the courts. In 2022, Colombia legalized abortion up until the 24th week of pregnancy following a ruling by the Constitutional Court. After initially rejecting abortion legalization, the Supreme Court of Mexico ordered in 2023 that abortion be struck from the penal code entirely—pro-life laws were still on the books in most of Mexico’s 32 states. Abortion activists are pushing in nearly every country—and it is the Blue Wave movement, which remains almost entirely unknown in the West, that is pushing back.

Francisco Jofre, of the Chilean pro-life organization Movimiento de Mujeres Reivindica, summed up the situation after one demonstration in front of the Chilean Parliament: “The abortion lobby never sleeps, and is well organized. But so are we.”