The continued significance of institutionalized religion in determining the social and legal order of Latin American countries is particularly evident in regards to issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and comprehensive sexual education. According to figures published by the Guttmacher Institute in September 2017, of the women of childbearing age living in Latin America and the Caribbean, more than 97% reside in countries where abortion is severely restricted or banned entirely. The Latin American nations where abortion is prohibited altogether include the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Suriname. By contrast, abortion is permitted without restriction as to reason in Cuba, Guyana, Puerto Rico, and Uruguay (Puerto Rico of course being an exceptional case due to its status as a U.S. territory).
As Larissa Arroyo Navarrete—a professor of human rights at the Universidad de Costa Rica—argues in a piece for The Conversation, there appears to be some correlation in Latin America “between the state of a country’s democracy and the reproductive rights of its female citizens.” Legal access to abortion has not necessarily increased with time, as we might intuitively expect; rather, numerous Latin American countries only passed total bans on abortion relatively recently, the common denominator being a general disintegration of the democratic structures within a country at the time it amended its legal code to more severely restrict reproductive rights.
Currently, same-sex marriage is legal in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Uruguay, as well as Mexico City and a handful of Mexican states. Chile and Ecuador allow some other form of civil union for same-sex couples, with Chile’s President Bachelet having sent a same-sex marriage bill that included full adoption rights to the Chilean Congress in August of 2017. Bolivia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Honduras, Jamaica, and Paraguay still possess constitutional bans on same-sex marriage (Ecuador, as previously mentioned, permits another type of union). In Jamaica, homosexuality—defined in practice as sexual activity between men—is illegal. Though a relatively high number of Latin American countries grant legal recognition to same-sex partnerships, members of the region’s LGBT+ community nonetheless find themselves subject to frequent harassment and violence, a testament to the rise of evangelism as a dominant religious force within Latin America, as well as evidence of the continuing importance of the rigid gender roles prescribed by the well-established Spanish tradition of machismo.
The combined effect of institutionalized religion and democratization in shaping Latin American social policy can be examined through the lens of several guiding questions. What formal and informal mechanisms have been employed by religious entities in Latin America (i.e., the Catholic Church, evangelical churches) to establish and/or maintain social and legal norms concerning abortion access and LGBT+ recognition? What have been the implications of increased rates of evangelism, particularly in Central America and Brazil? Does the greater attendance of evangelical churches render them more effective at mobilizing political action than the Catholic Church? Can meaningful, sustained democratization counteract the conservative forces of institutionalized religion, and if so, to what extent? Finally, is there any indication of a regional trend toward more socially liberal policies?