Evangelium Vitae Today: How Conservative forces are using the 1995 Papal Encyclical to Reshape Public Policy in Latin America

Abstract

Indexada en Ebscohost; Public Affairs and Information Service Indexes; Humanities International Complete; the Family and Society Studies Worldwide Index, Sociological Abstracts; Social Services Abstracts, Worldwide Political Science Abstracts, the Gender Studies Database; the Women´s Studies International Index; the Left Index y LexisNexis. The World Conference on Human Rights (Vienna, 1993), the International Conference on Population and Development (Cairo, 1994) and the Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing, 1995) saw sexual and reproductive health issues forced onto international agendas. The conferences distilled years of activism and mobilization so that sexuality issues could enter the contemporary global language on human rights. As such, they were important moments in the development of these new forms of conservative Catholic activism since the legitimacy attached to sexual and reproductive rights required a new response. The old arguments and strategies were unlikely to continue to be effective. The primary purpose of this article is to consider these conferences as markers of a new global grammar to which the most dogmatic Catholic entities, particularly the Vatican, its representatives in the hierarchy and its colleagues like Opus Dei (see box), had to adapt and react. In so doing, they began to generate a new type of Catholic activism that continues to be strongly patriarchal and which also tries novel ways of influencing public discussions without becoming any more flexible with regard to the hierarchy´s dogma on sexuality.