Event Date: April 9, 2025 - 5:00pm to 7:00pm
Location: FSS 4004, 120 University Private, University of Ottawa

Registration: Google Forms

Presented by CIPS and the International Women’s Forum

What happens to women’s reproductive rights when left populist movements have a say? Is populism always dangerous to women (Mostov 2021)? While right-wing populist parties and leaders make it no secret that they oppose abortion, do left populist governments and parties favour abortion access, this most controversial of women’s reproductive rights?

In this panel, we will discuss three recent cases of abortion law reform through the prism of populism. In Ireland, the 2018 referendum on abortion shone the light on the role of the Citizens’ Assembly and the possibilities of deliberative democracy. In France, the 2024 constitutional amendment made abortion a “guaranteed freedom” for French women, and yet it was done in response to the demise of the constitutional right to abortion in the United States in 2022. In Mexico, the left populist government MORENA oversaw the decriminalization of abortion in the country but against the background of a growing confrontation with the feminist movements and in the wake of right populist and authoritarian regimes’ hardening of the opposition to abortion elsewhere in Latin America. Join us for this panel organized by CIPS and the International Women’s Forum.

The event will take place in English. A recording will be available after the event.

Photo credit: Prensa Obrera

Speakers:

Dr. Seána Glennon is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law, researching in the areas of constitutional law and deliberative democracy. She holds law degrees from Trinity College Dublin (LL.B) and the University of Toronto (LL.M). She completed her PhD at University College Dublin (UCD) where she was recipient of the 2019 Sutherland School of Law doctoral scholarship. Seána previously practised as a lawyer in Dublin, specialising in public and administrative law.

Dr. Anna Bogic is a Research Associate with CIPS and has conducted research on women’s reproductive rights, ethno-nationalism, wartime sexual violence, post-socialism, and feminist translation studies. Her current project focuses on abortion laws and left/right populist politics. She holds a PhD in Women’s Studies and an MA in Translation from the University of Ottawa, as well as undergraduate degrees in International Relations and French from the University of Calgary.

Dr. Marie-Christine Doran is a Full Professor of comparative politics at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, specializing in democratization, human rights, and violence in Latin America. She is the Director of the Observatory on Violence, Criminalization and Democracy where her work focuses on the persistence of State and non-State violence in democracy and touches on different aspects of rights and freedoms in comparative perspective. She has been a fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University and at the École des Hautes études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and Université Lyon 2 Lumière. Professor Doran’s publications include Le réveil démocratique du Chili. Une histoire politique de l’exigence de justice, (foreword by Alain Touraine,: Karthala 2016), Human Rights as Battlefields. Changing Practices and Contestations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and Criminalizing Democracy: The Hidden Face of Violence in Latin America (Routledge, forthcoming).

Moderator:

Alexandra Gheciu is a Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA), and the Director of CIPS.