Illustration: Erick Retana. Article by Carlos Gutiérrez for Connectas, republished and edited in Global Voices under a media partnership. One of the campaign threats of former U.S. President Donald Trump finally came true. In 2016, during a televised debate with his opponent, Hillary Clinton, Trump said he planned to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, which decriminalized abortion in the U.S. To fulfill his promise, he nominated three judges to solidify a conservative front on the Supreme Court. On June 24, they effectively overturned the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. For years, conservative groups have had their sights set on overturning Roe v. Wade. For example, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops described that ruling in a 2018 statement as the product of “a society increasingly coarsened by toleration and acceptance of acts that purposely destroy human life.” Moreover, it considered it “bad law, bad medicine, and bad social policy” that has left ” death and sorrow and turmoil,” because “many women have been maimed or killed by legal abortion, and abortionists have been protected from legal scrutiny by courts applying Roe.” The decision of the Supreme Court represents symbolic support to very conservative organizations or social and political actors “who are questioning the advances in women's rights and sexual dissidence.” Carmen Díaz Alba, PhD in Social Sciences and academic of the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores (ITESO), Mexico, explains this to CONNECTAS. This could have an expansive effect in Latin American countries, where these groups have a very important presence. The reason, points out Rubio Schweizer, the national officer in charge of the Women's Program of the Ministry of Health in Chile, is that Latin America is highly influenced by the United States, since “we are part of their sphere or their circle; therefore, naturally it is not going to have a very good influence in the region.” In an academic article entitled, “The conservative restoration in Latin America,” Carlos Otto Vázquez, a researcher at the Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas in Mexico, talks about the establishment of a neoconservative movement on the continent, one of whose main expressions is precisely Donald Trump. He points out that the main values and practices of this movement are racism, xenophobia, machismo, authoritarianism, classism, homophobia, non-recognition of the other, and rejection of what is different. According to him, this “opens the way to what has been described as a kind of social fascism.” Vázquez added that this phenomenon is not exclusive to the Americas, as Europe has seen the rise of right-wing and far-right groups, which have even come to hold positions of power and political representation. France, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland are some of the countries where these movements are present. El parlamento de 🇵🇱 Polonia rechazó el pasado jueves un proyecto de ley para legalizar el #aborto hasta las 12 semanas. Otra victoria Pro-Vida en la misma semana. pic.twitter.com/jso91gqlLN — Observatorio de la Dignidad (@DignidadOk) June 26, 2022 Poland's parliament 🇵🇱 rejected last Thursday a bill to legalize #abortion up to 12 weeks. Another Pro-Life victory in the same week. According to Vázquez, in Latin America, such conservative tendencies “continue to extend and deepen their operation (…) in the economic, political, social, narrative, cultural and symbolic spheres.” In this region, Vázquez finds it present in Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Chile, Paraguay, Panama, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Costa Rica, among other countries. Under the influence of this neoconservative movement, in recent years a campaign has been launched to influence projects “aimed at occupying the State,” according to José Manuel Morán and María Angélica Peñas, researchers at the National University of Córdoba in Argentina. They cite as an example the case of Brazil, where President Jair Bolsonaro changed the name of the Ministry of Women and Human Rights to the Ministry of Women, Family, and Human Rights. Behind this seemingly subtle change was a whole doctrine about the traditional family, the only one admissible from that moment on in the country. Furthermore, as the researchers say, “the change in this case was not only nominative. He appointed the Evangelical pastor Damares Alves, a key player in the promotion of the ‘gender ideology’ narrative and a staunch opponent of abortion in all cases, to head this Ministry.” 🗣️ «¡Es inadmisible hablar de quitarle la vida a este ser indefenso!», escribió Bolsonaro en su cuenta de Twitter.