(Citizenship, Gender and Diversity) Joyce Outshoorn (Eds.) - European Women's Movements and Body Politics - The Struggle For Autonomy-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2015) PDF

European Women’s Movements and Body Politics
Citizenship, Gender and Diversity
Series Editors: Beatrice Halsaa, University of Oslo, Norway; Sasha Roseneil,

Birkbeck College, University of London, UK; and Sevil Sümer, University
of Bergen, Norway
Titles include:
Beatrice Halsaa, Sasha Roseneil and Sevil Sümer (editors)

REMAKING CITIZENSHIP IN MULTICULTURAL EUROPE
Women’s Movements, Gender and Diversity
Sally Hines
GENDER DIVERSITY, RECOGNITION AND CITIZENSHIP
Towards a Politics of Difference
Line Nyhagen Predelli, Beatrice Halsaa, Cecile Thun and Adriana Sandu (editors)
MAJORITY–MINORITY RELATIONS IN CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S
MOVEMENTS
Strategic Sisterhood
Joyce Outshoorn, with Radka Dudová, Ana Prata and Lenita Freidenvall
EUROPEAN WOMEN’S MOVEMENTS AND BODY POLITICS
The Struggle for Autonomy
Sasha Roseneil
BEYOND CITIZENSHIP?
Feminism and the Transformation of Belonging
Ana Cristina Santos
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND SEXUAL CITIZENSHIP IN SOUTHERN EUROPE
Citizenship, Gender and Diversity

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European Women’s
Movements and Body
Politics
The Struggle for Autonomy
Edited by
Joyce Outshoorn
Institute of Political Science, Leiden University, The Netherlands
With Radka Dudová, Ana Prata and Lenita Freidenvall

Selection and editorial matter © Joyce Outshoorn 2015
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Outshoorn, Joyce.
European women’s movements and body politics : the struggle for
autonomy / Joyce Outshoorn, Professor Emeritus of Women’s Studies,
Institute of Political Science, Leiden University, The Netherlands.
pages cm. — (Citizenship, gender and diversity)
1. Feminism—Europe. 2. Women’s rights—Europe. I. Title.

HQ1191.E85O98 2015
305.42094—dc23 2015004035
Contents
List of Figures and Tables vi
Acknowledgements vii
Notes on Contributors x
List of Abbreviations xi
1 Women’s Movements and Bodily Integrity 1

Joyce Outshoorn, Radka Dudová, Ana Prata and Lenita
Freidenvall
2 Constructing Bodily Citizenship in the Czech Republic 22

Radka Dudová
3 The Struggle for Bodily Integrity in the Netherlands 52

Joyce Outshoorn
4 Contesting Portugal’s Bodily Citizenship 84

Ana Prata
5 In Pursuit of Bodily Integrity in Sweden 118

Lenita Freidenvall
6 Women’s Movements and Bodily Autonomy: Making the

Case for Bodily Citizenship 153
Joyce Outshoorn, Radka Dudová, Ana Prata and
Lenita Freidenvall
References 178
Index 195
v
Figures and Tables
Figures
6.1 Points of comparison of country cases on selected issues 154
Tables
3.1 Abortion rates in the Netherlands 63
vi
Acknowledgements
This study emerged from the Feminism and Citizenship (FEMCIT)

project, which originated in 2007 and posed as its main question how
citizenship in European countries has been challenged and transformed
by the collective action of women in recent decades. The project,
financed by the EU 6th Framework Programme,∗ resulted in the book
Remaking Citizenship in Multicultural Europe: Women’s Movements, Gen-
der and Diversity, edited by Beatrice Halsaa, Sasha Roseneil and Sevil
Sümer and published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2012. The book covered
the various dimensions of citizenship, such as economic, social, politi-
cal, bodily and intimate citizenship, and addressed the complexities of
multicultural citizenship and migrant women’s organising in Europe.
For Remaking Citizenship in Multicultural Europe, we – Radka Dudová,
Teresa Kulawik, Joyce Outshoorn and Ana Prata – explored the issue
of bodily citizenship and the demands of the women’s movement
in four different countries, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands,
Portugal and Sweden, and wrote the chapter ‘Remaking Bodily Citi-
zenship in Multicultural Europe: The Struggle for Autonomy and Self-
Determination’. The issues examined were abortion and prostitution,
and one of our major findings was that women’s movements did not
frame their claims in terms of citizenship, but in terms of autonomy
and self-determination. Bodily integrity was the underlying common
theme. We also found that the classic formulation of citizenship did not
include bodily rights, and that in the scholarly literature, including the
feminist literature, the concept of bodily citizenship is underdeveloped.
The volume presented here, European Women’s Movements and Body
Politics, now authored by Radka Dudová, Lenita Freidenvall, Joyce
Outshoorn and Ana Prata, is a sequel to the chapter which was the
first presentation of our research results. In this new volume, we go
∗
Our book is based on the research project ‘Sexual and Bodily Citizenship
and Feminist Body Politics in a Multicultural Europe’, a subtheme of the
FEMCIT project, of which the full title is ‘Gendered Citizenship in Multicultural
Europe: The Impact of the Contemporary Women’s Movements’, financed by the
6th Framework Programme of the European Union, Priority 7, Networks of Excel-
lence and Integrated Projects: Citizens and Governance in a Knowledge-based
society, 2007–2011.
vii
viii Acknowledgements
beyond our earlier findings in three respects. Firstly, we analyse our

cases in a stricter comparative way, showing how earlier policy lega-
cies structured the political context which the new feminist groups
encountered and which influenced their framings, strategically or other-
wise. Secondly, by drawing on the rich material gathered in the original
research, we explain how policy change was possible. Thirdly, we use
our findings to elucidate the concept of bodily citizenship and argue
that bodily integrity ought to be a separate (independent) category of
citizenship. While aware of the debate on whether a proliferation of cat-
egories of citizenship might undermine the strength of the concept, we
make the case that it should not be subsumed under the category of
intimate citizenship.
Scholarly research is always a collective enterprise, and therefore there
are many people we would like to thank for having made this vol-
ume possible. Crucial for our work have been the initiators and the
directors of the FEMCIT project: Beatrice Halsaa, Tone Hellesund, Sasha
Roseneil, Sevil Sümer and Solveig Bergman; Siren Hogtun, our adminis-
trative coordinator; and the Steering Committee of the project, Nicky Le
Feuvre, Line Nyhagen Predelli and Monica Threllfall. We are indebted to
the members of the FEMCIT Advisory Board for their comments and to
those FEMCIT colleagues who have supported us with their critiques,
notably Line Nyhagen Predelli and Ana Christina Santos. We thank
Teresa Kulawik, who worked with us on the original research project
but could not join us for the book, and Karin S. Lindelöf and Susanne
Dodillet, for their earlier work on abortion and prostitution in Sweden.
We are very grateful that Lenita Freidenvall, who was already involved
in the FEMCIT project, joined us in making this book and took care of
the Swedish case.
We also want to acknowledge the help of those at the Univer-
sity of Leiden who provided the essential support for developing and
completing our project on bodily citizenship, in particular Ingrid van
Heeringen-Göbbels, manager of the Institute of Political Science, and
Bert Dubbeldam, our financial officer at the Faculty of Social and
Behavioural Sciences, for their managerial support. Our thanks also go
to Tomas Cirhan, PhD student at the Institute, for his help in preparing
the manuscript.
We are also grateful for the help of several other scholars in the
course of the project. Radka Dudová thanks Marie Čermáková, for-
mer director of the Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences
of the Czech Republic, who always encouraged her to extend her
work to the European and international level. Ana Prata thanks Scott
Acknowledgements ix
Applerouth, Randal Contreras, Amy Denissen and Lauren McDonald for

their comments on the earlier versions of her chapter on Portugal. Lenita
Freidenvall thanks Drude Dahlerup, Maud Eduards and Josefina Erikson
for their advice on the chapter about Sweden. Joyce Outshoorn thanks
Petra de Vries for the many discussions on the feminist movement and
the politics of prostitution.
Finally we want to thank our publisher, Palgrave Macmillan, in par-
ticular Philippa Grand for her early interest in our project and her
confidence in its completion; Emily Russell for her patience, support
and advice during the process; and Judith Allan for her work on the
final stages of the production.
Contributors
Radka Dudová is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the

Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Czech Republic. She is the
author of the books Otcovství po rozchodu rodičovského páru (Fatherhood
after the Parents’ Separation) (2008) and Interrupce v České republice: zápas
o ženská těla (Abortion in the Czech Republic: A Struggle for Women’s Bodies)
(2012). Her research interests are women’s bodily citizenship; policy-
making on abortion, childcare and elderly care; and changes in private
and family life.
Lenita Freidenvall is Senior Lecturer in Political Science at Stockholm

University, Sweden, specialising in citizenship, gender equality policies
and political representation, and Co-Director of the Women in Politics
Research Center. She is the author of Vägen till Varannan Damernas (Every
Other One for the Ladies) (2006). She is editor of Politik och Kritik (Poli-
tics and Critique) (with Maria Jansson, 2011); Bortom Rösträtten (Beyond
Suffrage) (with Josefin Rönnbäck, 2011); and Comparisons, Quotas and
Critical Change (with Michele Micheletti, 2013). She is currently working
on a project on intersectionalising representation.
Joyce Outshoorn is Professor Emeritus of Women’s Studies at the Uni-

versity of Leiden, the Netherlands, where she is affiliated with the Insti-
tute of Political Science. She is editor of The Politics of Prostitution (2004);
Changing State Feminism (with Johanna Kantola, Palgrave Macmillan,
2007); and The New Politics of Abortion (with Joni Lovenduski, 1986).
She was one of the project leaders of the EU-funded Feminism and
Citizenship (FEMCIT) project. Her research interests are women’s move-
ments, gender equality policy, and body politics, notably abortion and
prostitution.
Ana Prata is Assistant Professor at California State University

Northridge, United States. Her research interests include women’s move-
ments, gender, democratisation, sexuality, sex trafficking, and compar-
ative and historical sociology. Currently she is working on a research
project entitled ‘Southern European Women and the Economic Crisis –
Assessing Problems, Policies, and Practices (2009–2013)’.
x
Abbreviations
Czech Republic
CR Czech Republic
ČSSD Česká strana sociálně demokratická (Czech Social
Democratic Party)
CWL (ČŽL) Czech Women’s Lobby (Česká ženská lobby)
CZK Czech Crown
EWL European Women’s Lobby
IOM International Organisation for Migration
KDU Křest’ansko-demokratická Unie (Christian-Democratic
Union)
KDU-ČSL Křest’ansko-demokratická Unie – Česká strana lidová
(Christian-Democratic Union – Czech Popular Party)
MVČR Ministerstvo vnitra České republiky (Ministry of the
Interior of the Czech Republic)
ODS Občanská demokratická strana (Civic Democratic Party)
VÚK Výzkumný ústav kriminologický (Research Institute of
Criminology)
Netherlands
AWBZ Algemene Wet Bijzondere Ziektekosten (General Law
Special Medical Costs)
D66 Democraten66 (Social Liberal Party)
DCE Directie Coordinatie Emancipatiezaken (Department for
the Coordination of Equality Policy)
HTKB Hollanda Türkiye Kadinlar Birligi (Dutch Turkish
Women’s League)
LPF Lijst Pim Fortuyn (List Pim Fortuyn)
MVM Man-Vrouw-Maatschappij (Man-Woman-Society)
NMB Neo-Malthusiaanse Bond (Neo-Malthusian League)
PvdD Partij voor de Dieren (Animal Rights Party)
PVV Partij van de Vrijheid (Freedom Party)
SGP Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij (Political Reformed
Party)
xi
xii List of Abbreviations
Stimezo Stichting Medisch Verantwoorde

Zwangerschapsafbreking (Foundation for Medical
Interruption of Pregnancy)
STV Stichting tegen Vrouwenhandel (Foundation Against
Trafficking of Women)
VNG Vereniging Nederlandse Gemeenten (Association of
Dutch Municipalities)
WVE Wij Vrouwen Eisen (We Women Demand)
Portugal
AD Aliança Democrática (Democratic Alliance)

AMJ Associação das Mulheres Juristas (Women Lawyers
Association)
APAV Associação Portuguesa de Apoio à Vítima (Portuguese
Association for the Support of Victims)
CAIM Cooperation, Action, Investigation, World View Project
CDS Partido do Centro Democrático e Social (Christian
Democratic Party)
CDU Coligação Democrática Unitária (Communist Coalition)
CLA Comissão para a Legalização do Aborto (Commission for
Legal Abortion)
CNAC Campanha Nacional pelo Aborto e Contracepção
(National Campaign for the Right to Abortion and
Contraception)
Correio da Correio da Manhã newspaper
Manhã
DGS Direção Geral de Saúde (National Centre for Health)
DL Diário de Lisboa newspaper
DN Diário de Notícias newspaper
DR Diário da República (Journal of the Assembly of the Republic)
Expresso Expresso newspaper
IDM Informação, Documentação Mulheres
(Information/Documentation Women’s Group)
IUSW International Union of Sex Workers
IVG Interrupção Voluntária de Gravidez (Voluntary
Interruption of Pregnancy)
JS Juventude Socialista (Socialist Youth)
PCP Partido Comunista Português (Communist Party)
PP Partido Popular (Popular Party)
List of Abbreviations xiii
PSD Partido Social Democrata (Social Democratic Party)

UMAR União Alternativa e Resposta (Union of Anti-Fascist and
Revolutionary Women)
WDM Movimento Democrático de Mulheres (Women’s
Democratic Movement)
WLM Movimento de Liberação da Mulher (Women’s
Liberation Movement)
Sweden
FBA Fredrika-Bremerförbundet (Fredrika Bremer Association)
RFSL Riksförbundet för Homosexuellas, Bisexuellas och
Transpersoners rättigheter (Swedish Federation for
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights)
RFSU Riksförbundet för sexuell upplysning (Swedish
Association for Sexuality Education)
ROKS Riksorganisationen för kvinnojourer och tjejjourer i
Sverige (National Organisation for Women’s Shelters
and Young Women’s Shelters in Sweden)
SKV Svenska Kvinnors Vänsterförbund (National Federation
of Left Women)
1
Women’s Movements and Bodily
Integrity
Freidenvall
Introduction
‘Citizenship is not a word I would use’ was the phrase that best
summarised the major findings of the analysis by Line Nyhagen Predelli,
Beatrice Halsaa and Cecilie Thun in the project Gendered Citizenship
in Multicultural Europe (FEMCIT) of how women’s movement activists
viewed the concept of citizenship (Nyhagen Predelli et al., 2012:188).
The activists used other framings to formulate their demands, using
the language of human rights, equality or social justice. This central
finding corresponds with the findings of the FEMCIT project, which
focused on bodily citizenship (Outshoorn et al., 2012:135–138). The
activists engaged in the campaigns for abortion rights framed the issue
in terms of autonomy and self-determination, while those involved
in changing prostitution legislation used self-determination alongside
competing framings of gender equality, power between the sexes or
human rights. Paralleling the gap that Nyhagen Predelli et al. noted
between the concept of citizenship in feminist theory and the ‘lived
experience’ of activists (2012:208–210), there is a gap between the cen-
tral notion of bodily integrity underlying the claims of autonomy and
self-determination, and the usual understandings of citizenship which
do not include women’s claims to bodily integrity.
The political ideas and practices women developed across a range of
‘body’ issues since the beginning of second wave feminism in the late
1960s in Western European democracies and later in the post-transition
states of Southern and Eastern Europe did not draw on the concept of
citizenship, but sought to establish women’s autonomy regarding the
body. In this way they revealed the genderedness of ‘universal’ concepts
1
2 Women’s Movements and Bodily Integrity
such as citizenship, human rights and justice, which were originally

based on a false universalism taking the male as norm. In this book,
our aim is to analyse the contribution of women’s movements in four
different European countries to realising the right to bodily integrity
for women, and to argue that the concept of bodily citizenship is both
important in this political struggle and a productive tool for the analysis
of women’s issues in politics and public policy.
Our research for this book originated within the FEMCIT project,
which looked at the impact of women’s movements in Europe since
the late 1960s on social and political change in 2007. As was stated
by the editors of the first book, Remaking Citizenship in a Multicultural
Europe, ‘women’s struggles for social, political and cultural inclusion, for
redistribution and recognition, for autonomy and self-determination,
were analysed through the lenses of intimate, economic, social, bod-
ily and political citizenship’ (Halsaa, Roseneil and Sümer, 2012:5). The
study explicitly includes ‘the claims and experiences of women from
minoritized and racialized groups in its analysis of women’s movements’
(ibid.:2). By adding intimate and bodily citizenship as crucial aspects of
modern citizenship, the FEMCIT project departed from the mainstream
classification and discussion of citizenship as originally set out in the
classic work of T.H. Marshall (1963). It also drew on the feminist critique
of the modern conceptualisations of citizenship as based on the nation
state. This critique argues that, while the individuals within a state have
rights and obligations as well as a legal status that is bestowed on them
as full members of the state, national citizenship is also an exclusion-
ary concept, defining those who are entitled to citizenship. Moreover, it
argues that rights, obligations and legal status are not equally distributed
among women and men, the point of departure for the feminist critique
of citizenship.
The concept of citizenship
Marshall (1963) identified three major types of citizenship: civil, polit-

ical and social. Civil citizenship concerned the fundamental rights and
freedoms extended to individuals, including freedom of speech and free-
dom of religion. Political citizenship referred to the right to vote and
stand for election. Social citizenship included the right to minimum
standards of living and social security. According to Marshall, the three
types of citizenship and the rights that were connected to them devel-
oped gradually: civil rights were introduced in the 1700s, political rights
in the 1800s and social rights in connection with the development of
Joyce Outshoorn et al. 3
the welfare states in the 1900s. Also, all individuals on whom a citi-
zenship status was bestowed were to be regarded as equal pertaining to
rights and duties, although, de facto, they might have different access
to these rights.
Feminist researchers have criticised the concept of universal citizen-
ship as developed in the mainstream literature. Carole Pateman (1989,
1992), for instance, shows that women’s struggle for civil, political
and social rights has not followed the model identified by Marshall.
In Marshall’s model, she argues, women have been regarded as pas-
sive citizens; they have received social rights as mothers before they
have received civil and political rights. Ruth Lister (1997) follows up
Pateman’s critique of the ideal of the abstract universal citizen as based
on a male norm, which implicitly means that the apparently gender-
neutral concept of ‘citizen’ de facto refers to white, heterosexual and
middle-class man. She sets out the dilemma of women’s struggle for
an equal citizenship: should women strive for a gender-neutral view
on citizenship enabling them to participate in society as equal part-
ners (universalism) or should they pursue a more gender-differentiated
model based on women’s needs and responsibilities (particularism)?
Should women’s demands for inclusion be based on equality or differ-
ence, universalism or particularism, or on justice (the ethic of justice)
or equal worth (the ethic of care)? Rejecting the false universalism in
theories of citizenship, Lister calls for a combination: ‘a universalism
that stands in creative tension to diversity and difference and that
challenges the division and exclusionary inequalities, which can stem
from diversity’ (1997:66). For her, a more ‘women-friendly’ concep-
tualisation of citizenship combines gender-neutral and gender-specific
strategies, while being sensitive to differences between women. Hence,
a more inclusive conceptualisation of citizenship is both plural and
relational.
Ann Shola Orloff (1993) focuses on how states affect gender relations,
concentrating mainly on social citizenship rights, but she makes the
crucial point that the right to control one’s body and sexuality are taken
for granted for men, but contested for women. She underlines that the
control of women’s bodies in the family, workplace and public spaces
undermines their abilities to participate as ‘independent citizens’ in the
polity, ‘which in turn affect[s] their capacities to demand and use social
rights’ (1993:309). Julia O’Connor (1993) criticises Marshall not only for
using an undifferentiated category for members of a community, thus
losing sight of those who are not equal in rights and duties. She also
points to the fact that the image of the ideal citizen evolved at a time
when women were denied citizenship, which raises questions about the
conceptualisation of citizenship and ‘what constitutes taken for granted
citizenship activities’ (1993:505).
Other feminists share the critique of the classic conceptualisations
of citizenship for not taking into account the ways in which gen-
der intersects with structures such as class, race, ethnicity, sexuality
and age. Birte Siim (2000), for instance, maintains that a simple focus
on inequality between women and men may disregard other forms
of inequality, exclusion and discrimination, and argues for a plural
citizenship, including the rights and responsibilities of minority and
marginalised women. Nira Yuval-Davis (2007) connects citizenship to
identity, addressing the subjective sides of citizenship – to feel that
you are and to identify yourself as a citizen. More recent feminist
conceptualisations of citizenship, consequently, focus on three main
aspects of citizenship: rights and responsibilities, participation and
practice, and belonging. They argue that a feminist view on citizen-
ship should transgress dichotomies and prioritise the ‘lived experiences
of citizenship’ in multicultural and transnational contexts (Strasser,
2012:25).
Surprisingly, given the central place of the body and sexualities in
the campaigns and writings of women’s and feminist movements, the
feminist work on citizenship has hardly developed the idea of bodily
citizenship (see, for instance, Phillips, 1991a; Squires, 1999; Siim and
Squires, 2007). The major strands of feminist thought used the liberal
idea of self-determination and autonomy to make the case for bodily
integrity, as Rian Voet has observed (1998:98–108). However, there are
some starting points for developing the idea of bodily citizenship. Ruth
Lister has made a convincing case for including bodily integrity in the
concept of citizenship, arguing that it is a precondition for the other
citizenship rights (1997:126–128). Sheila Shaver (1994) made a distinc-
tion between the formal recognition of body rights in law (often partial),
specifically the right to abortion, and abortion as a medical entitlement.
The latter retains medical control over abortion, but in effect allows a
liberal abortion practice by inviting less political contestation and more
adequate public funding. Bacchi and Beasley (2002) make the distinc-
tion between those who are assumed to have control over their bodies –
full citizens – and those who are regarded as being controlled by their
bodies and can thus be deprived of their citizens’ rights. This impor-
tant idea definitely has a gender dimension, but also has consequences
for children (minors) and those defined by the state as deviating from
‘normality’.
The dimension of bodily citizenship
The FEMCIT project set out to study all the dimensions of citizen-
ship to assess the contribution of women’s and feminist movements
towards equality and gender justice. This included the original triad of
Marshall – civil, political and social citizenship – but in the project, bod-
ily, economic, intimate and multicultural citizenship were also taken
up as new dimensions. Research projects were developed covering all
these dimensions: on the political representation of women and the
agency of women politicians, gender inequalities in paid work, notably
in care for the elderly, the organisation of intimate life, such as part-
nership, parenting, sexual identities and sexual violence, the autonomy
of women’s bodies, the arrangement of child care and parental leave,
and the multicultural citizenship experiences of women from majority
and minoritised groups. In Remaking Citizenship in a Multicultural Europe,
Halsaa, Roseneil and Sümer (2012:4) observed that these dimensions are
never empirically separable and the boundaries of each are contestable.
Two instances can illustrate this observation: the multicultural dimen-
sion in fact runs through all the other dimensions of citizenship, and
the demarcation between bodily and intimate citizenship is indistinct
and not easily resolved by a definition. Ken Plummer, who coined the
concept of intimate citizenship, defined it as ‘the decisions people have
to make over the control (or not) over one’s body, feelings, relationships;
access (or not) to representations, relationships, public spaces, etc; and
socially grounded choices (or not) about identities, gender experiences,
erotic experiences’ (2003:14, emphasis in original). His ideas were devel-
oped against the backdrop of the changes in personal life and the new
arenas of public debate forming around these issues (2003:x) and how
these are shaped by public institutions, redrawing the public sphere.
Originally, the research on bodily citizenship was to include sexu-
ality, as reflected in the selection of the two issues for studying the
impact of women’s movements and bodily citizenship: abortion (stand-
ing for reproductive rights) and prostitution (involving sexuality). In the
research on intimate citizenship, sexuality and reproductive rights could
hardly be ignored given the focus on partnership and sexual identities.
In the course of the FEMCIT project, a division of labour developed in
which sexuality, including reproductive rights, was also studied as part
of intimate citizenship. In the conclusions of our research on bodily cit-
izenship, we observed that prostitution can be regarded as part of bodily
integrity if one regards it as violence, as many feminists claim it to be,
but we also argued that it can be seen as an economic issue involving
workers’ rights, as many other feminists have argued (Outshoorn et al.,

2012:140). No consensus in the overall project developed on the issue as
to whether bodily citizenship ought to be regarded as a separate category
or be subsumed under the category of intimate citizenship.
On the basis of our empirical work in four continental European
countries, all four with a strong state tradition, we developed the view
that bodily citizenship should be a separate category. Plummer’s per-
spective focuses on the individual level, paying little attention to the
state, government and law, which cannot be equated to changing pub-
lic arenas. He developed his ideas about intimate citizenship from an
Anglo-American context, and although he discusses the globalisation of
intimate citizenship, it is too anecdotal to pass for a systematic analysis
of the issues involved, both empirically and conceptually. Finding over-
whelming evidence for state control of and intervention in the issues we
studied empirically, abortion and prostitution, we concluded that bodily
citizenship for women was still limited, and, given states’ strong interest
in bodies, that it should be a distinct, separate dimension.
Our choice was also informed by the work of Michel Foucault and
Nikolas Rose. Foucault developed the concept of ‘bio-power’, which
began in the 18th century (1980a:139), linking it to the rise of national
states, which have generally not regarded bodies as purely private. States
developed a vested interest in the bodies of their citizens for demo-
graphic, military, public health and eugenic reasons. Bio-power is a
normalising power, with the objective of ensuring the preservation
and reinforcement of society against ‘non-normal’ or potentially dan-
gerous individuals, mainly through the progressive medicalisation of
‘non-normality’ (Malette, 2006:49–50). The mechanisms of bio-power
are exercised by preventively monitoring any potential signs of disorder
originating from their biology (Foucault, 1999:44). Foucault distin-
guishes between bio-power as a global strategy and disciplinary power
as an individual strategy; the former is directly linked to the advance of
medical power into the sphere of political control over the population.
In the case of disciplinary power, technology is applied to the body of
the individual, and its primary objective is to bring him/her round to
accepting generally widespread ideas in conformity with the imperatives
of industrial and capitalist society (Foucault, 2004:122, 144). The objec-
tive is not just to punish but to ‘retrain’ and adapt the individual, and
this is achieved by acting on his/her body, his/her time, his/her physi-
cal gestures and his/her everyday habits. In bio-power, the mechanisms
of power no longer rely on the disciplining and punishing of individ-
ual bodies. Instead they are finely entwined with the technologies of
security. In contrast to blocking, bending and destroying forces, bio-

power aims at producing them, helping them to grow and organise. The
attention is shifted from the body of the individual to environmental,
genetic and intergenerational factors. While the legal punishments of
women who undergo abortion represent an example of a disciplinary
power mechanism, the state-wide programme of preventive gynaeco-
logical checks applied to the whole female population is an example of
the functioning of bio-power.
Disciplinary mechanisms and the mechanisms of population reg-
ulation are thus overlapping and interconnected. As Sawicki notes,
‘disciplinary technologies control the body through techniques that
simultaneously render it more useful, more powerful and more docile’
(1991:83). Bio-power manifests itself as a political economy, which is
applied to the entire population in an all-pervasive manner, yet it inte-
grates random and individual elements and reconstitutes them as a
strategy of the whole (e.g. birth rate, ageing and illness). Disciplinary
power here no longer acts on the individual body but on the total-
ity of the human species, the effort being to ensure that it remains
balanced and regular. Examples are efforts to reduce the mortality
rate, prolong life expectancy, stimulate fertility or reduce congenital
and hereditary diseases (Malette, 2006:53). According to Foucault, bio-
power normalises, intending to preserve and reinforce the social system
against ‘non-normal’ individuals. It exerts a positive influence on life by
improving and optimising it, and by submitting it to control, regulation
and careful monitoring (Foucault, 1980a:137). In this way bio-power
was essential to the development of capitalism, which could only evolve
by integrating the human body into production and by adapting the
population to the economic process (ibid.:141).
Following Foucault’s idea of bio-power, Rose and Costas have coined
the word ‘biological citizenship’ (Rose and Novas, 2004; Rose, 2007) to
‘encompass all those citizenship projects that have linked their concep-
tions to beliefs about the biological existence of human beings, as indi-
viduals, as men and women, as families and lineages, as communities,
as populations and races, and as species’ (Rose, 2007:132). According
to them, this biological citizenship is fundamentally changing in the
new bio-politics which has developed since the biotechnological revo-
lution at the end of the 20th century, with its discoveries in genomics
and reproductive technologies. As Rose later notes, ‘bare life’ itself has
become ‘the basis of citizenship claims and protections’ (ibid.:133), lead-
ing to a new vital politics. Previously, states were involved in the politics
of health: births, death, diseases and their control (ibid.:3), and bodies in
this way were public matter. But today there is a devolution of the power
of states ‘in managing health and reproduction to quasi-autonomous
regulatory bodies’ (ibid.), while at the same time citizens are urged to
become ‘active and responsible consumers of medical services and prod-
ucts’ (ibid., 4). In this way biological citizenship is changing in form
and content, and is leading to new kinds of politics, with pharmaceuti-
cal companies dealing with genetic material as major players, and new
types of activism around diseases and other health issues. Prior to Rose,
Deborah Heath, Rayna Rapp and Karen-Sue Taussig coined the term
‘genetic citizenship’ (2004) for this new emerging field of health poli-
tics, participation and contestation, but Rose points out that genetics is
only one axis of the ways in which the biological make-up can become
a political issue (2007:137). We agree with this analysis, and it under-
lies our argument of recognising ‘the politics of life itself’, as the title of
Rose’s book has it, as a separate category of citizenship. However, we pre-
fer to call it ‘bodily citizenship’, mainly because the concept of biology
is open to many interpretations, and in common parlance is too often
regarded as mere matter, while it is crucial to remember that people are
always embodied.
The present book goes beyond our first analysis of women’s move-
ments’ contestation of state governance and dominant political dis-
courses about the female body in three respects. Firstly, we shall be
analysing our cases in a stricter comparative way, showing how earlier
policy legacies structured the political context which the new women’s
movements encountered and which influenced their framings, strategi-
cally or otherwise. Secondly, by drawing on the rich material gathered
in the original research, we shall be explaining how, despite past lega-
cies, policy changes proved possible in the context of changing political
configurations and discursive changes and the challenge of women’s
movements. Thirdly, we shall use our findings to elucidate the concept
of bodily citizenship. While aware of the concern that a proliferation of
categories of citizenship might undermine the strength of the concept,
we shall maintain that bodily integrity ought to be a distinct category of
citizenship, for both theoretical and political reasons. For this purpose
we will be drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and his concept of
bio-power and on Nikolas Rose’s (2007) recent work on contemporary
bio-politics.
As mentioned, issues concerning the body have been central to the
new women’s movements that have arisen in Western Europe since the
1960s. States had a legacy of curtailing women’s reproductive capacities
and regulating their sexualities, as well as upholding patriarchal control
by the institutionalisation of marriage and inheritance laws. Violence

against women was generally regarded as a family affair and here the
state also delegated its monopoly on violence to the heads of house-
holds to control their families. Since the 19th century, women’s bodies
have been central to processes of demographic projects of states, both
of a qualitative and quantitative nature. The regulation of fertility and
reproduction at the social level is common to all types of state systems.
As Alena Heitlinger has written: ‘All societies intervene in procreation.
The processes of giving birth and raising children are too important for
societies to leave uncontrolled, though controls do not always work’
(1987:15). Symbolically, the female body stood for the vitality and
the imagined community of the nation (Yuval-Davis, 1997), as well as
marking the difference between the sexes; the female body represented
women’s natural otherness and the fundament of their lesser position in
regard to men. It legitimated their exclusion from many rights, includ-
ing citizenship. Although women’s movements differed regarding when
they addressed the issue of the integrity of the female body, sooner or
later they claimed that the female individual ought to be autonomous
and free from external intervention in relation to decisions about the
body. In the authoritarian states of Southern Europe, such as Portugal
or Spain, this became possible with the rise of social movements dur-
ing the transition to democracy. In Central and Eastern Europe, where
under communism abortion was often legal, but under medical con-
trol and prone to state natalist concerns, women’s movements that
challenged their authority could not develop, but after transition, repro-
ductive rights became contested again, not in the least by anti-abortion
activists. As we shall see, in most Nordic states the dominance of the
class paradigm enabled women’s movement demands for gender equal-
ity issues, but it was a barrier for new ‘second wave feminism’ non-class
claims (such as sexual violence) to reach the political agenda until the
1990s. These had already been expressed by feminist groups in Western
Europe since the early 1970s, and addressed by governments, often met
with some degree of success.
This book sets out to answer two major questions. Firstly, we shall be
asking how women’s movements have contested state governance and
dominant political discourses about the female body, and how they have
changed ‘problem definitions’ and policies impeding women’s bodily
self-determination in different political systems. Secondly, how have the
growth of multicultural societies, notably the increase in migration in
our four countries, and the process of Europeanisation – ‘the process
in which domestic politics, policies and polities are changed through
the engagement with the EU system’ (Backe and George, 2006:57) –

impinged on political debates about the body, and possibly impacted
on attempts to enhance women’s rights to bodily integrity? These ques-
tions will be analysed in a comparative study of four European states:
the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden – by studying
two bodily issues: abortion and prostitution.
Theoretical background and key concepts
Institutionalism
The point of departure of our research has been new institutionalism,
particularly historical (Hall and Taylor, 1996; Thelen, 1999; Pierson and
Skocpol, 2002; Steinmo, 2008) and discursive institutionalism (for an
overview: Schmidt, 2010; for feminist contributions: Kulawik, 2009;
Mackay and Krook, 2010; Freidenvall and Krook, 2011). Historical
institutionalism emphasises long-term historical processes and the path
dependency of policies and has been criticised for lacking explanation
for change; here we draw on discursive institutionalism and others
who emphasise the role of ideas in accounting for institutional pol-
icy change (Hall, 1989; Hay, 2002; Blyth, 2002; Schmidt, 2010). Sven
Steinmo observes that more recent work shows that institutional change
results from changes in ideas among actors: change becomes possible
‘when powerful actors have the will and ability to change institutions
in favour of new ideas’ (2008:131), but it should be pointed out that
Peter Hall already noted the importance of a policy paradigm to explain
the shift from Keynesian economic policies to monetarist economics in
the US and Great Britain (Hall, 1989).
Discursive institutionalism holds that institutions are both structures
and constructs of the meaning that is internal to agents whose ‘back-
ground ideational abilities’ enable them to create and maintain those
institutions, while their ‘foreground discursive abilities’ enable them
to communicate critically about them, to change or maintain them
(Schmidt, 2008:305). Background ideas refer to human capacities, dispo-
sitions and know-how related to the ways in which the world operates.
Agents draw upon this background of ideas to make sense of meaning
and to understand how they should act in terms of ideational rules.
This set of background ideas underpins the institutions within which
agents are enmeshed. Foreground discursive abilities follow a logic of
communication. Agents engage in deliberation about how to act, and
seek to persuade other agents to follow their lead and craft institutional
change. According to Schmidt, foreground action can generate change
in background ideas over time as actors are convinced to change old

rules or follow new rules (ibid.).
From historical institutionalism we use the concept of path depen-
dency, the self-reinforcing process of specific historical outcomes that
leads to certain patterns, which then make it difficult to reverse or even
change these (Pierson and Skocpol, 2002:699–700). A given outcome
cuts off alternative options, creates new interests around the new sta-
tus quo, and others also adjust and thus invest in the new rules. Policy
change is a central focus in this approach, as it can structure the rules
of the system; its ‘specific design can have an enormous effect on the
resources and strategies subsequently available to political actors’, often
as much as ‘formal political institutions in shaping political processes
and outcomes’ (ibid.:710). Path dependency points to the weight of the
past, and we use the term ‘policy legacy’ to refer to the tradition of
past policies that structure and limit the universe of options open to
new actors and challengers of the status quo. We also borrow the idea of
‘critical juncture’ from historical institutionalism, usually taken to mean
‘events’; for us, it denotes openings in the political system that derive
from a changed configuration of power and can provide opportunities
to political actors to further their interests.
Historical institutionalism is also characterised by the basic idea of
taking ‘time seriously’, as Pierson and Skocpol have argued (2002:695).
They write: ‘Specifying sequences and tracing transformations and pro-
cesses of varying scale and temporality are at the core of historical
institutionalism as it tries to account for why something happened’
(ibid.:696). In a later work, Pierson argues that sequences not only
matter because events in time are irreversible, but also because ‘some
groups are able to consolidate their position before others even arrive
at the scene . . . the early emergence of certain kinds of players fore-
closes the possible emergence of other kinds of players . . . ’ (Pierson,
2004:62–63). Historical institutionalism emphasises that ‘it is not just
a matter of what happened, but when it happened’ (ibid.:71, emphasis
in original). Following Pierson (ibid.:78), we hold that the key notions
of timing, sequences and path dependency can also be applicable to
‘micro-processes’ of collective action and policy formation.
As mentioned, many have argued that historical institutionalism
offers little to explain change; as Steinmo notes, it assumes change
to be difficult, given vested interests, expectations and preferences
(2008:129). In order to explain change, scholars have developed two
broad models that are based on different views of institutional inno-
vation: one is focused on critical junctures and path dependency,
the other on institutional evolution and development. The latter sug-

gests that institutions emerge incrementally – they are gradual and
slow-moving – which means that periods of institutional reproduction
overlap with events of institutional creation (Streeck and Thelen, 2005;
Weir, 1992). Generally, it is argued that institutions survive through
dynamics of institutional conversion, in which existing institutions
are directed towards new objectives, and institutional layering, where
some aspects of existing institutions are renegotiated while other aspects
remain intact (Thelen, 2003). In our research we have kept our eyes
open for both processes. Given our interest in social movements and
changes in discourse, we have focused on both critical junctures and
path dependency.
Discursive institutionalism has as premise that institutions should not
be treated as neutral structures of incentives, but as carriers of ideas
that are changeable over time as actors’ ideas and discourse also evolve.
The key to explaining institutional change and continuity, according to
Vivien Schmidt, is to analyse ‘(how) ideas are generated among policy
actors and communicated to the public by political actors through dis-
course . . . ’ (2010:5). In the same vein, John Donnelly and Paul Hogan
(2012) hold that a critical juncture that sets institutional change in
motion consists of a crisis (or simply uncertainty over a problem, see
Meijerink, 2005), ideational change and subsequently radical policy
change. Without the ideational change, the ‘crisis’ results in only minor
or moderate adjustments of a particular policy, and thus the critical
juncture does not take place (Donnelly and Hogan, 2012:344). Follow-
ing this insight, we have taken on the task of analysing the new ideas
of the involved actors in our selected issues over time, as expressed in
their discourses and framings, and the ways in which these ideas influ-
enced the policies and institutions that impacted the bodily citizenship
of women.
Social movement theory

While new institutionalism emphasises the ways in which institutions
structure the political context, we also draw on social movement the-
ory, mainly the political process approach (McAdam, McCarthy and
Zald, 1996; Kriesi, 2004) and framing theory (Snow and Benford, 1988;
Gamson and Meyer, 1996; Snow, 2004; Donati, 1992), to analyse the
agency of political actors, notably women’s and feminist movement
organisations. The political process approach is highly compatible with
historical institutionalism given its focus on structure and the perspec-
tive of framing. Within social movement theory, the concept of political
opportunity structure concerns what enables or hinders the mobilisa-

tion of protest; it sets limits to what actors can do and achieve. Like
historical institutionalism, the political process approach has been criti-
cised for not taking ideas seriously and, more generally, ignoring cultural
elements. In more recent social movement literature this shortcoming
has been met by authors like Ruud Koopman and Paul Statham (1999),
David Snow (2004) and William Gamson (2004). Snow points out that
culturalist authors use the term ‘discursive field’ to denote the terrain,
while structuralists (e.g. Koopmans and Statham, 1999) use ‘discourse
opportunity structures’ (Snow, 2004:402) to capture this dimension.
Gamson (2004:249) calls it a ‘playing field’ where the contest between
framings takes place. In his words, ‘what the political opportunity struc-
ture is to policy outcome, the discursive opportunity structure is to the
outcome of framing contests’ (ibid.).
The central concept of the political process approach, ‘political oppor-
tunity structure’, was coined to map the political context of social
movements that constrains or enhances their mobilisation. Many schol-
ars have generated diverse operationalisations of this concept (see e.g.
Kitschelt, 1986; Kriesi et al., 1995; Tarrow, 1996; Kriesi, 2004), usually
distinguishing long-term and formal aspects, such as political institu-
tions and political culture, from shorter term, more volatile aspects such
as the political alignments of elites and conflicts among them. Although
sharing the critique of the expansion of the concept to include as many
variables as possible (for the critique: Gamson and Meyer, 1996:275;
Kriesi, 2004:69; Della Porta and Diani, 2006:7), we use the general idea,
as it enables us to examine configurations of power at the time of critical
junctures and to develop the points of comparison between our country
cases and issues. Following Koopman and Statham (1999) and Nyhagen
Predelli and Halsaa (2012), we take both institutional and discursive
aspects of the political opportunity structure to explain critical junctures
and policy change.
Within social movement theory, the concept of framing was devel-
oped in response to the neglect of cultural factors by the political process
approach, with critics arguing that opportunities are ‘embedded’ not
only in political institutions but also in culture (Gamson and Meyer,
1996:277). Snow points out that some scholars use the term ‘discursive
field’ to denote the shared elements of culture (2004:402), which is
never homogeneous; framing then points to the meaning construction
by movement activists who draw on certain elements of the discursive
field. This meaning construction is essential work for social movements,
as political opportunities are not just ‘out there’ but have to be perceived
and interpreted by actors (Gamson and Meyer, 1996:283; Della Porta

and Diani, 2006:17). Framing organises these interpretations and per-
ceptions, defining issues in terms of a diagnosis of the problem ‘in ways
that are intended to mobilize potential adherents and constituents, to
garner bystander support, and to demobilize antagonists’ (Snow and
Benford, 1988:198). This social construction of the problem by move-
ment activists adds an important dimension of agency to the often
static and deterministic conceptions of the political opportunity struc-
ture. But the framing process is bounded by the universe of cultural
and symbolic elements in a society, and to achieve a mobilising effect,
the framing will have to resonate with important parts of it. Framing
is also crucial in policymaking, since defining an issue in a certain way
also allocates power: it determines who becomes a political actor in the
political debate, who has the power to politicise and decide about the
issue, which solution is seen as legitimate and, to a large extent, also
the outcome of the decision-making process. An important part of our
research has therefore focused on uncovering framings of abortion and
prostitution by distinct political actors around the two issues.
We have found it useful to distinguish between discourses and
framings. Discourse entered social science research through the work of
Foucault, who developed the concept in his analysis of the structure of
knowledge in history. Discourse is a process that defines and formulates
the structure of debate prior to its actual performance, and includes rules
on how to handle knowledge, what can be said and done. It follows cer-
tain patterns or rules which people must observe if they are involved in
the various forms of social life. For Foucault, discourse reflects the social
order, while it also constructs the social order (Foucault, 1971, 1980b;
see also Schneck, 1987). People express their own opinions and value
judgements, which are often pre-structured by the prevailing discourse
in a society which sets what is normal or appropriate. There can be sev-
eral discourses within a society in different walks of social life, and they
operate with similar underlying rules. Following Fairclough’s discussion
of Foucault, one can then distinguish the order of discourse, ‘the totality
of discursive practices within an institution or society’ (1992:43), which
points to the similar underlying rules and patterns; it is in this sense
that we are using the concept of discourse.
For us, framing is a lower-level term, denoting the meaning construc-
tion by political and social actors in the processes of politics and policy,
for which they draw from the diverse and often contradictory discourses
circulating in their society (and increasingly internationally). Frames
work as guiding models for what is to be understood in the discourse
(Fisher, 1997). Data are grouped together under the heading of one
subsuming category, a larger ‘frame’ which provides them with a recog-
nisable structure and meaning. These categories, or frames, by means
of which people ‘perceive’ the world, are categories which are already
present in the perceiver’s culture or memory. Once a frame is elicited,
data or elements which are difficult to fit will be adapted or selectively
dropped. Mentioning some elements – sometimes even one – is usually
enough to ‘suggest’ or to recall the whole set (Donati, 1992). Framing is
understood as an activity involving selecting some aspects of a perceived
reality and making them more salient in a communicating text in such
a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpre-
tation, moral evaluation and/or treatment recommendation (Entman,
1993:52). On the one hand, the policy debates come out of some dis-
course and thus they have some frames; those can be identified and
described. On the other hand, social movements have their own frames
that can correspond or not to the frames of policymakers.
A final note is in order on the concept of women’s movements. In our
analysis we will use this plural form to bring the variety of women’s
collective action to the fore, following the working definition devel-
oped by the Research Network on Gender Politics and the State (RNGS)
(McBride and Mazur, 2010:30, 33). The definition has two elements:
it refers to both the ideational world of women’s movements – the
ideas, aspirations and identities developed from gender consciousness
which inspire collective behaviour – and the actors articulating these
ideas in public. These actors can be individual women, informal or for-
mal organisations which have been inspired by movement ideas, and
who act to advance what they see as women’s interests. Women’s move-
ment actors are defined by their discourse; while they have in common
with other social movements that they engage in collective behaviour
for social change, the major difference between women’s movements
(and men’s movements if they exist) and other social movements is that
they are consciously and explicitly gendered. They claim to represent
the grievances of women as women and set gender as the focal point
of their mobilisation. Women’s movement actors develop a wide range
of discourses and demands on what they define as women’s interests in
public debate and policy arenas (Outshoorn, 2010:144–145).
Following the RNGS definition, we distinguish feminist groups from
women’s movements, as the latter do not necessarily espouse femi-
nist ideas. There are women’s groups which defend traditional female
roles or vehemently oppose changing gender relations or crucial femi-
nist issues, such as the right to abortion. While all women’s movement
actors express explicit identity with women as a group, use gendered dis-
course and claim to represent women, feminist ones also hold there is
something wrong with the status of women and challenge gender hier-
archies and women’s subordination. As McBride and Mazur (2010:33)
note, feminist movements are thus a specific subset of the total popu-
lation of women’s movements; an argument that corresponds with the
arguments made by Beckwith (2000), Ferree and Tripp (2006:vii), Ferree,
(2004:6–7) and Ferree and Mueller (2004:577).
The distinction between women’s movements and feminist move-
ments also allows us to include women’s organisations under authori-
tarian or totalitarian rule. In former communist countries, such as the
Czech Republic, it is doubtful whether one can speak of a ‘women’s
movement’ under communist rule, as a movement could not and did
not develop under the regime, although there was an official women’s
organisation. After the political change in 1989, there was no over-
all movement, but a complex of different activities of small groups
and individuals to mobilise and gain the support of women in Czech
society. Here we prefer to use the term ‘women’s groups’ or ‘feminist
groups’.
Research design and methodology
We developed a comparative research design to study how women’s

movements contested state power, the dominant discourses about the
female body and changed policies that impeded women’s bodily self-
determination. We also looked at how the rise of multicultural societies
and the process of Europeanisation affected these debates (Outshoorn
et al., 2012:119–121). In selecting our country cases, we could not draw
on the literature on gender and welfare states, as these never incorpo-
rated body issues in the development of their typologies. This also holds
for typologies that abound in political science about kinds of regimes
or democracies. As we wanted to determine whether the central role of
women’s movements in changing the discourse about the female body
holds in very different contexts, we opted for a ‘most different system’
research design. We chose four European states – the Czech Republic, the
Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden – from each of the four major regions
of the current European Union (EU): the Nordic region, Western Europe,
Central and Eastern Europe and Southern Europe. After the selection
of states, researchers from each of the four countries were recruited to
ensure knowledge of the national language and familiarity with national
political culture and sociological knowledge.
This selection provided a mix of both secular and religious coun-

tries, which we considered was likely to be significant in terms of body
politics. Roughly stated, the Czech Republic and Sweden are largely
secular, the latter having a Lutheran state church legacy and the for-
mer a Catholic and Protestant minority. More than half of the Dutch
no longer subscribe to a church; the religious are more or less equally
divided into Roman Catholics and Protestants, but many of these attend
church only sporadically. Portugal is still a solidly Roman Catholic coun-
try, with about 70% identifying as such. Our selection also has two old
democracies (the Netherlands and Sweden) and two countries with a
recent transition to democratic rule (Portugal 1974–1976; the Czech
Republic 1989). Consequently, women’s movements emerged in differ-
ent decades, providing variation in the life cycle of women’s movements
and the (non)existence of feminist groups. Moreover, two of the four
countries, the Netherlands and Portugal, have a colonial history, with
a long tradition of migration from overseas to Europe, while Sweden
and the Czech Republic have long-standing indigenous minorities, the
Sámi and Roma, and more recently, to a different degree, immigration.
All four countries are members of the EU: the Netherlands is a founding
member, while Portugal joined in 1986, Sweden in 1995 and the Czech
Republic in 2004.
We selected two ‘body issues’ for our analysis from the range of issues
about the (female) body. Previous feminist public policy analysis dis-
tinguished two types of body politics: reproductive rights and (sexual)
violence against women (Mazur, 2002:137). Here gender equality is not
the goal, as both focus ‘on women’s bodily distinctiveness and the social
construction of their sexualities’; what is at stake is autonomy, bringing
in issues of control and domination. The logic behind the distinction
is, as Mazur writes, that they are dealt with in different policy subsys-
tems. We would add that there is also a difference in historical sequence:
reproductive rights were an older, second wave issue, generally arriv-
ing earlier on the political agenda and leading to policy responses long
before sexual and violence issues. The distinction between reproductive
rights and violence against women is also useful, as it maps into the
distinction between ‘position’ and ‘valence’ issues.1 The former refers to
issues in which there is no consensus in society about the goals and the
means of a policy, such as abortion, whereas in the latter, people agree
on the goal but not on the means (e.g. ending violence against women),
a distinction which leads to very different kinds of political processes.
At the level of women’s movements, abortion was a valence issue, with
practically all feminists agreeing about the goal of women’s right to an
abortion, but not always agreeing on the strategy of how to achieve this.
However, prostitution was a position issue at the level of movements, as
women disagree vehemently on the goal to be achieved, and usually
also on the means, such as government intervention or more autonomy
for sex workers.
Choosing one issue from each category thus appeared to be the most
logical, and was also in line with ongoing research on the priorities
of women’s movement groups since the late 1960s (for the results:
Outshoorn, 2010). The legalisation of abortion has been one of the
top priorities of contemporary women’s movements and it has been
a pivotal issue in distinguishing feminist movements from women’s
movements – feminist movements always pushed for abortion law
reform, while women’s movements opposing abortion have occurred
in many countries, such as the US, Spain and Poland (Fuszara, 2005).
Many feminists have regarded abortion as part and parcel of reproduc-
tive rights in general (also opposing forced sterilisation practices), while
arguing that the right to an abortion is a prerequisite for practising other
rights. As legalisation of abortion has followed very different time paths
in European countries and considerable divergence in law across states
can still be observed, the issue is a likely suspect for assessing women’s
movement impacts across states.
Prostitution has not been a high priority for women’s movements,
except in Sweden, but it is an issue which raises contentious questions
about sexuality, personal autonomy and the role of the state. For those
who frame prostitution as a form of violence, it would qualify well as an
example for the second category of body issues, that of (sexual) violence.
However, in contrast to abortion, women’s movement activists and fem-
inists are deeply divided on prostitution. Many regard prostitution as
sexual domination, involving violence, while others hold that selling
sex is about sexual self-determination, in which a woman can decide
to deploy her body in her own way. In this way prostitution becomes
work, selling sexual services. The contentious nature of prostitution con-
trasts with the consensus position of feminist movements on abortion,
and, given the dissent, it is not a ‘valence issue’ like other issues in the
violence spectrum, where women’s movement activists and feminists
all decry rape, domestic violence and sexual harassment. Prostitution
has become a position issue, not just for feminists, but for policymakers
and other interest groups around the issue: the goal of prostitution pol-
icy itself is contested, not only the means with which to deal with the
issue. Some want to abolish prostitution altogether while helping prosti-
tutes to exit the sex industry, others want to criminalise all participants
from clients and sex workers to those running sexual services, and still
others want to regulate the industry or legalise it altogether. For these
reasons, but especially for its contested nature among women’s and fem-
inist movements, we chose prostitution, or sex work, as our second body
issue.
Interestingly, both of our selected issues fall within the jurisdiction of
the national state, and not of the EU. This makes both particularly suit-
able for the analysis of processes of Europeanisation that are not directly
related to EU regulation. Once we had started gathering our data, we
were able to derive three important questions inductively. Firstly, did
women’s movements expand the scope of conflict by taking the issue to
the supranational level? Secondly, how did the EU and other European
states serve as points of comparison for our four national states? Finally,
how did our states construct their national identity in the context of
shifting boundaries and EU growth in the context of our selected issues?
Our empirical work started by process tracing: reconstructing the life
cycle of our issues in the political and social context since the late
19th century to capture the policy legacy, but discovering at the same
time that often the legacy was even older than that. For each country
and each issue, we identified the critical junctures, the dominant dis-
course(s) and the alternative framings that challenged the status quo.
We also established the configurations of power at each critical junc-
ture and the major actors involved, and how each new framing allowed
access for new actors or discredited older ones. Which women’s organi-
sations or groups got involved, including those of minority women, and
how did they frame their demands? To what extent were their framings
adopted by governments and incorporated in the policy outcomes, and
were they accepted as stakeholders in the further implementation of the
adopted policy?
Finally, we analysed how discourses about these issues were affected
by ongoing debates about migration and multicultural societies. To
avoid the ideological debate on multiculturalism, we analysed our data
in terms of migration and the emergence of new ethnic minorities in
our countries, as well as taking into account the existence of indigenous
ethnic minorities. How did new migration patterns impact the debates
on our new issues and how did migrant women’s organisations partici-
pate in these? How did the presence of women migrants in our countries
affect the debates on our issues and to what extent did this give rise to
new framings of national identity?
To collect our data, we used multiple sources. Secondary literature
on our topics informed our first reconstruction of the life cycle of our
issues in each country, especially for the older periods. From the 1950s
on, in addition to the existing scholarly literature, we collected primary
sources of many sorts: documents produced by the different groups in
the debates, such as parliamentary records, government statements, pol-
icy documents, party programmes, texts from women’s movements and
reports from experts and interest groups. When information was lacking
or contradictory, interviews were held with key actors in the debates –
leaders and members of women’s movement organisations, grass-roots
feminists, politicians, decision-makers such as cabinet members and
civil servants, and involved experts.
Comparing the cases
We make two comparisons in the analysis of our empirical material.

Firstly, the country cases are compared. In line with our theoretical
approach, we will be looking at the following points:
1. Critical junctures: which critical junctures come to the fore, and what
is the configuration of power at the time in terms of government and
involved actors – cabinets, political parties, the major churches, inter-
est groups and social movement organisations, specifically women’s
movement organisations, involved professions and experts?
2. Policy legacy: what is the legacy in terms of outcomes and dominant
discourse(s)? Is there a constant, despite policy change?
3. Timing and sequence: do the critical junctures occur in similar peri-
ods across the four states? Did a sequence play a role in in/excluding
certain actors and outcomes?
4. What was the dominant framing and which ones persisted over time?
What framings can be distinguished in the political debates of var-
ious actors, including those of women’s movement organisations,
including those of migrant women? How were the issues of abor-
tion and prostitution constructed through the public (media, expert
and political) discourse and how did this construction influence
institutional change or continuity?
5. What role did migration play in the various debates and did it
affect national discourses of identity on the issues of abortion
and prostitution? How were migrant organisations involved in the
debates?
6. How did Europeanisation affect the debates and national discourses
of identity?
Secondly, we shall be comparing the two issues, abortion and prostitu-

tion, in terms of:
1. Outcomes: to what extent were women’s movements’ claims

realised? What barriers are there still to bodily citizenship? Is new
policy change likely to occur in the near future?
2. Commonalities and differences in discourses and framing.
Outline of the book
After this introductory chapter, we present our four country cases in

four different chapters, in alphabetical order: the Czech Republic, the
Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden. Each chapter outlines the policy
legacy of abortion and prostitution, discusses the life course of each
issue, presents the major discourses on the topics and deals with the
framings of women’s movements and the other involved actors. They
each discuss the impact of migration on the debates around the issues
and analyse these in the context of the process of Europeanisation.
In the final chapter we make the overall comparison between the coun-
try cases and between the two issues and answer the major questions of
our research. We also return to the issue of the distinct category of bod-
ily citizenship in the light of our major findings and the work of Michel
Foucault and Nikolas Rose.
Note
1. The original distinction goes back to Stokes (1966) in his discussion of spatial
models of party competition.
2
Constructing Bodily Citizenship in
the Czech Republic
Radka Dudová
Introduction
In the Central and Eastern European countries that experienced four

decades of communist rule, the history of women’s bodily citizenship
followed a path different from that of democratic Western European
countries. Abortion was legalised in Czechoslovakia relatively early,
almost as soon as the situation after the Second World War and the
communist putsch in 1948 more or less calmed down. The Act on Artifi-
cial Termination of Pregnancy in 1957 legalised abortion under specific
conditions. Though women could legally undergo an abortion for social
reasons, the decision to terminate an unwanted pregnancy was not
placed directly in their hands, but depended upon the authorisation of
special expert political commissions. Prostitution was then considered
by law and in the discourse as an ‘aberration’ to the socialist way of life.
Women involved in prostitution were persecuted as spongers, and no
protection or recognition of their citizens’ rights existed. The process of
building women’s bodily citizenship – understanding abortion as a part
of women’s reproductive rights and not as an instrument of the bio-
power of the state, and disconnecting prostitution from the imagery of
women deliberately abusing the socialist state – thus was (and still is)
marked by the totalitarian legacy of the communist regime that was in
power from 1948 to 1989.
In this chapter, I trace the development of two issues defined as
revealing for research on the bodily citizenship of women – the case of
abortion and the case of prostitution. I focus on the ‘critical junctures’ –
the turning points when the institutions changed and development
took a different path – as well as on the path dependency of the two
issues. I show how the debates over these two issues were framed in the
22
Radka Dudová 23
post-war history of the Czech Republic,1 what the outcomes of these

debates were and how this development influenced the thinking and
public understanding of women’s rights in this area. In the first step,
I uncover the discourse that has accompanied the legislation on abor-
tion and prostitution in Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic since 1950,
and the impact this framing had on the actual politics of abortion and of
prostitution and on the bodily citizenship of women, namely whether
the reframing led to a critical juncture in the institutions’ develop-
ment. Then I compare the two issues and explore their implications for
the theoretical concept of bodily citizenship. However, it is necessary
first to introduce the history and development of the women’s move-
ment in the Czech Republic and to provide a brief description of the
development of the political system in the country.
Political system
The Czech Republic is among the post-communist countries with an

historical legacy of totalitarianism. After the Second World War, the
political system in Czechoslovakia was greatly affected by the intro-
duction of a Soviet-style Communist regime, as happened in the
other countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The three branches
of power – executive, legislative and judicial – were substituted by a
unified Communist power. Its power was based on the constitution.
For 40 years (1948–1989) it ruled all layers of social and political life
throughout the country with the help of oppressive institutions. After
the putsch in February 1948, the Communist Party became the only
autonomous political entity. It allowed a few other parties (including
the Christian-Democratic Union) to exist within the so-called National
Front; however, these parties had no real power. In 1968–1969 a reform
movement known as the ‘Prague Spring’ emerged in Czechoslovakia,
with the aim of creating ‘socialism with a human face’. The Soviet
Union and other Warsaw Pact countries, however, from fear that these
ideas would threaten the existence of the communist system, invaded
Czechoslovakia in 1968. A hard-line regime was consequently installed,
erasing all traces of reform in a process known as ‘normalisation’.
Since the ‘velvet revolution’ in 1989 and the break-up of
Czechoslovakia in 1993, the Czech political system has been shaped as
a parliamentary democracy. The government is responsible to the lower
chamber of the parliament, and until 2013, both chambers elected the
head of state at a joint session. In 2013, the direct presidential election
was introduced.
24 Constructing Bodily Citizenship in the Czech Republic
The Czech Republic today has a multi-party system. A diverse

array of political parties was well established even before the break-
up of Czechoslovakia, and some have a long tradition dating from
the founding of the republic in 1918. Most influential in the post-
communist period have been the Civic Democratic Party (liberal right)
and the Czech Social Democratic Party (left). Other notable parties that
came into being were the Civic Democratic Alliance (right), Christian-
Democratic Union, Freedom Union (centre-right) and the Green Party.
The Communist Party was never banned and regularly wins a relatively
high percentage of the vote (about 15%). Due to the electoral system
(proportional representation with a threshold of 5%), a limited number
of parties are represented in parliament. The system repeatedly produces
very weak and therefore unstable governments (a specific problem is
that the Communist Party is shunned by all the other parties in coali-
tion negotiation). This situation explains the continuity of the influence
of the Christian party KDU (Christian-Democratic Union), later KDU-
ČSL, in the politics of the CR, rather surprising if we consider that a
majority of the Czech population is atheist (with only about 30% of
people claiming to belong to a religion (Nešpor, 2004)). The party has
been present in every government except in the periods 1998–2002
and 2010–2013. Although the Christian Democrats represent only a
minority of the electorate (5–9%), they have exercised a significant influ-
ence on government decisions, including on issues of women’s bodily
rights.
Historical legacy prior to the ‘new’ women’s movement
Given the history of the Czech Republic, with a past shaped by the
totalitarian regime under the Communist Party, by Marxist-Leninist ide-
ology and by the related suppression of civil society, Czech women’s
and feminist movements developed along a different course than in the
democratic countries. It could even be questioned whether a women’s
movement actually exists in the Czech Republic and whether one ever
existed (Hašková, 2005; Vodrážka, 2006).
It is evident that it is not possible to speak of a ‘new women’s move-
ment’ in the context of the state-socialist Czechoslovakia. Although
we can note an upheaval in civil society, including women’s organised
groups, during the Prague Spring, the women’s and/or feminist groups
had no or very limited influence on the issues of bodily citizenship dur-
ing the period of the communist regime. If we want to trace the impact
of the women’s movement on the issues of abortion and prostitution,
Radka Dudová 25
we need to look further back in history – to the period of the democratic

‘First Republic’ of Czechoslovakia. In 1923, the organisation Women’s
National Council (Ženská národní rada) was formed with the main aim to
put the political equality of women and men, enshrined in the constitu-
tion since 1920, into practice. The efforts to emancipate women legally
were supported by the president of the Republic, Tomas G. Masaryk,
who was personally inclined to feminist ideas, inspired by his American
wife Charlotte Garrique. During the 1920s, several women Members of
Parliament (especially Betty Karpíšková and Luisa Šandová-Štychová)
opposed the repressive legislation of abortion originating in the leg-
islation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They managed to unite and
mobilise other women in parliament across party and national divid-
ing lines. The MP Luisa Landová-Štychová explicitly used the argument
of a woman’s right to decide over her pregnancy when trying to push
through the amendment of the Criminal Law in 1926. Their efforts,
however, were not successful and in the end were disrupted by the
Second World War (Musilová, 2007:7, 79).
The issue of prostitution was also strongly present in the public and
political debates in the interwar period. The abolitionist movement,
allying women fighting for women’s rights with doctors concerned
about the increase of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and led by the
president of the Republic, Masaryk, gained in importance in the early
years after the First World War. Prostitution was framed as a moral and
social problem, reflecting the unequal position of women and the gen-
erally accepted ‘double standard’. The end of the war, the collapse of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire and the foundation of the Republic headed by
President Masaryk created a political opportunity structure favourable to
the abolition of prostitution. The abolition was discursively connected
with the ‘new’ Republic and ‘new’ democracy, serving as a token of the
progress of the nation. As early as 1919, the proposed law to abolish the
regulation of prostitution was prepared (by doctors, jurists and women
MPs, such as Luisa Landová-Štychová) and in 1922, it was accepted by
the parliament (Lenderová, 2002). This event presents the first critical
juncture in the development of the issue of prostitution.
After the Second World War, the women’s organisations hoped they
would remain in existence as in the pre-war period. The Council of
Czechoslovak Women claimed the legacy of pre-war women’s organisa-
tions and the activities of the Women’s National Council. The Council
was linked to government bodies and institutions and important social
organisations (such as unions) by the women who worked in them
and who were also active in the Council. Reports on its activities were
published in the magazine titled The Women’s Council, renamed in 1947

as Vlasta2 (Jechová, 2008:80–82).
Nonetheless, the women’s organisations were dismantled during the
communist putsch in February 1948. The leader of the Council of
Czechoslovak Women Milada Horáková was arrested and later executed
in a politically driven process. After the organisation ‘purged’ its ranks,
Anežka Hodinová-Spurná, a communist Marxist, became the head of
the Council of Czechoslovak Women. The Council attempted to trans-
form itself into a mass organisation that would manifest the unity of
the people (women) under the leadership of the Czechoslovak Commu-
nist Party. It turned its attention mainly to propaganda tasks. Women’s
activities receded and were dismantled (Uhrová, 2005).
The Council, transformed in 1953 into the Committee of Czechoslo-
vak Women, was until 1989 the only organisation representing women
in the Czech Republic (Jechová, 2008:100–104). This organisation had
nothing to do with the movement for the emancipation of women –
it was mainly a tool for controlling the female population. However,
women were left with one significant instrument to influence the pub-
lic and potentially promote at least minor changes: the magazine Vlasta.
Vlasta was published in a massive edition and reached most of the adult
population. Of course it was a magazine that followed the politics and
ideology of the ruling party (ibid.:104–105). Nevertheless, it was in its
pages that discussion of some of the smaller issues troubling women
and requiring solutions was opened up. In every issue at least one page
was devoted to personal letters and complaints, and although it is clear
that their publication was subject to censorship, it was the obligation of
the editorial office to respond to letters and complaints and to undertake
real steps towards solving them (Havelková, 2008). The issues of abor-
tion and birth control were raised regularly on the pages of the journal,
being viewed as issues concerning all women. The same was not true for
prostitution, perceived as a marginal issue, a problem solely of ethnic
and other minorities.
Abortion
The first critical juncture in the development of the legal institution

of abortion took place in 1957, when Czechoslovakia reformed the
abortion law and made abortion legal (under specific conditions). This
occurred shortly after the legalisation of abortion in the USSR in 1954.
In the USSR, abortion initially was legalised in 1920 (this step was
inspired by the ideology and writings of F. Engels and V.I. Lenin), but
Radka Dudová 27
then criminalised again during the Stalinist regime in 1936 (Řehořová,

2012). The re-legalisation in 1954 came less than two years after Stalin’s
death, and in the following two years other Eastern European coun-
tries (Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland) also legalised abortion (see e.g.
Sokačová, 2006). The communist deputies had already tried to decrim-
inalise abortion in the CR in the interwar period, and after 1948 the
abortion legislation copied that of the Soviet Union (like in other leg-
islative areas). Until 1957 the criminal law did not permit abortion (with
the exception of abortion for severe health reasons since 1950, which
corresponded to the Soviet Stalinist law), but in fact many abortions
were performed – by doctors, midwives, medical students – without
their being prosecuted. During the Second World War, the German
occupiers prosecuted abortion harshly and it was quite difficult to get
access to a doctor or a midwife who would consent to perform one.
According to Bartošová,3 this led to a counter-reaction after the war
and the liberation of the country – public opinion became favourable
towards liberalisation. At the same time, the extent of unqualified abor-
tions and their negative consequences became known (Srb, Kučera and
Vysušilová, 1961).
The new Act No. 68/1957 legalised abortion under specific conditions:
special commissions decided whether to authorise an abortion requested
by a pregnant woman, either for health reasons or for ‘other impor-
tant reasons’, including social indications. The decision to terminate
an unwanted pregnancy was thus subject to authorisation from offi-
cial commissions. These commissions did not function just as advisory
bodies, offering women assistance and support; they had the power to
make the final decision about the reproductive rights of each individual
woman.
Over the next 30 years the legislation did not change significantly,
although it was repeatedly amended by orders and regulations issued by
the Ministry of Health, depending on the demographic and economic
situation of the country. The regulation of abortion was tightened in
1973 to conform to the stricter atmosphere of the ‘normalisation’ period
and to several pro-populationist measures that were introduced in this
period. These measures were politically motivated: the stricter abortion
regulation (for instance, the interval required between two abortions
was prolonged from 6 to 12 months, and married women with no or
only one child could be granted an abortion for social reasons only by
exception), and (more) social benefits for parents led to an increase in
the birth rate and simultaneously to a decrease in the abortion rate.
Nonetheless, at the end of the 1970s the abortion rate began to rise
again, given that contraception was not widely available and often inef-
fective. In the 1980s discussion of possible reform started. As we shall
see below, the debate was led mainly by experts in the field of gynaecol-
ogy and obstetrics, psychology and psychiatry, and demography. As a
result of these debates, Act No. 66/1986 Coll. on the induced termina-
tion of pregnancy took effect on July 1987. This new law represented a
second critical juncture in the development of the abortion issue in the
Czech Republic. According to this act, abortion was granted on the writ-
ten demand of the pregnant woman, if the duration of the pregnancy
did not exceed 12 weeks. This legislation still applies today.
The period since 1989 has been marked by recurring discussions on
the moral acceptability or unacceptability of abortion. On the one hand,
opponents of free choice regard the current abortion law as a commu-
nist law and unrestricted access to abortion as a negative remnant from
the communist regime. On the other hand, some experts and represen-
tatives of the feminist movement claim that Act No. 66/1986 should
be amended because it has several shortcomings due to the absence of
democratic discussion in the period when the law was being prepared.
Major discourses on abortion

The first debate took place in 1956–1957, before the Law on Artificial
Termination of Pregnancy 1957/68 was accepted. The main actors in the
debate were gynaecologists, and predominantly medical arguments were
used. The premise was that the number of abortions was high despite the
restrictive law, and that abortions were being performed by unskilled
people in inconvenient places. Due to the lack of hygiene and expe-
rience, those abortions had very negative consequences for women’s
health. Infertility as the consequence of an illegal abortion was pre-
sented as the most important factor. It was made clear by the doctors
in the media that hospital abortions were dangerous as well, but still
much less so than illegal ones.
Legal and safe abortion was considered by policymakers to be legit-
imate only for women in difficult social situations that would hinder
them caring for the children properly. In the end the law specified a
group of legitimate reasons for abortion, and a commission had to judge
the legitimacy of every demand and possibly limit the overall number
of performed abortions.
Were we to believe the media from this period, the typical woman
who underwent an illegal abortion was a mother of five, with an alco-
holic husband who did not support the family sufficiently and forced
the woman to have sex. The woman then found herself pregnant and,
Radka Dudová 29
in order to be able to take care of her children, had to turn to an

unskilled ‘angel-maker’ who would rid her of the pregnancy while
causing irreparable damage to her health. A possible variation was an
unmarried woman with a child receiving no support from the father
and struggling in poverty (see Mikule, 1957; Radvanová, Nezkusil and
Novotný, 1957). These women, according to the articles published in
Czech journals in the late 1950s, should be given the option to termi-
nate their pregnancy – but should not themselves decide. Women were
seen by experts and state authorities as either irresponsible or extremely
vulnerable and were asked to behave responsibly towards their families
and the socialist society.
The legalisation of abortion was paradoxically interpreted as a pro-
population measure: the reproductive health of women would be saved
by hospital-performed abortions, so those women would be able to have
children later in life. Legal and safe abortion was considered to be legit-
imate for women in difficult social situations that prevented them from
caring properly for their children. Women could get an abortion not in
order to avoid becoming mothers, but in order to be better mothers.
During this debate, a framing emerged that became dominant for all
the subsequent debates on abortion. The medical framing of abortion
and the accent put on the health of women-mothers, combined with
the focus on the size of the population and the communist ideology,
represented the ideational foundations for the change in the law.
In the 1980s the practice of the abortion commissions began to be
criticised and the possibility of reform started to be discussed. This was
due to two important events: firstly, the invention and diffusion of the
method of menstrual regulation (or early vacuum extraction), called
‘mini-abortion’ in the Czech context (Havránek, 1981); and secondly,
the publication of a psychological study of unwanted children that was
conducted by a group of Prague psychiatrists, revealing the psycholog-
ical damages of unwanted pregnancy on children born out of these
pregnancies (Matějček, Dytrych and Schüller, 1975).
In consequence, there were two main frames in the debates preced-
ing the approval of the new law on abortion in 1986 which abolished
the abortion commissions. Although they came from different places
and their arguments were different, the two frames influenced and rein-
forced each other, and together (acting as a ‘master-frame’, see Benford
and Snow, 2000:169) became dominant in the discursive field. The first
frame was based on the idea that all children should be born wanted.
The study of unwanted children showed that children born to women
who were refused abortion fared significantly worse in life than others,
and it was therefore in the best interest of the population to grant

abortion to a woman if she so wished. The second framing was very
similar to the framing of the debate in 1957, as it defined the further
legalisation of abortion as a condition for improving women’s repro-
ductive health. The early vacuum extraction method was proven to be
much safer and to have fewer negative side effects than abortion con-
ducted in the later stage of pregnancy. Its use would therefore better
protect women’s health and their future reproduction. The problem was
that the length of abortion commission procedures did not allow for
performing early abortions, so this argument supported abolishing the
commissions and putting the decision directly in the hands of pregnant
women (Štěpán, 1981).
The persistence of the monopoly of medical experts over the argu-
mentation in the abortion discursive field can be observed, which then
resulted in further liberalisation. Expert discourse evolved from the total
‘objectification’ and disciplining of women to the belief that women
must first accept their pregnancy if later they are to care for the child
properly, so they must not be forced into continuing the pregnancy.
Nonetheless, in the experts’ articles we find no mention of a woman’s
rights or interests. At most women were treated as patients whose health
and well-being must be protected by doctors (e.g. Hrádek and Petr,
1981).
The argument of the ‘irresponsible woman’ was used again in the dis-
course, but this time it was turned on its head by psychology experts.
The fact that some women were irresponsible, unstable or promiscuous
was not a reason they should not be given the right to decide; on the
contrary, it was a reason for making abortion even more accessible to
them, as they would not make proper mothers anyway. As psychologist
Drahomíra Fukalová stated:
They have little predisposition to become a good mother so we

should welcome the fact that they are asking for an abortion, as
opposed to women who judge abortion to be damaging to their
own health and carelessly breed one child after another without any
notion of what the role of a mother involves.
(Fukalová, 1979:752)
In the same period, the study conducted by researchers at the Research

Institute of Psychiatry (see Matějček, Dytrych and Schüller, 1975)
revealed the negative psychological consequences of unwanted preg-
nancy for the well-being of children born out of these pregnancies.
Radka Dudová 31
It was therefore argued that it would be better for unwanted children

not to be born and abortion was in their best interest. The interest of
these children was presented together with the best interest of soci-
ety (which was equated with a healthy and quality population). For
example, in an article published in 1979, gynaecologist Jan Birgus (who
in 1977 was still advocating that commissions be stricter about abor-
tion) considered abortion the preferred solution for avoiding the ‘risk
of pathological personality development in the unwanted child and the
threat that represents to the quality of our population’ (Birgus, 1979:70).
While in the debates in the 1950s and early 1960s, the accent was put
on the health of mothers and the quantity of population, from the sec-
ond half of the 1960s it was replaced with concern about the quality of
population. This concept made its appearance in Czechoslovakia along-
side developments in the scientific knowledge on modern genetics (see
Černý 1971; Dejmek 1972). There was a tradition of eugenic thinking
in pre-war Czechoslovakia, but it was abandoned in 1948 as contradic-
tory to the communist ideology of Lysenkoism (the belief that heredity
had only a limited role in human development) (see Krementsov, 2000).
After Stalin’s death, genetics regained its popularity and the eugenic
interventions came to be seen as an instrument to obtain the ‘qual-
ity population’. Prenatal screening methods (and abortion in case of
positive results) were used in order to ‘improve the genotype of the pop-
ulation’, and in order to minimise the number of children born with a
life-incompatible defect who would negatively impact the statistics on
prenatal mortality. Reproductive policies (abortions and forced or eco-
nomically motivated sterilisations) were used with the aim to influence
the ethnic composition of the population, judging some ethnicities such
as Roma of lesser ‘quality’ than others (see Dudová, 2012).
The framing of abortion as a reproductive right of women, the right
to decide over one’s own body, did not appear in the debate over the
first abortion law in 1957, it was not brought up during the tempo-
rary upheaval of the women’s movement during the Prague Spring in
1968–1969, and it did not appear in the discussions of the medical
and psychology experts about the proposed new law in 1980–1986.
Although the new law from 1986 represented a critical juncture, the
dominant framing of the discourse on abortion remained essentially the
same. The change came from the outside, as the result of altered exter-
nal circumstances – the scientific findings that changed the meaning of
some old arguments while adding some new ones to the old frames of
women’s health and the quantity/quality of population. The legalisa-
tion of abortion in the communist period in Czechoslovakia was thus
framed merely as a policy improving the reproductive health of women

and improving the population of the nation.
After 1989, a new discourse opportunity structure opened up in the
debates on abortion, as new actors entered the game – the civil soci-
ety groups or women’s movement groups on one side, and the religious
actors and groups on the other. In 2003, a group of conservative Mem-
bers of Parliament proposed a law that would make abortion illegal, and
in 2008 the vice-chairman of the Christian-Democrat party declared
in the media his party’s intention to make the abortion law more
restrictive.
The new Czech feminist NGOs reacted quickly to the restrictive
attempts of Christian Democrats and managed to mobilise the pro-
choice-oriented public opinion. After the restrictive legislation was
proposed in parliament in 2003, the activists started lobbying and mak-
ing presentations in the media. In a very short time, they prepared a
statement that was disseminated via the Internet and published on the
pages of the main Czech newspapers.4
Surprisingly, the text of the statement did not use any feminist argu-
ments. It pointed out the risks of making abortion illegal (namely the
health risks of illegal abortions and inequalities of access due to high
prices of illegal abortions) and the argument that abortion would not
disappear even if it were prohibited. The authors also noted that the
prohibition of abortions would not lead to a higher fertility rate. They
suggested alternative solutions: educating the young generation on
reproductive rights and responsibilities, including contraceptive knowl-
edge, and introducing effective policies of family support and work/life
balance policies.
The absence of a feminist frame and women’s rights terminology in
the petition can be explained as part of the general ‘discursive strategy’.
The activists found it politically useful to frame abortion in medical
terms as a woman’s health issue, in order to avoid the morally con-
troversial discussion of the ‘beginning of human life’ or the ‘rights of
unborn children’.5 The secular political elites in the post-socialist period
also found the medical frame appealing. Given the controversial nature
of the issue and the difficulty of obtaining a democratic compromise,
pragmatic politicians in general prefer not to open the debate at all.
This continuity of framing might be useful for most of the ‘progressive’
actors, but it has some serious pitfalls, especially in connection with
the need to extend rights and entitlements to groups who were previ-
ously and are still excluded (such as migrants living temporarily on the
territory of the Czech Republic).
Radka Dudová 33
Minority women
The interests of women of minority origins were absent in the Czech
debates on abortion legislation. Minority women were present in these
debates merely as objects of intervention by state power. Abortion was
used as an instrument for the regulation of the population directly
through the bodies and reproductive fates of women. In the 1970s and
1980s, Roma women represented a specific target of this ‘bio-politics’.
While some women (young, majority) were discouraged from having
abortions by any means, in the case of other women it was considered
the best solution.
This group constructed according to ethnicity was ascribed several
negative characteristics: alcoholism, promiscuity, lack of interest in edu-
cation and work, abuse of the welfare system, poor health. The solution
was seen in the ‘management of population’: in the first period, in
the dispersion of families across the territory and the (re-)education
of Roma children in care institutions. When those efforts proved inef-
fective, more ‘scientific’ methods were to be used: assimilation of the
children through education and the influencing of the reproductive
behaviour of the families (see e.g. Sojka, 1966). The methods ranged
from informational campaigns about contraception (information spread
by gynaecologists and social workers), granting of financial subsidies to
women who decided to undergo sterilisation, facilitating access to abor-
tion, to performing sterilisation without the consent of the woman, or
obtaining the consent under threats and with incomplete information.
The objective was to ‘cure’ the Roma population as such and bring their
model of reproduction and childcare closer to the majority model, and
to do so even at the cost of limiting their bodily integrity (see Motejl,
2005:46–48; Dudová, 2012).
In November 2009, the Czech government acknowledged these
events, but it recognised only the responsibility of individual doctors,
not the state as such. Similar eugenic practices were used in cases of
pregnancy that might result in the birth of malformed children: prenatal
screening was, and still is, relatively widely used, with the expectation
that women will choose abortion in case of positive results.6
Europeanisation
The Czech Republic joined the European Union in 2004. The influence
of Europeanisation on the abortion issue in the new member coun-
tries (and the limits of this influence) is illustrated in the debate that
took place in 2008 about access to abortion for women with a migrant
background. Access to abortion in the Czech Republic (previously

Czechoslovakia) had been limited for some groups of women since
1973. In the Regulation of Ministry of Health 71/1973 it was stated that
the artificial termination of pregnancy cannot be granted to citizens of
other countries who do not dwell in the Czech Republic on a long-term
basis. In the abortion law 66/1986, this regulation was maintained.
Foreigners were defined here as all persons without Czech citizen-
ship. This measure explicitly targeted tourists visiting the Czech Repub-
lic. All legal migrants automatically enjoyed the status of long-term
resident, and given the political situation there were no illegal immi-
grants on the territory of the Czech Republic. With the political and
socio-economic changes after November 1989 and the new Aliens Act
adopted in 1992 (that instituted the ‘permanent residence’ status and
differentiated between several other statuses of non-Czech citizens on
the state territory), this measure acquired a new meaning. Different res-
idency statuses were instituted – the short, the long and the permanent
residency permits. Migrants with short-term visas (up to 90 days), as
well as irregular migrants, have been considered as ‘staying in the CR
on a temporary basis’ and thus do not have access to legal abortion.
These groups are not represented in the women’s movement and do
not have sufficient strength and resources to mobilise a lobby and push
through any change in the abortion law. The health organisation or
doctor who performed an abortion on one of these women would be
violating the abortion law. The same applies to EU citizens without the
long or permanent residency permit.
This fact was pointed out in the debate accompanying the proposal of
the general health care reform during 2008. The part of the law about
specific health services had a clause stating that abortion on demand
should also be accessible for foreigners who do not have the status of
permanent resident in the Czech Republic. In the memorandum to the
bill, it was explained that ‘all women should have the same access to the
abortion services’.
This widening of the right to abortion nevertheless encountered
strong criticism, mainly from the conservative representatives of the
Christian-Democrat party. Their protests endangered the chances of the
overall reform bill to pass, and the Minister Tomas Julinek (Civic Demo-
cratic Party) therefore decided to moderate his demands. Still, he (and
his spokesmen) argued that it is inevitable that access to abortion will be
open to all EU citizens, regardless of their residency status in the Czech
Republic. It was presented as part of the process of harmonisation of
Czech legislation with EU conditions, as all women from the European
Radka Dudová 35
Union must have the same access to health care in each member coun-
try. The representatives of the KDU-ČSL did not accept this logic and
continued to refuse the reform in this form:
The proposal broadens the possibilities of abortion and essentially

interferes with the law of neighbouring countries. By the reform, we
would create a concurrent, more liberal legal environment. We are
not forced to do so by any European Union, it is just our own
decision.
(Michaela Šojdrová, Lidové noviny, 20 November 2008)
The main argument made by the Christian Democrats in rejecting the

proposal was the refusal to open the possibility of legal abortion for
foreigners from neighbouring EU countries, for example Poland.
The Health Reform designed by the right-wing government in 2008
was not submitted to parliament; after long negotiations, the govern-
ment was dissolved in the spring of 2009 for other reasons. Access to
abortion therefore remains limited to women with permanent or long-
term residence permits in the territory of the Czech Republic. The 2008
discussion introduced a new aspect to the abortion debates in the con-
text of the European Union, and we may suppose that this argument
will be used again in the future, with the possible outcome of widen-
ing the bodily citizenship to all women in the Czech territory. However,
after the elections in 2013, the Christian-Democratic party again found
itself in the position of the small yet necessary ally in the coalition gov-
ernment, so we may assume that no change in the abortion legislation
can be expected (as the status quo in the abortion legislation is part of
the coalition agreement).7
Outcomes for women’s bodily citizenship
In the legislation of the socialist state, women’s bodies were construed

as material, a resource not just for economic production but also for
the reproduction of the population. Emphasis was placed on the ‘func-
tional quality’ of this building material, that is, on the reproductive
health of women. When the first (1957) and second (1986) abortion
laws were adopted and other orders and regulations concerning abor-
tion and reproduction were formulated, the primary framings employed
related to health. Deciding what would be defined as beneficial or harm-
ful to health was left to the experts – doctors. In this way, the regulation
of population in the Czech Republic was tied up with the discourse of
medical knowledge/power. Arguments not related to health occupied a

secondary role in the discussions. ‘Health’ arguments were used to ratio-
nalise the objectives of bio-power (Foucault, 2004); but even ‘health’
was construed in a specific, totalitarian way, and many of the argu-
ments were not substantiated by any objective scientific findings or were
limited by the closed system of the communist regime.
The medicalised discourse on abortion had as effect the fabrication of
a specific knowledge of abortion, a specific truth that in the Czech con-
text is now taken for granted. The right of every woman to choose or
decide freely over her body is not really part of this knowledge. Abor-
tion is primarily defined as a health issue, not a human rights issue
nor a political issue (see also Dudová, 2010). This framing impedes any
possibility of further change. On the one hand, organised religion and
‘pro-life’ groups have largely failed in their attempts to impose their
framing on the public discourse (and legislation on abortion), because of
the strong secularism of Czech culture and the resonance of the medical
discourse in public opinion. On the other hand, efforts to further liber-
alise abortion institutions have proven equally impossible. This became
manifest in the 2008 discussion on extending the right of abortion to
‘foreigners’ who do not live in the territory of the Czech Republic on a
long-term basis. Given that abortion in the Czech context has never
been framed and interpreted in terms of human or women’s rights,
it proved impossible to open the space to discussion about abortion
in connection with the rights of women – in this case, women living
temporarily on the territory of the Czech Republic.
It seems very difficult to reframe abortion as a part of human rights
for all women. The existing Czech women’s movement groups are aware
that the feminist framing finds resonance neither with the policymak-
ers’ frames nor with the potential participants’ frames (see Snow and
Benford, 1988). They formulate their arguments in conformity with the
dominant discourse and do not attempt to reframe the issue. Conse-
quently they are not able to push the agenda of the issue forward and
they settle for keeping the status quo. Currently new issues concerning
women’s bodily citizenship are receiving attention from women’s move-
ment groups and policymakers, including prenatal screening (obligatory
in practice if not in law) and the issue of ‘natural childbirth’ concerning
the choice of where and how to give birth. The basis of mobilisation is
the Internet; several formal and informal groups are part of the network,
which also includes individual supporters like midwives and journalists.
Their goal is to influence public opinion and mobilise new participants
and to lobby for change.
Radka Dudová 37
Prostitution in the Czech Republic
The history of law-making on prostitution has been quite eventful in the

Czech Republic (former Czechoslovakia). The period prior to 1922 was
characterised by the regulation of prostitution according to the former
Austro-Hungarian legislation. The year 1922 brought about the victory
of abolitionism, mainly thanks to the activity of the president of the
new Czechoslovak Republic, Masaryk, leading to the first critical junc-
ture in the development of the legal institutions of prostitution. Act
No. 241/1922 on combating sexually transmitted diseases ended the
regulation and aimed at prosecuting different phenomena connected
with prostitution (not prostitution itself), such as the conscious dissem-
ination of STDs, pimping, public offering of sexual services or causing
public outrage by providing sexual services. A register of prostitutes,
a list later abused by the Nazi regime, was kept by the police (Vlček,
1985:39). After the Second World War, the provision of sexual services
continued to be illegal (according to Act No. 241/1922). Prostitutes were
prosecuted on the basis of the presidential decree 88/1945 on general
work duty (accepted by President Eduard Beneš in light of the emerging
need for the restoration of the country and an insufficient workforce
after the war). From that moment, prostitution was not prosecuted for
being immoral, but as ‘avoidance of honest work’ (Vlček, 1985:40).
The new communist Criminal Act dating from 1950 did not treat pros-
titution in detail. Its makers relied on the belief that the new socialist
society would destroy the conditions leading to prostitution in capitalist
countries (poverty, material inequality, inequality of men and women).
The Act only offered the possibility of prosecuting prostitutes as persons
who avoid work.
In 1956 it was already clear that prostitution, together with other
social phenomena seen as typical of the capitalist organisation of soci-
ety, had not disappeared. An amendment of the Criminal Act brought
about a definition of the criminal act of ‘social parasitising’ or ‘spong-
ing’. Two conditions had to be met: to earn one’s living in an unworthy
way, and to avoid honest work (both had to be fulfilled simultaneously).
This change in legislation was partly accompanied by a change in the
thinking about prostitution and the treatment of women involved in
it. However, the abolitionist orientation of the policies, consisting of
prosecution of the phenomena connected with prostitution (pimping,
spreading STDs and avoiding work), remained untouched. Therefore
the path dependency was maintained even though the political regime
changed radically.
In 1958, Czechoslovakia signed the International Convention for the

Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the
Prostitution of Others, prepared by the United Nations in 1949. It cor-
responded with the abolitionist path the country took in 1922 and
it aligned with the politics of prostitution in the communist state;
therefore this event cannot be understood as a critical juncture. Nev-
ertheless, signature of the Convention has had an important impact on
the legislation on prostitution until the present time.
In 1969, the criminal legislation was divided into criminal acts and
criminal contraventions, and this also permitted the prosecution of the
less obvious cases of ‘social parasitising’. Contrary to the criminal act of
‘social parasitising’, contravention did not require the continuous avoid-
ance of honest work – which meant that the person who was employed
in an ordinary job and worked as a prostitute in addition could also be
prosecuted. The sanction was imprisonment for up to one year or a fine
of up to 5,000 Czechoslovak Crowns. This legislation did not change
until 1989, when the paragraph about ‘social parasitising’ was removed
from the Act. Simultaneously, Act No. 20/1966 Col. on the Care of the
Health of People stipulated forced medical checks and treatment under
quarantine for persons suspected of spreading a sexually transmitted dis-
ease. According to this Act, every person arrested for prostitution was to
be suspected of contamination (ibid.:55).
Pimping was prosecuted according to paragraph 204 (on pimping)
(kuplířství) of the Criminal Act. Strikingly, the criminal sanctions of
pimps were less current than the sanctions of prostitutes – although
Martin Vlček assumed that ‘almost all prostitutes have some kind of help
or protection in their activities, or they are, mainly in the metropolitan
areas, forced to have’ (ibid.:56).
After the frontiers of Czechoslovakia were opened in 1989 and the
communist legislation outlawing prostitution was abolished in 1990,
the number of prostitutes grew massively,8 mainly in Prague (which
became a destination city for sex tourism) and in the border regions
neighbouring Germany and Austria (Trávníčková, Osmančík, Scheinost
and Janda, 1995). The repeal of the communist law presents a critical
juncture, accompanied by the change of the framing and the practice of
prostitution.
In the post-1989 legislation, prostitution was not treated explicitly;
brothels were illegal, as were some other phenomena connected with
prostitution (e.g. pimping or endangering the moral development of
children). Since 1993 several attempts have been made to regulate pros-
titution. The first attempt dates from 1993 (a draft submitted by a
Radka Dudová 39
deputy from Civic Democratic Party (ODS) – right wing), while others
were made in 1994 (the Ministry of Interior, ODS – right wing), 1999
(the Ministry of Interior, Czech Social Democratic Party (ČSSD) – left
wing), 2005 (the Ministry of Interior, ČSSD – left wing), 2008 (the city
of Prague, governed by ODS – right wing) and most recently in 2014
(the city of Prague, governed by ODS – right wing). All of the draft
bills defined prostitution as a specific economic activity and aimed to
introduce compulsory registration and control of prostitutes (together
with taxation of their incomes). The draft bills differed from each other,
but all were characterised by an incongruence of their arguments con-
cerning prostitution as such and by the failure to recognise sex workers
as full citizens deserving rights and protection without stigmatisation.
The draft from 1999, presented to parliament by the Minister of the
Interior (ČSSD – left wing) defined prostitution and the persons who
were allowed to practise prostitution. Particular emphasis was placed on
the protection of youth from prostitution and the protection of pub-
lic order. Prostitutes were to be regarded as self-employed persons (and
thus subject to paying social security and health insurance and income
taxes). They were obliged to be medically examined periodically. The
draft bill also defined the conditions for the operation of public houses –
sex businesses. Municipalities were given increased powers in the regu-
lation of prostitution. An annual fee was designated for operation of the
sex business, with the character of a local tax.
All these law proposals were refused by the government, mainly
because they were in contradiction to the UN Convention for the
Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the
Prostitution of Others, signed by Czechoslovakia in 1958 (see also
Trávníčková et al., 1995:25). In 1999, the possibility of withdrawal from
the Convention was first discussed by the governing ČSSD (left wing),
which also authored the draft bill on the regulation of prostitution in
1999. In March 2005, the Chamber of Deputies of the parliament dis-
cussed the proposal to withdraw from the Convention presented by the
Social Democrats (governing in coalition with the centre-right Union of
Liberty and the Christian Democrats). The withdrawal was refused by
the majority of the deputies. The only party that actually supported it
were the Social Democrats.
MPs from the largest opposition party, the right-wing ODS, were
against withdrawal from the Convention, arguing that regulation would
not solve the problems connected with prostitution and would put the
state in the position of a pimp, taking advantage of ‘immoral money’.
The position of the Civic-Democratic MPs was in fact in contradiction
with the position of its representatives in local governments, who were

lobbying for some kind of regulation. The Christian Democrats refused
the withdrawal from the 1949 UN Convention on the basis of the
morality and the Bible. The Communists argued that prostitution as
such threatens the human dignity of the women and children engaged
in it (see the speech of Květoslava Čelišová9 ). Finally, the proposal to
withdraw from the Convention was refused by a two-thirds majority
of the deputies. The validity of the Convention has blocked the politi-
cal opportunity structure and foreclosed any major institutional change
until now. The UN Convention is thus an example of how the path
dependency operates in the development of legislation: since 1956 it has
hindered any legislative change, and its repeal has proven impossible
due to the conflicts of interest among a number of key actors.
In the absence of a general legal frame, representatives of the towns
and communes most affected by prostitution decided to take the situ-
ation into their own hands. The towns issued a number of Communal
Regulations forbidding prostitution or the offering of sexual services on
their territory or in public spaces. Many of these regulations were in con-
tradiction to state legislation and have been abolished by the decision
of the Supreme Court. Prague was among the first, with the Regulation
of the Capital of Prague number 2/1993 Col. on the Protection of Public
Order in Relation to the Offering of Sexual Services. The regulation for-
bade the offering of sexual services in public spaces – thus the activity of
street sex workers was forbidden by this regulation. The Constitutional
Court maintained the regulation, but asked the authorities to specify
and distinguish the places where prostitution would be forbidden and
where the prohibition did not apply.
Trafficking in persons also started receiving more and more public
attention after 1991. While in the state-socialist period trafficking was
legally non-existent, after the opening of the frontiers a number of cases
of Czech women trafficked abroad, and also of foreign women trafficked
into the Czech Republic, surfaced. With the planned accession of the
country to the EU, the official authorities began to take the issue seri-
ously and to develop a series of measures aimed at fighting trafficking.
As we shall see, the discussion on trafficking led to a shift in the framing
of prostitution as such.
In 2000, the United Nations Convention against Transnational Orga-
nized Crime and its Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Traffick-
ing in Persons, Especially Women and Children, supplementing the
United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime,
was adopted in Palermo. The Palermo protocol served as a basis for the
Radka Dudová 41
EU Council decision of 19 July 2002 on the Fight against Trafficking in

Human Beings Related to the Crime of Trafficking in Human Beings for
the Purpose of Labour or Sexual Exploitation that was binding for EU
member states. With the accession of the Czech Republic to the EU, the
decision had to be implemented by the Czech legal system. The National
Reporter for Trafficking in Human Beings in the Czech Republic was
established in 2003 and this function was delegated to the Ministry of
Interior.
Consequently the situation of trafficking started to be closely moni-
tored, research on trafficking and support for the victims of trafficking
was funded, and the legislation was changed. In 2002, the wording of
paragraph 246 of the Criminal Act on trafficking in women was changed
to ‘trafficking in human beings for sexual purposes’, and in 2004 it was
replaced with a new paragraph 232a on trafficking in human beings.
The crime of trafficking was thus made more comprehensive and also
included other purposes alongside sexual ones, such as forced labour
and new forms of slavery. The condition of the transportation of the vic-
tim across the border from another country was abolished. Yet doubts
arose about whether the system of law and order in the Czech Republic
did not provide better protection to victims who are Czech citizens, and
better visibility of crimes committed by Czech nationals (Trávníčková,
Luptáková, Nečada, Přesličková and Trdlicová, 2004). In recent years the
Czech Republic has become primarily a destination and transit country
rather than a source country, and the official number of victims has
decreased slightly (Ministry of Interior CR, 2012).
Major discourses on prostitution and trafficking for

sexual purposes
From the wording of the legislation from the state-socialist period of
Czechoslovakia, it is clear that at that time, prostitution was not seen
as ‘work’: on the contrary, it was constructed as its opposite, as a
way of avoiding work and leading an easy life without working. In all
the documents of this period (legal texts, expert publications, media),
prostitution was framed as ‘non-work’, as the opposite to work that
constituted the principal value in the socialist society. Prostitutes were
framed as abusing the society, parasitising it, by not working and profit-
ing from the work of others, individuals or collectives. Only work useful
to society was considered ‘worthy’ or ‘decent’ work, and sex work did
not correspond to this definition.
In contrast to capitalist countries, prostitution in the state-socialist
system was assumed not to be caused by basic material necessity.
State-socialist experts and ideologists stressed that the main motivation

for prostitution was not poverty, but lust for a life of luxury and adven-
ture. Prostitution was supposed to present a way to acquire locally scarce
or luxury goods that were available only through foreigners.
The experts refused to see the causes of prostitution as structural in
socialist society. The motivation was seen in individuals, and in the
‘outside’. Women, usually from ‘broken families’ and with a tendency
towards ‘hyper-sexuality’, were thought to resort to prostitution in order
to fulfil their desire to access luxury and the ‘bourgeois’ way of life,
including Western goods (see Osmančík and Vacková, 1969).
In the 1970s, its cause was seen in the liberalisation of sexuality and
moral inhibitions which was imported from foreign countries during
1968–1969 period. Prostitution was thus discursively connected with
the (bad) capitalist West and constructed as something extraneous to
socialist Czech society (ibid.:119).
The issue of prostitution was not given any serious research attention,
except during the short period of the thaw of the communist regime
shortly before and during the Prague Spring (1966–1969). In these years,
a study of prostitution was conducted by the Institute of Criminology
and Social Prevention (see Osmančík and Vacková, 1969). Although
the authors reproduced a considerable amount of unfounded, generally
shared stereotypes about prostitution, they managed to present a new
perspective on prostitution – one that did not resonate with the prob-
lematic definition of official communist ideology. They showed that,
despite declarations that prostitution did not exist in socialist society,
the communist regime itself had generated new conditions that were
favourable for the spread of prostitution. Through unwarranted pop-
ulation management (moving workers from one region to another),
through the planned economy and job market (first forcing all women
to work without providing sufficient services and supporting emancipa-
tion also in the private sphere; later by not creating enough qualified
work opportunities and places in education for 15-year-old girls) and
through chronic shortages of some goods on the labour market (and
the possibility to obtain these goods only on the black market or from
abroad), a new demand for prostitution, and a new supply of prosti-
tutes, was created. The report also connected prostitution to the gender
inequality that prevailed in contemporary society. It acknowledged that
prostitution had not disappeared in the socialist society, and that one of
the reasons was the inequalities between men and women.
Women’s groups did not play any role in the politicisation of pros-
titution in the state-socialist period. Their impact became visible only
Radka Dudová 43
near the end of the 1990s, when new feminist NGOs were founded
with the goal of improving the situation for women in prostitution and
for victims of trafficking. However, the framing of prostitution as social
pathology persisted in the expert, governmental and local policy texts
during the period of democratic transition in the 1990s. Prostitution
was considered the cause of many problems: the disturbance of public
order; the public offering of sexual services, scandalising citizens and
having a bad influence on the education of their children; the danger
of the spread of STDs; organised crime activity; and the financial losses
incurred by communes due to the impossibility of taxing the prostitutes’
incomes.
Although there was already knowledge about a rising number of traf-
ficked women, and an awareness that prostitution often was the only
alternative for undereducated girls coming from Roma ghettos or state
educational institutions for abandoned children, the texts in the 1990s
conserved the socialist state definition of the majority of prostitutes
doing their work voluntarily, with the aim of gaining a lot of money
easily, quickly and ‘without work’. In doing so, they were accused of
causing a lot of trouble – disturbing the public order, spreading disease,
abandoning their children to state care and so on, and thus costing
the citizens. The definition of the problem and the solution offered
presented only the perspective of the ‘decent citizens’, not of the sex
workers themselves.
Two major feminist organisations dealing with prostitution and traf-
ficking emerged in the mid-1990s: Rozkoš bez rizika – Bliss without Risk,
and La Strada (funded by the EU from the Daphne programme). They
challenged this official definition of the problem. They constructed
prostitution as ‘sex work’, maintaining that the rights of the women in
prostitution should be equal to any other workers’ rights. They shifted
the attention to the risks this work presented to the women – especially
health risks stemming from STDs – and the physical risks resulting from
the violence they often had to face (Bliss without Risk focused on health
care for prostitutes and La Strada on legal and social help for trafficked
women). They emphasised the discursive separation of sex work from
trafficking, and consensual prostitution from involuntary prostitution.
During the late 1990s, these two organisations established their activi-
ties in the area of social and street work and services for women involved
in sex work. Their direct influence on the policies and discourses of
prostitution became nonetheless more visible only after 2000, when
the frames they used aligned with the frames of the European Union
documents.
Both organisations have defined themselves as feminist (while being

aware that the significance of this term is unclear and could trigger long
discussions among their members). Both have given their comments at
different moments when the legislation on prostitution or trafficking
in humans was to be changed (for example, Bliss Without Risk pub-
lished its comments to the 2008 draft of the bill on the regulation of
prostitution prepared by the city of Prague and is collaborating with
city representatives in the preparation of the new draft bill, while La
Strada commented on the 2009 Criminal Act). Both organisations tried
to challenge the dominant framing of prostitution and of the prostitutes
in Czech society. Though they were not constituted as trade unions of
women in the sex business, they included and presented to the public
the perspective of the sex workers themselves, playing the role of ‘care-
takers’ for these marginalised and disadvantaged groups of women (see
Köbben, 1983).
Europeanisation
Although the EU did not interfere directly as the Czech Republic was
dealing with prostitution, still, when reviewing the development of the
legislation and discourses, it is obvious that Europeanisation, and more
broadly the transnational influence, played a crucial role here. At the
turn of the century, when the Palermo Protocols were signed and the
binding Framework decision of the EU Council on the Fight against Traf-
ficking in Human Beings was issued, not only the legislation but also the
thinking about prostitution changed.
The perspective expressed in the expert and governmental texts and
documents (with the exception of the local government communica-
tions) changed. The documents prepared after 2000 no longer focused
on prostitution, but shifted attention to the issue of trafficking. In the
course of the 2000s, the dividing line started to be drawn in the
discourse between forced prostitution (trafficking) and voluntary pros-
titution (or rather prostitution with consent) instead of a dividing
line between the ‘bad’ street prostitution and ‘good’ (because invisi-
ble) indoor prostitution as it was in the 1990s (see, for example, MVČR,
1993, 1999; Trávníčková et al., 2004; Trávníčková, Osmančík, Scheinost
and Janda, 1995).
The two major feminist organisations that emerged in the mid-1990s
played a significant role in this reframing of the issue. All throughout
their existence, they challenged the dominant definition of the prob-
lem. Firstly, they constructed prostitution as ‘sex work’, maintaining
that the rights of the women in prostitution should be equal to any
Radka Dudová 45
other workers’ rights. Secondly, they shifted the attention to the risks
this work presented to the women involved in sex work. And lastly they
strictly divided sex work from trafficking, or prostitution with consent
from prostitution without consent. As this framing was finally accepted
by the experts and the government (or the experts working for govern-
ment), these organisations started to collaborate more closely with the
governmental programmes (e.g. La Strada participating in the Ministry
of the Interior’s programme of support and protection for the victims of
trafficking).
However, in recent years their framing of prostitution as sex work has
come into conflict with the position of the Czech Women’s Lobby and
the organisations participating in it. The Czech Women’s Lobby is a
network of non-profit organisations promoting women’s rights in the
Czech Republic. As a member of the European Women’s Lobby, it coop-
erates with European institutions, together with women’s and gender
organisations throughout the European Union. Like the EWL, the CWL
takes the abolitionist approach to prostitution and is supported in this
position by the EWL. The two organisations active in the field of prosti-
tution and trafficking, Bliss without Risk and La Strada, are not members
of the Czech Women’s Lobby, as they do not accept this position. The
CWL is not yet participating in the active lobbying concerning prosti-
tution but plans to do so and is mobilising its members to adopt the
abolitionist stance.
Minority women
The ethnicising and racialising of prostitutes is ever-present in the gov-
ernmental reports written after 1989. According to them, prostitutes
were rarely Czech citizens, and if they were, they were usually of the
Roma minority. Migration was often quoted in the reports as being part
of the ‘problem’. Prostitution was considered a channel through which
foreigners/immigrants came to the Czech Republic.
According to the report of the Institute of Criminology and Social Pre-
vention on organised crime and trafficking (Trávníčková et al., 1995),
the majority of people participating in prostitution, but also in traffick-
ing and pimping, were supposed to be of Roma ethnicity. In addition,
much of the pimping was organised by criminal groups of Russians,
Ukrainians, Yugoslavs and Poles. Street and road prostitution in partic-
ular were considered the most problematic, and were presented as the
activity of Romas and immigrants. A governmental report from 1999
stated that ‘the Czech citizens performing street and road prostitution
are mainly Romas, or they come from other countries such as Slovakia,
Ukraine, Russia, Bulgaria and Rumania’ (MVČR, 1999). In this way, the
link between ethnicity and migration was strengthened, as most of the
immigrants from Slovakia were of Roma ethnicity.
Prostitution of Roma women and girls was not a new phenomenon,
but with the introduction of the market economy, new forms of
social exclusion and also criminality leading to this exclusion (e.g.
usury) appeared and strongly affected the Roma minority (IOM,
2005).
The majority of clients interested in all types of sexual services were,
according to these reports, foreigners, especially from the former West
Germany. It is a fact that the highest concentration of prostitutes was
observed in towns near the borders with Germany and Austria, and
to a lesser extent also Poland. Sex business was also present in towns
with a high level of tourism, such as Prague and Brno. The estimates
of NGOs from 2007 to 2008 corroborated these assumptions: they said
that about 40% of sex workers were of foreign origin and that the major-
ity of victims of trafficking they encountered were foreigners (Malinová,
2008). The proportion of sex workers of foreign origin seems to have
decreased over time. In 2009–2010, 80% of sex workers contacted by
the street workers of the Bliss without Risk organisation were of Czech
origin (Šídová, 2010).
However, between 1996 and 2001, 88% of the persons prosecuted by
police for trafficking were Czech nationals; 90% of persons prosecuted
for procuring or pimping were Czech nationals. In the case of traffick-
ing, an overwhelming majority of the victims were Czech women who
were mainly transported abroad from the Czech Republic, but also were
trafficked inside the territory of the Czech Republic. It is not clear if the
discrepancy of the police files, and other types of documents, is caused
by the fear and reluctance of immigrant trafficked women to partici-
pate in the prosecution and by the incapacity of the police to prosecute
foreign offenders, or whether it should cast doubt on the assumptions
about the demography of prostitution in the Czech Republic. In any
case, the non-Czech origin of the sex workers, the pimps and espe-
cially the clients was strategically used in the discourse by the public
authorities. It served as a means to shift the guilt and to turn the atten-
tion from ‘us’, our country, to ‘them’ – other countries. The politicians
referred to this fact when facing the critique of international institu-
tions (idnes.cz, 2007). Several municipal campaigns against prostitution
were directly targeted at German clients – such as the distribution of
leaflets about STDs to Germans coming across the border (Matoušek,
2004).
Radka Dudová 47
Outcomes in terms of bodily citizenship
Some of the frames used in the Czech political and expert discourse
around prostitution are very persistent. This is true specifically for the
framing of prostitution as the opposite of ‘honest work’, connected with
the mobilisation against public nuisance. Although the problem of pub-
lic nuisance should be taken seriously, what can be problematic is how
it translates into public discourse. In the Czech Republic, the conflict is
pitting the ‘decent citizens’ against the ‘indecent’, and sex workers are
primarily constructed (in the media as well as in the political discourse)
as disturbers of public order.
The racial/ethnic framing of prostitution, on the other hand, is rel-
atively new. With the increase in migration after the opening of the
frontiers in 1989, the number of foreign women entering the country
in order to work in the sex business grew. In consequence, race and
ethnicity started to play an important role in the discourse. During
the 1990s and 2000s, the most influential actors (experts and politi-
cians) constructed firstly prostitution as an important social problem,
and secondly the prostitutes, pimps and clients as foreigners, coming
from abroad, or as ethnically different.
This situation has led to the polarisation of the issue: the ‘us’, decent
citizens, properly paying taxes and insurances and raising our children,
and ‘them’. This ‘them’ has not been deconstructed in the experts’ and
politicians’ discourses, even though knowledge about the differences
between prostitution with and without consent, pimping and trafficking
was already present and accessible. The legislation (mainly the draft bills
on regulation of prostitution submitted since 1993) mirrored this divi-
sion and concentrated only on the possibilities of preserving the public
order and of collecting taxes from the sex business.
All of the important actors (experts, government and Members of Par-
liament, representatives of the communes and the press) constructed
the women in the sex business as non-citizens. Their rights and needs
were not mentioned. Conversely, the citizenship of the ‘honest people’
was put forward and explicitly used in the arguments. The discourse on
prostitution contributed to the deepening of the xenophobic and racist
feelings in Czech society, especially in regions where prostitution was
most visible.
The only alternative perspective was presented by the two women’s
organisations La Strada and Bliss without Risk. Their framing of the
problem challenged that of the experts, media and politicians. Their
aim is not to help prostitutes escape life in the sex business, but to
improve the conditions of their work. In a way, they have thus reasserted
the sex workers’ entitlement to citizenship. However, their framing of
prostitution as sex work does not correspond to the position of the
Czech Women’s Lobby and the organisations participating in it. We may
thus expect a deepening of the divide between the abolitionist and the
regulationist women’s movement groups in the Czech Republic.
Constructing the bodily citizenship of women

in the Czech Republic
In the Czech debates on abortion and on prostitution, women were

framed as irresponsible, selfish, pathological or vulnerable, or as for-
eigners, coming from abroad, and ethnically different. The right to
self-determination and bodily integrity was never part of the debates,
and it did not figure in the framing of the policymakers. In all the
debates on the regulations concerning women’s bodies (reproduction
and sexuality), women’s interests were absent. Women were consid-
ered by the experts either as a collective resource – producing human
capital (discourses on reproductive health, children’s well-being and
healthy population) – or as potential deviants, misusing their sexuality
to improper ends.
Women who did not follow the collective norms were discursively
and practically excluded from citizenship – constructed as non-citizens
(in the case of prostitution), or as ‘failing citizens’ (in the case of abor-
tion). The regulations then were supposed to serve as protection –
protecting the community from these women, or protecting the women
from themselves. Their bodies constituted a legitimate reason for not
granting them full citizens’ rights and for their disciplining by state
authorities.
These discourses witnessed a strong continuity even during the demo-
cratic transition after 1989. The newly emerging feminist groups and
organisations tried with greater or lesser intensity to reframe the issues
and to change the images and representations of women in the dis-
courses, but they did not succeed in changing the dominant public
framing (women as needing protection of their reproductive health by
the medical experts in the case of abortion, women as abusers of the
system and ‘parasites’ of the society in the case of prostitution). The
only exception can be seen in the activity of the organisations sup-
porting sex workers and victims of trafficking in the early 2000s, who
at least managed to change the experts’ and the central government’s
perspective on prostitution (if not the perspective of the general public
and local governments). Their success can be partly explained by the
Radka Dudová 49
alignment of their framing of the problem with the framing present in

the UN and EU documents that became binding for the Czech Republic
in 2004.
As a result, there are still groups of women in the Czech Republic
who lack bodily citizenship rights. Immigrants without long-term res-
idence permits do not have legal access to abortion. Abortion is not
covered by the health insurance and thus can be economically inacces-
sible to low-income groups of the population.10 A number of provisions
that limit access to abortion in specific situations remain in the legisla-
tion from the period of the communist regime (such as the prohibition
on performing abortions on foreigners without long-term residence
permits). Access to legal abortion was never framed in the CR as an indis-
putable women’s right; thus it is permanently at risk of restrictions by
conservative political actors. The women involved in prostitution lack
bodily rights and protection against violence as well as social and eco-
nomic rights; and the legislation that is currently being prepared aims
at curtailing their civil rights by compulsory registration.
The case of the Czech Republic (where the totalitarian communist
regime precluded the rise of an independent women’s movement) shows
how the absence of a feminist movement that could actively frame the
issues concerning women’s bodies, reproduction and sexuality in terms
of citizenship rights, has led to very limited reforms. These reforms may,
in practice, grant women some rights, but they continue to construct
them as ‘lesser citizens’.
The politics of abortion, as well as the politics of prostitution, were
and still are used in the Czech Republic as an instrument of the ‘citi-
zenship project’, defining (some) individuals as potential citizens, and
marking the distinction between ‘actual, potential, troublesome and
impossible citizens’ (Rose, 2007:132). From the 1950s to the 1980s,
these instruments were used with the aim of constructing the ‘nation’
and consisted of many techniques of population management. Women,
with their reproductive behaviour and reproductive health, were special
targets of these techniques. Beliefs about their success and legitimacy
were enhanced by the relative isolation of the Czechoslovak popula-
tion because of the Iron Curtain, and by the disciplinary power of the
communist regime that went hand in hand with bio-power (Foucault,
1980a). The techniques of bio-power were applied directly to women’s
bodies, without any space left for protests or negotiation. A machinery
of interdictions, prescriptions and positive incentives was put in place
in order to build the nation of socialist citizens.
At the same time, this machinery served to exclude the ‘trouble-
some’ citizens who did not conform to the needs or to the rules of the
system. This concerned (among others) the women who, for different
reasons, did not ‘handle’ their bodies as the means of reproduction of
the nation – the women involved in prostitution. Their exclusion was
not based on a traditional moral judgement; they were excluded as those
who refused to work on the building of socialism. Work was here under-
stood not only in the sense of a daily labour activity, but also in the
sense of participation in the biological building of the population.
With the democratisation of the society after 1989, the collapse of the
institutions in charge of disciplining the population and the pluralisa-
tion of the society led to the activation and mobilisation of new groups
of citizens. Some of them have claimed their bodily rights and recogni-
tion, giving rise to new forms of public engagement and mobilisation
mainly based on information technologies and the Internet. However,
this upheaval of grass-roots women’s activism did not concern the issues
of abortion or prostitution, but included the groups fighting for the
right to natural childbirth or the groups refusing the obligatory vaccina-
tions against contagious diseases and preventive pregnancy screenings.
These women have contested the superiority of medical knowledge,
attempting to ‘pluralize biological and biomedical truth (and) introduce
doubt and controversy’ (Rose, 2007:142). This is especially important
in a context where the medical expert framings dominate the problem
definition of the issues connected to women’s bodies.
Simultaneously with the new space for claiming rights, new demands
and obligations have appeared. These concern especially the demand
of individual responsibility for one’s body and health, for example
the use of contraceptives or healthy lifestyles. Concerning the issue of
reproduction, these new demands are underpinned by the new econ-
omy of health – the marketisation of the medical sector creating new
inequalities (specifically in access to artificial reproduction technolo-
gies). Concerning prostitution, the new legislative proposals have aimed
in a similar direction: sex workers would be considered citizens, but the
focus is only on the citizens’ obligations (paying taxes, being respon-
sible for one’s health by undergoing regular medical checks), hence
again creating new inequalities for those who are not able to fulfil these
requirements. The bodily citizenship of women in the Czech Republic is
therefore still a building site, filled with old and new controversies.
Notes
1. Throughout the book, ‘Czech Republic’ is used to refer to the geographic area
regardless of the political structure at the time.
Radka Dudová 51
2. The editors realised that the new title would appeal more to readers – Vlasta
was the name of a woman in the old Czech mythology who led a group of
armed women fighting men. It also connotes with the word vlast which in
Czech means ‘fatherland’.
3. Milada Bartošová is a sociologist who defended her dissertation in 1969 on
the woman’s and feminist movement between 1945 and 1948. She worked
in the Czechoslovakian Statistical Office and collaborated closely with the
Czech Union of Women.
4. See http://www.feminismus.cz/fulltext.shtml?x=162657.
5. Linda Sokačová, personal interview, 29 February 2009.
6. See Memorandum of the Law on artificial interruption of pregnancy
66/1986.
7. See point 1.6.8 of the coalition agreement for the period 2013–2017, from
13 October 2014.
8. In 1976, the number of prostitutes in Prague was estimated at 12,000 by
the Research Institute of Criminology (VÚK 1976). In 1994 it estimated
there were 25,000 regular sex workers and about 7,000 women working only
occasionally (Trávníčková et al., 1995:65).
9. Květoslava Čelišová was at that time the leader and also a co-founder of
the Parliamentary Commission for Family and Equal Opportunities, and the
head of the Republican Council of the Left Club of Women.
10. In 2012, more than 10% of women in the Czech Republic were living under
the income poverty threshold, i.e. less than 9,580 CZK per month (14.4%
of young women 18–24 years old) (Czech Statistical Office). The price of an
abortion varies between 3 and 6,000 CZK, depending on the hospital.
3
The Struggle for Bodily Integrity
in the Netherlands
Joyce Outshoorn
Introduction
Since the late 1960s the Netherlands has had a lively and multifaceted
women’s movement which has addressed a wide range of issues and
developed numerous groups and organisations, including mobilisation
within established organisations such as political parties, trade unions
and professional associations. Issues concerning the female body have
figured on its agenda since its beginnings, and their framing was drawn
from a new discourse that stressed self-determination and autonomy,
both of which were essential in the new feminist analysis that couched
the relations between women and men in terms of power. As we have
shown elsewhere, women’s groups and organisations did not resort to
the language of citizenship to frame their demands (Outshoorn et al.,
2012); moreover, in the Netherlands body issues were initially also not
framed in terms of rights. The legalisation of abortion was a top priority
of the new women’s movement, and after the new Abortion Act of 1984,
which more or less met the demands of the feminist abortion campaign,
women’s movement organisations remained alert about its implemen-
tation. Prostitution was never a high priority for the overall movement,
but was a matter of concern to specialised feminist interest groups until
the legalisation of prostitution in 1999. While they remained active after
this event, they only attracted a larger and newer feminist audience in
recent years when the legalisation started to be called into question, as
we shall see later in this chapter.
Following our institutionalist approach, in this chapter I trace the
history of both issues in the Netherlands and analyse the role of
the women’s movement that emerged in the 1960s and the policy
52
Joyce Outshoorn 53
changes that have occurred since. Given the policy legacy that it had
to challenge, I also analyse the policies’ previous histories and the two
major discursive shifts leading to policy change since 1848, the year
of the establishment of parliamentary democracy in the Netherlands.
The Morality Laws of 1911 were the first major policy shift. These laws
linked a number of disparate issues under the framing of ‘zedelijkheid’
(morality): the display and advertising of contraceptives, pornography,
brothels, pimping (not the prostitute herself), homosexual acts by both
men and women, and abortion. These all became illegal. The critical
juncture for their enactment was the new post-1900 political hegemony
of the religious political parties that ended the Liberal hegemony of the
period after 1848. Liberal moral pragmatism was replaced by state reg-
ulation of morality: the existing regulation of prostitution was turned
into an abolitionist regime, while abortion, condoned even if illegal,
was redefined as a crime against morality.
The second major shift occurred in the 1960s, following the dramatic
change in the social and cultural climate as the post-war generation
challenged the political establishment and the prevailing conserva-
tive social conventions, opening the political opportunity structure
for a series of social movements. Here again the critical juncture was
a political shift: the religious parties lost their parliamentary major-
ity in the national elections of 1967. The challengers attacked the
dominant moral discourse with a new discourse arguing against state
intervention in private life and for self-determination and autonomy
of the individual. The new women’s movement was both cause and
consequence of the generational change and the social/cultural revo-
lution.
In this chapter I address the questions of how the discursive shifts
took place and resulted in policy change. What was the role of women’s
movement organisations in the ensuing legal changes? How did they
challenge the dominant political discourses on abortion and prostitu-
tion, and change the problem definitions of existing legislation and
policies? How did the migration of people from the former colonies
of Indonesia and the Dutch West (Suriname and the Antilles) to the
Netherlands, and of workers from Morocco and Turkey from the 1960s,
affect the political debates on abortion and prostitution and women’s
rights to bodily integrity? And, taking into account the changing inter-
national context of the national state since that period, how did the
process of Europeanisation affect the political debates on both issues,
possibly creating a new policy venue for women’s movement groups to
mobilise and lobby?
54 The Struggle for Bodily Integrity in the Netherlands
Policy legacy
The rise of the religious majority did not end the plural character of
Dutch society, divided into religious and regional minorities, with a
political culture characterised by compromise and deliberation to main-
tain overall stability (Daalder, 1966; Lijphart, 1975). It did herald the
system of Verzuiling (pillarisation), in which Protestants, Catholics and
later the liberals and socialists cemented a segmented society in which
each segment or pillar had its own organisations, from its own political
party to its own newspapers and broadcasting companies, trade unions,
schools, agrarian associations, hospitals, charity organisations and even
universities (Andeweg and Irwin, 2009:29–31). This led to cabinet coali-
tions in which the religious parties had the majority. The policy shift
of 1911 represented a broader shift in society, increasingly characterised
by industrialisation, mobilisation of a broader public beyond the tradi-
tional elites, and the rise of a civil society in which social movements
started to make demands at the national level, one of which was the
feminist movement of the ‘first wave’.
Abortion had been a crime against life in the Penal Code that the
Netherlands had inherited from the Napoleonic occupation, but prose-
cution had been rare, as abortion was not widely regarded as immoral
in the older Dutch legal tradition. Common people regarded abortion
as acceptable if performed before the fifth month of pregnancy, indi-
cated by quickening (Outshoorn, 1986:84–85). After revision of the
Code in 1886, abortion remained illegal without explicitly formulat-
ing the exception for saving a woman’s life if it was endangered by
the pregnancy, as this was deemed self-evident. However, a campaign
to combat abortion, led by the medical profession, got under way in
the 1890s, which framed the issue in terms of ending backstreet abor-
tion. It was part of the struggle for monopoly of the profession over
what they framed as health issues, driving midwives and other medi-
cal providers out of business. The campaign received new vigour when
various religious leaders joined the campaign, framing abortion as well
as contraception as immoral, as the latter was perceived as leading to
more abortion. Religious leaders therefore also strongly attacked the
Neo-Malthusian League (Neo-Malthusiaanse Bond – NMB) which has
propagated contraceptives since its founding in 1880.
In the debates leading up to the Morality Laws, the Protestant/Roman
Catholic framing of abortion as immoral gained the upper hand, and it
remained illegal in the 1911 law. Women having abortions were cast as
selfish, lazy or frivolous (Outshoorn, 1986:96–97).
Joyce Outshoorn 55
After 1911, abortion disappeared from the public eye, going under-
ground. Only criminologists and doctors raised the issue occasionally
and despite debates on abortion elsewhere, notably Germany, it was
rarely discussed in public. No political party or interest group politicised
the issue. There was hardly any research on abortion until after the Sec-
ond World War, and Dutch medical journals did not publish articles on
either abortion or contraception until the early 1960s (Outshoorn, 1986:
107). Feminists also did not raise the issue of abortion. While a major
feminist figure such as Aletta Jacobs, the first woman medical doctor
in the Netherlands, supported birth control and set up the first clinics
for contraceptive advice to women, many other feminists found contra-
ception and abortion distasteful topics. The mainstream of the feminist
movement of the time adhered to a morality of sexual self-control and a
conception of motherhood as women’s ultimate fulfilment, asexual and
chaste (Outshoorn, 1986:93).
Despite the religious opposition to contraception, the birth rate
had been gradually declining since the 1880s, which led to debates
about population policy in the 1920s and 1930s (van Praag, 1976;
Noordman, 1989). These focused mainly on the quantity of the pop-
ulation, not so much on the quality, although there was some public
concern that the poor and working classes were multiplying while
the middle classes were not producing sufficient numbers of children.
The Netherlands had a eugenic movement until the Second World
War, but it remained relatively isolated and had little impact on pol-
itics or policy (Noordman, 1989:248–249). Public opinion, especially
among Protestants and Roman Catholics, was averse to eugenics because
of its biological determinism and its rational conception of human
reproduction. Protestants and Roman Catholics also opposed state inter-
vention in the private sphere, a position they shared with the Liberals,
although Noordman notes that the religious elites were not averse to
state intervention if it led to greater elite control of their constituency
(1987:265).
For prostitution policy, the Morality Laws were a major policy rever-
sal. Prostitution had always been regulated by local authority in the
Netherlands, and following the introduction of the Code Penal of 1811
it was illegal only if minors were involved. The Netherlands took over
the French system of regulation of prostitution (in Dutch this was
called the reglementering) to control venereal disease (de Vries, 1997;
Bossenbroek and Kompagnie, 1998). Prostitutes were registered and
became subject to medical examination so that young military recruits
could avoid being contaminated by prostitutes. However, because of
the strong tradition of municipal autonomy, the implementation of

the reglementering varied widely across the country. The regulation was,
not surprisingly, ineffective in controlling the spread of syphilis and
this undermined the dominant social hygienic discourse supporting the
medical examinations.
In the 1860s a new coalition opposing the regulation emerged, headed
by orthodox Protestants and later joined by first wave feminists. They
developed a new abolitionist discourse, setting up prostitutes as fallen
women and prostitution as a moral vice, and demanded the end of reg-
ulation and a ban on brothels. Feminists opposed the registration and
the compulsory medical examinations of prostitutes and they framed
prostitution as sexual slavery, symbolic of the sexual inequality between
women and men (de Vries, 1997:270). In the 1880s feminist organi-
sations also started to campaign against the trafficking of women for
prostitution, arguing that prostitution led to trafficking. By 1900, with
the increasing mass mobilisation of the religious population and the
rise of religious political parties, a political majority for doing away with
the system of reglementering emerged. The new abolitionist discourse did
not target the ineffectiveness of regulation in controlling venereal dis-
ease, but propagated a moral view opposing any kind of state regulation,
casting prostitutes as fallen women, clients as unchaste men, pimps
as unscrupulous middlemen and the women who ran the brothels as
unreliable ‘madams’.
The Morality Laws prohibited brothels as well as living off the earn-
ings of prostitution, but not the prostitutes, who were regarded as ‘fallen
women’ in need of rehabilitation. The effects of the policy change were
mixed. Brothels had already more or less disappeared by 1911 as the
market for sexual services had shifted since the 1870s to the newly
emerging public spaces such as bars, cabarets and hotels, and old open
spaces such as the streets (Bossenbroek and Kompagnie, 1998:90–98).
Historians Bossenbroek and Kompagnie conclude that the Morality Laws
were more or less effective in rural communities and the smaller cities,
but prostitution continued to thrive in the big cities such as Amsterdam
and Rotterdam (1998:281–282). They returned to the time-honoured
practice of turning a blind eye as long as public order was not disturbed,
and limited the selling of sexual services to certain areas and private
houses. The laws firmly established the morality story as the domi-
nant discourse defining prostitution as a moral vice, but it was always
accompanied – if not publicly – by the discourse of maintaining public
order of the more pragmatic local authorities.
Joyce Outshoorn 57
The critical juncture of the 1960s
It was not until the early 1960s that the hegemonic discourse on moral-
ity started to erode and the Morality Laws came under attack. The
origins of the social and cultural revolution of the 1960s are still debated
(Kennedy, 1995: Andeweg and Irwin, 2009:43–44), but it is generally
agreed that the 1960s were a watershed period marking the transition
of a conservative and elite-led society to a post-materialist society as the
generation born at the end of, and during the first years after, the Second
World War came of age. Processes of secularisation, the waning of reli-
gious authority and increased affluence allowing people more individual
freedom all led to a crisis of traditional authority and a widely shared
demand for more democratic relations in all social spheres, opening the
political opportunity structure. The system of Verzuiling began to col-
lapse, leading to de-pillarisation and the electoral decline of the religious
parties. Historian James Kennedy (1995:15) ascribes the rapid changes to
the pragmatic attitude of the political elites who believed in the ‘unre-
lenting’ inevitability of change; in the best tradition of Dutch consensus
politics, they set out to accommodate the opposition and incorporate
their demands. The critical juncture is formed by the results of the 1967
national elections, when the religious parties lost their parliamentary
majority for the first time since 1918.
The call for change was two-pronged; there was a strong movement
for the political renovation of political institutions and the party sys-
tem, and a broader movement advocating social and cultural change.
A new discourse developed against state intervention in the sexual
lives of its citizens, in which the key terms were self-determination
and self-actualisation. It challenged the Morality Laws, and this attack
led to the second major policy shift, the reform of the Abortion Law
of 1981/1984 and the legalisation of prostitution in 1999/2000. That
reform was a lengthy process, due to the exigencies of the Dutch party
system (Outshoorn, 2001a, 2004b). In this period, the party system was
based on two cleavages, the left/right divide and the religious/secular
divide. These cleavages are cross-cutting; when an issue touches on the
religious/secular divide, it runs counter to the left/right divide of the
party system. Given a strict electoral system of proportional representa-
tion, the Netherlands has a multi-party system in which no party has
a majority, making coalition government inevitable. When a ‘moral’
issue threatens the required essential consensus, political elites turn to
the ‘rules of the game’ (Daalder, 1966; Lijphart, 1975) by defusing the
offending issue with tactics of depoliticisation (for instance, framing the

issue as a technical matter) or delay.
Although the major Christian parties lost their parliamentary major-
ity in 1967, they retained their pivotal position in coalition formation,
as they were essential for a majority cabinet. They ruled with either
the Liberals or the Social Democrats, as the latter two were each other’s
opposites on the dominant left/right divide. The Christian parties were
therefore in a position to veto any reform on ‘moral’ issues. The reli-
gious/Liberal coalition cabinet De Jong (1967–1971) and parliament
could agree on repeal of the clauses of the Morality Law on contracep-
tion (1969), homosexuality (1971) and a new law allowing divorce by
mutual consent (1970). But precisely on abortion and prostitution there
proved to be no such consensus.
Abortion
Towards abortion law reform

The dominant moral discourse on abortion started to be questioned
in the 1950s when medical doctors discussed allowing abortion on
medical-psychiatric grounds. Abortion became a medical-psychiatric
problem; women asking for an abortion were framed as unstable per-
sonalities with ‘relational pathologies’ which stood in the way of using
proper contraception. The issue became more urgent after the scandal
about thalidomide in 1962–1963, a drug used to prevent miscarriage but
which caused deformity of the developing foetus. When some doctors
asked the eminent professor of law C.J. Enschedé in 1966 whether the
old law allowed for such therapeutic abortions, he argued that a broad
interpretation was still within the limits of the existing law (Enschedé,
1966). This paved the way for progressive doctors in university hospi-
tals to start working with abortion ‘teams’ to select women ‘really’ in
need of an abortion. The teams included a psychiatrist, a gynaecolo-
gist and sometimes a social worker who screened women’s applications
for abortion and in a limited number of cases allowed these on thera-
peutic grounds. This put medical doctors in control, supplanting moral
theologians, ethicists and criminologists as the ‘experts’. This practice
suited the religious parties and the cabinet (Outshoorn, 1986:123) as it
depoliticised the issue, left the decisions to the professionals and allowed
them to delay taking a decision.
However, this strategy did not work. The cabinet had hoped that the
professional organisation of medical doctors would develop guidelines
for allowing abortion, but doctors were just as divided on the issue as the
Joyce Outshoorn 59
public at large and the political parties. Moreover, the ‘team solution’
proved to be untenable, as doctors could not define ‘objective’ criteria
for permitting abortion. This led to substantial differences between abor-
tion teams, creating liberal and restrictive hospitals and thus unequal
access to abortion services across the country. This undermined the prin-
ciple of equity under the law. The teams also could not cope with the
huge numbers of women asking for abortion, putting lie to the idea
that abortion was only a problem for a small group with psychiatric
disorders.
The cabinet also had not counted on new actors stepping into the
void created by its indecisiveness. In the Second Chamber, two Social
Democrats entered a private members’ bill to legalise abortion, for which
there was a potential majority. Progressive doctors founded the Stichting
Medisch Verantwoorde Zwangerschapsafbreking (Stimezo – Foundation for
Medical Interruption of Pregnancy), which set up clinics which pro-
vided abortion on demand from 1970 on. Following regular legal
custom, these were not prosecuted while parliament was deliberating
on concrete reform proposals. Stimezo also gathered crucial statistics on
abortion which refuted many myths about abortion and countered the
claims by anti-abortion groups, as well as providing sound knowledge
for developing new policy (Ketting, 1978).
Then the new women’s movement joined the debate, mobilising
on abortion and arguing that abortion was a necessary condition for
the emancipation of women. Neither MVM (Man-Vrouw-Maatschappij –
Man-Woman-Society), founded in 1968, nor Dolle Mina (founded in
1970), the first organisations of the new wave, developed elaborate dis-
courses about abortion. MVM attacked the paternalism of the medical
profession and argued that women are fully capable of taking their own
decisions about abortion. Both groups challenged the ‘team solution’ as
it privileged women who were able to articulate their wishes over those
who were less well spoken. Dolle Mina formulated the best-known slo-
gan of second wave feminism when it framed its demand for total repeal
of the old law succinctly as Baas in eigen buik (boss over one’s own body).
In 1974 several members of Dolle Mina took the lead in organising
the women’s national campaign for the legalisation of abortion. It was
appropriately called Wij Vrouwen Eisen (WVE – We Women Demand) and
united women’s groups from all the left parties, the confederation of
trade unions, and until 1976 also the Liberal Party’s women’s auxiliary.
Many non-aligned feminists also joined. The traditional women’s organ-
isations of the Verzuiling period did not join except for the secular Bond
van Plattelandsvrouwen (League of Rural Women). WVE’s demands were
very straightforward: women should decide about an abortion, abortion

had to be removed from the Penal Code and it had to be funded by
the national health insurance (the Ziekenfonds). The claim that women
should make their own decisions turned abortion into a lay issue and
put an end to the traditional experts – theologians, ethicists, doctors
and legal scholars – controlling the issue. The three major demands of
WVE polarised the political debate from 1975 onwards and made the
key question one of power: who takes the final decision about an abor-
tion? Any attempt thereafter at defining categories of women in terms
of emergency, need or any other set of indications has failed.
The name of WVE – We Women Demand – was symbolic of the
claim that it stood for all women. The only distinction in its cam-
paign and leaflets was the difference between ‘foreign women’, which
denoted non-resident women who travelled to the Netherlands for
an abortion.1 WVE had support from the left-wing Turkish women’s
organisation Hollanda Türkiye Kadinlar Birligi (HTKB – Dutch Turkish
Women’s League), which also joined its demonstration in 1980 against
the original cabinet proposal for the Abortion Act. Its demands
were also supported by the Surinamese women’s organisation Stichting
Belangenbehartiging Surinaamse Vrouwen. The black feminist magazine
Ashanti came out strongly in favour of women’s control of their own
bodies and backed WVE’s later campaigns to retain contraception in
the national health insurance, but Ashanti’s frank discussions of sex-
ual issues was contested among its Surinamese constituency (Ashanti,
1983, 6 (July/August):6–7, 11). Other groups or organisations of migrant
women were not involved in the abortion campaign.
This non-involvement can best be explained by the late development
of migrant women’s organisations in the Netherlands. Only after 1975
did large groups of women migrants come to the country, following the
independence of Suriname and the new government policy allowing for
family reunion for migrant workers, mainly from Turkey and Morocco.
Mobilisation of migrant women took off in the 1980s (Botman, Jouwe
and Wekker, 2001), but by that time the major issues about abortion had
been settled and there were no legal and financial barriers or problems
of access to services for migrant women to have an abortion. Moreover,
the various groups of migrant women had different needs and priori-
ties. Many of them came from rural areas in Turkey and Morocco and
had little education. Their organisations therefore focused on practical
issues such as language courses, health care, sewing lessons and informa-
tion about social welfare. Subsequent Moroccan women’s organisations
steered clear of politics (following Moroccan government guidelines and
Joyce Outshoorn 61
threats) (Redmond, 1990:36) and focused on social welfare issues. The

Turkish HTKB and the Surinamese women’s groups engaged in political
education; the HTKB also lobbied for women’s residency rights along-
side organising social activities and providing information about health
care (Baak, 1985:34–35). The Surinamese focused on work issues, lob-
bying the trade unions and improving women’s status in society and
politics (Redmond, 1990) and fighting racial discrimination (Deekman
and Hermans, 2001:106, 109).
In addition to establishing its demands as the dominant perspective
on abortion, WVE also managed to break the deadlock created by the
unwilling Christian parties and the pragmatic Left, who were not will-
ing to press the issue given the widely available abortion services of
Stimezo and the more cooperative hospitals. Feminists demanded a per-
manent legal solution as they did not trust the Christian parties with
their alliance with anti-abortion groups. As opponents of reform had
expected the old law would be upheld, these were formed relatively
late, but they became more vocal after 1974 when some in the reli-
gious parties started to support limited reform. The feminist distrust of
the Catholic Minister of Justice Van Agt in the predominantly left-wing
cabinet Den Uyl (1973–1977) proved well founded when he tried to
close down the Bloemenhove clinic – the only clinic in the Netherlands
where second-trimester abortions were performed. Feminists prevented
its closure in 1976 by occupying the clinic and, aided by the Social
Democrats in the cabinet, the minister had to back down (Outshoorn,
1986:221–224).
The parliamentary debates on abortion law reform

After tortuous debates in parliament on no less than nine different abor-
tion bills, the Christian Democrat/Liberal cabinet Van Agt (1977–1981)
drafted a compromise bill, which was passed in 1981 by the Second
Chamber and the First Chamber by the smallest possible majority. The
bill had created enough middle ground to convince Christian Demo-
crat MPs to vote in favour, by creating a number of procedural clauses
for ‘conscientious decision-making’. Abortion was to be allowed if the
‘emergency situation’ of a woman makes abortion unavoidable; she has
to have considered other alternatives, and the doctor has to determine
if she is acting out of free will (TK 1979–1980, 15475 (Wet Afbreking
Zwangerschap), nos 1–3, 16 February 1980). Together they take the deci-
sion. She has to take a five-day waiting period into account to reflect
on her decision before she is granted her request. The abortion has to
take place in a licensed hospital or clinic, with compulsory registration
and price control. There is a conscientious objectors’ clause for those

not willing to perform or assist an abortion. After an amendment from
the Social Democrats, a clause was inserted that, if a doctor does not
agree with the woman’s request, he/she has to refer her to another doc-
tor. In this way it allows for women’s right to choose. Abortion remains
illegal after viability (not defined in the Act) and if the abortion is
performed outside licensed premises. These elaborate procedures were
defended as essential parts of the compromise between the woman’s
right to decide and the need to protect human life.
The Act only took effect in 1984, as the licensing of clinics and hospi-
tals had to be worked out in the face of prolonged Christian Democrat
opposition (Outshoorn, 2001a:219–220). The funding of abortion from
one of the national health care insurances (the Algemene Wet Bijzondere
Ziektekosten – AWBZ) was settled in 1985.
The passing of the Act was the second major policy shift on abortion,
resulting from the successful new discourse of the feminist movement
which cast women as mature moral agents able to take their own deci-
sions. Self-determination was the key phrase. The compromise became
possible when, in the late 1970s, all the major parties wanted to get
rid of the issue, as it caused too much conflict between and within the
parties, complicating coalition formation (Outshoorn, 1986). The Act
had little effect, however, on the established practice of abortion since
1972; the five-day waiting period is no deterrence as the period starts
when a women has a referral from her doctor; by the time she arrives
at an abortion clinic, it is already completed. The clause, ostensibly for
‘conscientious decision-making’, was in fact inserted to prevent women
from abroad having abortions in the Netherlands.
Abortion and migration

Migrant women hardly figured in the abortion debates leading to the
new bill. Stimezo had already noted the higher abortion rate among
migrant women in the 1970s (Ketting and Schnabel, 1978:57–59); they
were less likely to use contraception than white Dutch women and were
twice as likely to have a second abortion. The differences increased:
in 1983 native Dutch women had a rate of abortion of 4.5 per 1,000
women aged 15 to 44, while for Surinamese and Antillean women the
rate was 42.3, for Turkish women 22.8 and for Moroccan women 10.7
(Ketting and Leliveld, 1983:47). The differences have remained pro-
nounced since then. The research also showed that lack of knowledge
and the ineffective use of contraceptives by migrant women were the
main cause of the higher rate; this was framed in an optimistic discourse
Joyce Outshoorn 63
Table 3.1 Abortion rates in the Netherlands
Year White Dutch Surinamese Antillean Turkish Moroccan

women
1988∗ 3.6 30.2 31.5 18.1 11.0

1991/92∗∗ 3.5 31.5 34.5 17.4 13.7
2001∗∗∗ 4.4 29.4 36.6 10.0 15.5
2005∗∗∗∗ 4.6 34.2 44.2 13.6 20.2
∗ Rademakers (1988:26).
∗∗ Rademakers (1995:32).
∗∗∗ Wijsen, Van Lee and Koolstra (2007:31).
∗∗∗∗ Ibid.
Recent annual reports no longer split the numbers along ethnic lines.
by politicians and policymakers as a transient problem that would pass

away when the younger generations of migrants were socialised in the
Netherlands. The Stimezo research also showed that there are cultural
factors at play, such as the dislike of using condoms among Surinamese
and Moroccan men (Rademaker, 1995:33) and Turkish women’s reluc-
tance to use the pill as it could undermine their bargaining position in
sexual relations with their partners (Sieval, 2005:131) (Table 3.1).
In general the policy response has been to advocate for effective con-
traception and sex education for migrants, already a regular part of
school curricula. The hegemonic Dutch discursive framing holds that
abortion is an ultimate remedy, to be avoided by effective contraception.
The higher rates for migrant women were regularly brought up in parlia-
ment in the 1990s, but the message from consecutive cabinets was that
migrant women would catch up to native women’s rate in due course.
When the Christian parties raised the issue anew in 2002, the Minister of
Health admitted that the Netherlands no longer had the lowest abortion
rate in the world (a source of national pride and a defence against those
who regarded the Act as too lenient) and she ascribed it to the higher
rates among migrant women in turn caused by poor use of contracep-
tives2 (TK, 2000–2001, Aanhangsel, Vraag 929, Antwoord van de minister,
p. 1,953, 29 March 2002).
The most important abortion debate in which ethnicity played a
major role was about sex selection in 1997. Key to the debate was the
discourse about son preference among migrants and the potential use
of abortion as a means for sex selection. Technically speaking the Abor-
tion Act allows for it, as a woman can plead an emergency situation
because of an unwanted pregnancy. Most of the Dutch public regard
sex selection as immoral, so when the Social Liberal Minister of Pub-

lic Health Els Borst reportedly said in a press interview that she could
understand a woman from a ‘foreign culture’ having an abortion if
the foetus was a girl and she already had several daughters, it caused
great commotion. Several women’s organisations, notably the Women’s
Council on Development and migrant women’s organisations, criticised
her of cultural relativism (Saharso, 2005:253). The minister had to face
questions in parliament, where she explained the context of her remarks
and stated that in general she found abortion on the grounds of sex
for non-medical reasons unacceptable. But she could understand a doc-
tor helping a woman in such a case (HTK, 1997–1998, Vragenuur, TK
42, p. 3386, 21 January 1997). She also pointed out that the Abortion
Act does not prohibit it. The Act is the capstone to the ‘excellent con-
traceptive practices among the Dutch population which testifies to a
great feeling of responsibility . . . I think this also goes for foreign women
living in the Netherlands.’ She stated that ‘we’ should think thrice
before wanting to lay down the law for all in ‘our multicultural society’
(ibid.:3389).3
In 1998 a cabinet decree prohibited sex selection by artificial repro-
ductive technology for non-medical reasons (Staatsblad, 1998); it does
not mention abortion. The memorandum to the decree explained that
the primary motive was to prevent children becoming objects of the
desires and wishes of parents. It briefly mentioned the potential demo-
graphic consequences of sex selection and stressed the equal dignity of
women and men. There was no mention of cultural preferences in the
memorandum to the bill.
A pacified issue
Since its passing, there have been no serious challenges to either the
Act or the new discursive framing of women’s right to decide about an
abortion. Conservative Christian Democrat MPs have regularly asked
parliamentary questions on incidents around abortion, and orthodox
Protestant parties have continued their campaign against the Act, but
given their predominantly religious framing of the issue, they have not
been able to mobilise beyond their natural public constituency. Their
window of opportunity reopened after the stormy elections of 2002.
A new cabinet (Balkenende I) could only be formed by the Liberals and
the Christian Democrats with the new far-right party Lijst Pim Fortuyn
(LPF). The Christian Democrats seized the opportunity to incorporate
an evaluation of the Abortion Act in the cabinet coalition pact, under
the pretext that the clause about the ‘emergency situation’ was being
Joyce Outshoorn 65
interpreted far too liberally in abortion services. However, the evaluation

report noted nothing amiss (Evaluatie WAZ, 2005:12) and saw no reason
for reconsideration. It suggested that the five-day waiting period could
be redefined in a more flexible way and that very early abortions – in
the first two weeks of pregnancy – should be brought under the terms of
the Act. This was also to apply to abortion drugs in general. The report
noted the higher abortion rates of migrant women, but said most found
it easy to find an abortion clinic. In addition to the obligatory words on
prevention, it suggested the training of abortion providers to cope with
‘cultural difference’. This suggestion was not supported by the evidence,
as the providers reported that cultural or linguistic difference was hardly
ever a problem in their interactions with migrant clients (ibid.:168).
In 2006 the cabinet Balkenende II (Christian Democrats/Liberals/Social
Liberals) decided to extend the Act to the early abortions, justifying it
by the availability of new techniques for identifying early pregnancies.
But it rejected a flexible five-day ‘waiting period’ as it was the core of
the old compromise to guarantee ‘conscientious decision-making’ (TK,
2005–2006, 30371, no. 2. Brief Staatssecretaris VWS, 28 April 2006). The
cabinet did not think the law needed to be changed to accommodate
its extension to early abortions, but this was contested by the secular
parties. When parliament finally debated the evaluation in 2008, the
cabinet Balkenende IV, which consisted of Christian Democrats, Social
Democrats and the orthodox Protestant Christian Union, had come into
power. The Christian Union used its position to guard the conserva-
tive Embryo Act and to limit access to prenatal screening, but could
not muster support to change the Abortion Act itself. The parliamen-
tary debates focused on extending the Act to cover the early abortions
and the five-day waiting period (TK 2007–2008, 30371 no. 16. Verslag
algemeen overleg, TK 74, 2007–2008. Afbreking Zwangerschap, 9 April
2008). None of the major parties questioned the core of the 1981
compromise, although the Christian Democrats remained convinced
that the ‘emergency situation’ was being interpreted far too liberally
(ibid.:5,188). In 2009 a cabinet executive order extended the Abortion
Act to early abortion, excepting the five-day waiting period for later
abortions (Staatsblad 2009).
However, the usual religious/secular divide on abortion is no longer
prevalent, as evidenced by the voting in the 2008 debate. Three secular
parties – the Freedom Party (Partij van de Vrijheid – PVV), the Socialist
Party and the Animal Rights Party (Partij voor de Dieren – PvdD) – voted
with the Christian parties (TK 2007–2008, 30371, no. 14, 15 April 2008)
in favour of including early abortion in the Act. The PVV spokeswoman
held that the Act was too pro-choice; she was also opposed to the fund-
ing of abortion by the national health insurance, as it was a woman’s
own fault if she had an unwanted pregnancy, and she objected to non-
resident women having abortions in the Netherlands. Moreover, she
wanted special measures to contain ‘the explosive growth’ in the num-
ber of abortions among Moroccan women (TK, 2007–2008, 30371, no.
16, Verslag Algemeen Overleg, 16 April 2008:9). Earlier, the PVV had come
out with a pro-life position during the parliamentary debate on the
Embryo Act in 2007.
Although the women’s movement has been in decline since the 1990s
(Outshoorn and Oldersma, 2007), WVE, although more or less dormant,
has kept a watchful eye on the abortion debates since the enactment.
It mobilised in 1995 when the Minister of Health wanted to remove the
funding of contraception from the national health insurance. With the
support of two new migrant women’s organisations, AISE and Tije, it
helped to kill the proposal (TK, 1994–1995, 24124, nos 1,2). On request
of the migrant organisations, the higher incidence of abortion among
migrant women was not used as an argument in the campaign, proba-
bly because of the fear of stigmatisation.4 A later cabinet made a second
attempt at removal, but this time, despite the same opposition, the
result was a compromise; only women under 21 years were to get contra-
ception refunded under the new national health insurance law of 2006.
In 2008 the Social Democrat Minister of Health (a feminist) reversed
the decision, her main argument being that it would lower the abortion
rate. In 2011 the liberal conservative cabinet reversed her decision, so
that currently only those under 21 can obtain the refund.
In its monitoring role WVE was joined by a new feminist organisa-
tion, Women on Waves, founded and funded by Dutch feminists from
Amsterdam in 1999. While at first Women on Waves had an interna-
tional focus – fighting for the legalisation of abortion in those countries
where it was still prohibited, such as Ireland, Poland and Portugal (see
Chapter 4) – it had to engage with the Dutch abortion legislation.
Women on Waves has an ‘abortion boat’ where women can have an
abortion outside the territorial waters of their country, so they can
avoid prosecution. At first it was unclear whether the boat fell under
Dutch legislation, requiring it to have a licence, which it received in
2006.5 In the Netherlands, Women on Waves is in favour of remov-
ing the limitations on abortion in the 1981 Abortion Act, demanding
that general practitioners should be allowed to prescribe the early abor-
tion pill, and the repeal of the ‘five-day waiting’ period for a woman
before having an abortion. Its framing constructs a universal category of
Joyce Outshoorn 67
women, although it also points out that prohibition of abortion tends

to disfavour the ‘weaker’ part of the population.
In debates on new reproductive technologies, the Embryo Act and
prenatal screening, there has been no feminist voice; no new organ-
isations have arisen around the issues (Kirejczyk, 1996; 2008). One
reason suggested is that geneticists tend to speak ‘feminist language’,
as a woman’s right to decide and have an abortion, if test results are
unfavourable. The key word is ‘informed consent’. Another reason is
the decline of women’s movement organisations in general.
Abortion and Europeanisation

The European context was never irrelevant in Dutch abortion debates.
Firstly, there always was the possibility for pro-and anti-abortion groups
to expand the scope of conflict to the European level if they were dissat-
isfied with the national situation. Women’s groups had little incentive
to do so, as their demands were generally achieved in the course of time,
but opponents of the liberal law appealed (fruitlessly) to international
treaties to argue for the right to life. In 1990 the Christian Democrats
suggested a study on the harmonisation of abortion law in Europe, but
the Social Democrat junior minister of health warned against it as it
would put the Netherlands on the defensive, which would not be in the
interests of ‘clients’ (HTK 1990–1991, 18386, no. 42, 20 June 1991:14).
This strategy was still in evidence ten years later when the Minister of
Justice declared that he was not in favour of such a move, as it would go
in a direction which the Dutch cabinet and parliament was unlikely to
find appealing (TK 2000–2001, Vragenuur, TK 85, 5378, 12 June 2001).
In 2003 the European Parliament adopted a resolution on sexual and
reproductive health and rights, recommending making abortion legal,
safe and accessible for all, and calling on member states to provide
decent counselling and information (Resolution EP, 2003). But it is not
in a position to change the various treaties allocating mandates to the
EU or national level. There is a broad consensus among Dutch politi-
cal parties that the abortion issue is best addressed at the national level,
as can be distilled from their party programmes for the 2004 and 2009
European elections (Pellikaan and van Holsteyn, 2004; 2009). Recently a
narrow majority of the European Parliament passed a resolution to leave
‘ethical issues’ such as abortion and sexual education to the national
states, while a resolution of the Left calling for women’s right to abortion
failed (NRC Handelsblad, 11 December 2013).
Secondly, there was the question of abortion services for non-resident
women. This has always been allowed, but not without debates in which
opponents spoke of ‘abortion tourism’, commercial practices and ‘for-

eign’ women. The notorious five-day waiting period had little effect on
women coming from abroad. Demands from religious groups and politi-
cians to close the borders were fruitless, as the Raad van State (Council of
State) had already argued in its 1979 advice on the draft of the Abortion
Act that abortion is a medical service falling under the EU principle of
non-discrimination in the provision of health services.
From the early 1970s thousands of women from countries where abor-
tion was not yet legal, notably Belgium, Germany, France and Spain, had
abortions in the Netherlands. In 1977 there were 54,615 non-resident
abortions (Ketting and Schnabel, 1978:15); in 1982 the figure declined
to 19,600, mainly due to legal reform in France and Germany (Ketting
and Leliveld, 1983:132). After the Belgian reform in 1990, the numbers
fell to 10,738 a year later (Rademakers, 1992:37). The figure had dwin-
dled to 3,686 by 2012 (Jaarrapportage, 2013:37). Non-resident women
have to pay for the service, but abortion clinics have financial reserves
for those who cannot afford it.
Thirdly, the European context provided a point of comparison for
the Netherlands which was regularly used in debate. Doctors invoked
more liberal practices in other countries when they started to demand
liberalisation of the old 1911 abortion law, and the first policymakers
looked for inspiration from abroad when drafting new laws, notably
from Sweden and the UK. The idea of having two different regimes
for first- and second-trimester abortion was adopted from Germany by
Christian Democrat politicians (Outshoorn, 1986:188). The Abortion
Act was legitimated by its authors in part by arguing that the Dutch
law would not be exceptional in the European context (HTK 1978/1979,
15474, no. 3, Memorie van Toelichting, Bijlage 1). In the 1990s the dis-
course about the low Dutch abortion rate was explicitly comparative,
forming a source of national pride; the low rate was often employed to
counter critics of the 1981 Act. Allowing the emergency abortion pill
was also justified by using a European comparison, and in the recent
debates on prenatal screening and diagnostics the wish not to be out of
step with neighbouring countries was frequently brought forward.
With the arrival of medicated abortion, borders have become increas-
ingly irrelevant, as women can order abortion pills through the Internet.
The extension of the Abortion Act to cover early abortions (including
medicated ones) can be interpreted as an attempt to halt on-line pur-
chases of abortion pills from websites in other countries. But there is
a tension here: consecutive ministers have pointed out that if a cer-
tain medicine is registered in an EU state, the Netherlands is obliged
Joyce Outshoorn 69
to allow it within its borders. In 2005 the Minister of Health permitted

the emergency or morning-after pill to be sold over the counter at phar-
macies (TK, 2003–2004, 29200, XIV, no. 280. Brief van de Minister VWS,
7 September 2004). This is not the case, however, for early abortion pills.
Prostitution
Towards the legalisation of prostitution

As we have seen, the ban on brothels remained intact after the dis-
mantling of the Morality Laws in the 1960s, as it was regarded as a
weapon for local authorities to control prostitution and maintain public
order (Outshoorn, 2004a:187). The campaign against the intervention
of the state in the sexual life of its citizens did not include prostitution.
The prevalent moral discourse defined prostitutes as public women who
brought sexuality into the public sphere, and competing discourses also
defined the issue as public, either as public health or public disorder.
In the 1960s prostitutes were benignly regarded as ‘social workers’ or,
less benignly, as psychologically disturbed.
However, in the 1970s a new international and more aggressive sex
industry developed beyond the limits of the traditional working class
port areas. The city of Rotterdam had to deal with angry citizens of these
neighbourhoods complaining about noise disturbance but encountered
the confines of the law when it attempted to regain control over the
sex industry. It was prohibited from setting up an ‘Eros Centre’ by the
court, which pronounced that what is forbidden by the Penal Code
cannot be regulated (van Mens, 1992). The court ruling made parliamen-
tary reform inevitable. The prime mover became the powerful Vereniging
Nederlandse Gemeenten (VNG – Association of Dutch Municipalities),
which defends the interests of all municipalities against the national
and provincial governments.
Feminists became involved in the issue at the end of the 1970s,
when sex tourism to South East Asia was attacked by the Werkgroep
Sex Tourisme (Working Group Against Sex Tourism), who targeted male
tourists returning to the Netherlands at airports. In feminist interna-
tional networks and the First and Second World Whores Congresses
in the mid-1980s, a new discourse developed about prostitution as sex
work and sex workers who should have social and economic rights. This
framing was adopted by the women’s policy agency Directie Coordinatie
Emancipatiezaken (DCE – Department for the Coordination of Equal-
ity Policy), not surprisingly as it was well staffed by feminists at
the time. In this way the distinction between forced and voluntary
prostitution in the sex work discourse entered policy papers on women’s

issues, as can be seen in the DCE’s groundbreaking policy paper Nota
Bestrijding Seksueel Geweld (White Paper on Combating Sexual Violence)
(Outshoorn, 2004a:187, 191–192). The paper asked for the recognition
of prostitution as sex work and the improvement of sex workers’ rights.
In 1982 the DCE organised the first conference on violence against
women in The Hague, where the first feminist demands to repeal the
ban on brothels were heard. The Working Group Against Sex Tourism
also raised the issue of the trafficking of Thai and Philippine women to
the Netherlands. Pioneer research by Vanwesenbeeck (1986) on prostitu-
tion, Buijs and Verbraken (1985) on trafficking and Pheterson (1986) on
the stigmatisation of sex workers was funded by the DCE. In addition, it
funded the Second World Whores Congress in Amsterdam (1986) as well
as the organisation of sex workers Rode Draad (Red Thread) (founded in
1986) and the Stichting tegen Vrouwenhandel (STV – Foundation Against
Trafficking of Women), founded in 1987. These were the most important
feminist interest groups on the issue. A wider community of feminist
scholars and lawyers supported the call for the recognition of sex work
and the improvement of sex workers’ rights. The feminist legal journal
Nemesis followed all developments, publishing no less than 49 articles
and comments on the topic between 1984 and 2003, and the Clara
Wichmann Institute, the feminist legal centre, lobbied and supported
the major feminist demands on the issue until its demise in 2004. The
feminist discourse stressed the need for autonomy for sex workers and
their right to sexual self-determination.
The STV was originally set up to aid trafficked women, but it soon also
became an expert lobby on trafficking with its expertise on migration
statistics and migration law. Its framing stressed the agency of the traf-
ficked women, who are not regarded as helpless victims. The STV always
regarded prostitution as sex work, and rejected the idea that legalising
prostitution would increase trafficking. It lobbied for residency permits
for victims (adopted in 1988) so that they could stay in the country and
testify against their traffickers, and for a more feasible definition of traf-
ficking, achieved in 1993 with the passing of the Trafficking of Persons
Act. The organisation has always had migrant women on its staff, often
former victims of trafficking, and it has enabled migrant sex workers to
set up their own organisations and win support from migrant organi-
sations such as the Nederlands Centrum Buitenlanders (Dutch Foreigners
Centre – later renamed Forum) and the feminist Tije International (Inter-
view Marjan Wijers, 2010)6 . Sex workers from Colombia have their own
organisation, La Esperanza, which offers support and legal aid (Janssen,
Joyce Outshoorn 71
2007:4, n3). In 2002 a Nigerian women’s organisation started a cam-

paign against the prostitution of young Nigerian asylum seekers, but
little has been heard from it since (Mensenhandel, 2004:123).
As the issue has been intertwined with migration from the begin-
ning of the political debate in the late 1970s, feminist groups and
scholars have always discussed migrant sex work, emphasising the dif-
ference between victims of trafficking and sex workers coming to the
Netherlands to make a living. Migrant sex workers have always been
active in the major feminist interest groups on the issue. Women’s
organisations from the largest migrant communities have not been
active on the issue7 ; only Tije International supported the STV. This
lack of interest can be ascribed to the priorities of the migrant women’s
organisations, such as learning Dutch and coping with government
institutions, legal aid, employment and, in the case of the Surinamese,
the political participation of women. But it is also due to the taboo
nature of the topic among most migrants, although it is widely recog-
nised that men from the major migrant groups buy sexual services and
that there are women from those migrant groups active as sex workers.
The parliamentary debates on prostitution

In 1985 a first attempt to repeal the ban was made under the Lib-
eral/Christian Democrat cabinet Lubbers I (18202). It adopted the
distinction between voluntary and forced prostitution, accepting pros-
titution as work and only criminalising forced prostitution. During the
debates, the Christian Democrats held on to their moral framing, the left
used a mix of the sex work frame and the sexual domination frame, and
the Liberals the general free market discourse in which the rights of sex
workers did not figure (Outshoorn, 2001b:478, 487). The bill passed in
1987, but the First Chamber put it on hold as it was deemed inconsistent
with a pending bill on human trafficking.
However, the cabinet fell in 1989 and was succeeded by a new coali-
tion of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats (Lubbers III). This
provided the Christian Democrats the opportunity to sabotage the bill.
Their Minister of Justice, Hirsch Ballin, redrafted the bill and dropped
the distinction between voluntary and forced prostitution for women
from ‘Third World’ countries, who were thus held to be forced into pros-
titution in all cases. According to him, they were vulnerable because of
poverty and therefore easy prey for traffickers. Victims could be iden-
tified by comparing a possible victim with the modern assertive Dutch
prostitute; the former has no valid visa or passport and no money, and
works in bad conditions (HEK 1991–1992, 21207, no. 10, 21 February
1992). Thus the figure of a migrant woman coming to the Netherlands

to work as a prostitute to make a living was rendered invisible. The vic-
timisation of all non-EU women was vigorously attacked by the secular
parties, who argued that not all of them are trafficked. The Christian
Democrats, however, held on to the idea of migrant sex workers as
deceived victims, and by arguing that all non-EU women were traf-
ficked, could then reason that the best way to stop trafficking was to
stop them coming to the Netherlands in the first place. Their party was
not inclined to give migrant sex workers work permits, as they desig-
nated migrant sex workers as illegal migrants: allowing them in would
attract ‘an uncontrollable stream of foreign prostitutes’. The minister
spoke of the ‘open flank of Dutch immigration policy’ (HTK 1991–1992,
TK 81, 4994; 5001). In the debate no one drew attention to the race
and ethnic aspects of the issue, that it was about black and brown and
Asian women catering to the demands of predominantly white men
(Outshoorn, 2004b:195).
In the successful bill leading to the repeal of the brothel ban, the dis-
tinction between voluntary and forced prostitution was reinstated by
the new ‘Purple’ coalition of the Social Democrats, the Liberals and the
Social Liberals (HTK, 1996–1997, 25437, nos 1–3). Non-EU prostitutes
were not prohibited from working in a brothel; but as all Dutch employ-
ers have to check if their employees have valid papers, in practice it
would become impossible for them to work. The cabinet, and with it
the majority of parliament, did not intend to grant migrant sex workers
work permits, as this was held not to be in the Dutch national interest.
Neither did they agree to the legalisation of undocumented sex workers
who were already in the country. Only the Green Left was in favour of
such a move. The bill was passed in 1999, with voting running along
the traditional secular/religious cleavage, and took effect in 2000. This
legalisation of prostitution – now defined as sex work – aimed at con-
trol and regulation of the sex industry, to fight forced prostitution more
effectively, to protect minors from sexual abuse and to ‘protect’ (not
‘improve’) the position of sex workers. It did away with the idea that
all women from the ‘Third World’ were trafficked; non-EU sex workers
can work in a brothel, but as employers in the Netherlands are prohib-
ited from employing undocumented workers, only women with valid
papers can work in the sex business. Consecutive cabinets and the vast
majority of MPs had no intention of providing work permits for non-EU
sex workers. In line with the prostitution policy tradition, implement-
ing the bill was left to the municipalities, who could then tailor their
regulations to local needs.
Joyce Outshoorn 73
Legalisation was the second major policy shift on prostitution, but

as in the past, the autonomy of the municipalities remained more or
less intact. Their autonomy had hindered the 19th-century reglementer-
ing, as the major cities always had their own rules. Neither did the
Morality Laws standardise local measures, leaving differences between
the major cities and the smaller towns and villages. The cities, notably
Rotterdam and Amsterdam, used zoning and permitted window pros-
titution to maintain overall control. During the debate leading to the
second policy shift, both cities had continued to pioneer their own
solutions to legalisation. After 2000, local autonomy remained a major
issue when municipalities with a Christian majority refused to allow
sex clubs. Recently Amsterdam and Utrecht have ignored the rejection
of the registration of sex workers by the First Chamber by introducing
their own systems of registration.
Prostitution and migration

During the mid-1980s policymakers and MPs became aware of the
changing composition of the sex workers labour market and the exis-
tence of trafficking; the Buijs and Verbraken (1985) report played an
important role in this. From then on, ‘foreign women’ cropped up in
cabinet papers and parliamentary debate as MPs started to argue that
trafficking was increasing at an ‘alarming rate’. The Christian Democrats
especially set the 1990s debates in the context of illegal migration, talk-
ing of ‘floods’ of foreign prostitutes, but the issue was complicated by
their also being framed as victims of trafficking. They were assumed to
be more prone to being forced into prostitution by deceit and more
gullible than the average Dutch prostitute. The latter was the modern
and assertive (‘mondige’) sex worker who knows what she is doing.
During the whole period studied, the ‘numbers’ question was highly
political, actors having their own interests in over- or underestimating
the number of prostitutes. This is complicated by the ‘dark number’
problem, the difficulty of estimating the number of sex workers given
the stigma attached to the label ‘whore’. It is therefore also difficult to
establish how many sex workers of foreign descent are working in the
Netherlands. For the 1970s Van Mens (1992:27) estimated there were
6,000–7,900 female prostitutes, of whom 2,400 were occasional work-
ers; she estimated that the number of foreign prostitutes in The Hague
was around 12.5% in 1970; this figure rose to nearly 33% in the mid-
1970s, an increase she ascribes to the growing number of Surinamese
and German women (ibid.:28). In 1985 police and welfare workers esti-
mated that nationally between 25% and 60% (!) of window prostitutes
were from the ‘Third World’; for sex clubs a figure of 25% is given
(ibid.:28–29). Janssen (2007), using figures from the National Reporter
on Human Trafficking and the Red Thread, estimates there were around
20,000 to 25,000 workers in the Dutch sex industry around 2000, includ-
ing males and transgenders; about half of all sex workers were migrants.
This was also the figure circulating in parliamentary debate in the 1990s
and 2000s.
The migration of sex workers started with women coming from
Suriname and the Dutch Antilles; later South East Asia (notably Thailand
and the Philippines), West Africa and Latin America became the most
important countries of origin. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, there
has been a steady increase in women coming from Central and Eastern
Europe (ibid.:6). Janssen notes that the increasing dominance of migrant
sex workers also applies to other Western European countries. Wagenaar
et al. estimate that in 2012 about 70% of sex workers were from abroad
(2013:86). Their research also indicates that the usual estimate of the
total number of sex workers in the Netherlands is far too high: in the
four major cities they came to a figure of 2,200 (ibid.:24), making a
national overall figure of 20,000 highly unlikely.
Figures on trafficking are also hard to come by because of underreport-
ing and varying definitions of the offence (Mensenhandel, 2007:15–25;
285). The first research on trafficking, published in 1985, could give no
hard figures but maintained there were probably ‘thousands’ of cases
(Buijs and Verbraken, 1985:45). However, the evidence for the esti-
mate in this report is rather impressionistic. The authors noted that
most prostitutes were from ‘the Third World’, mainly from Thailand,
Colombia, the Dominican Republic and Ghana (ibid.:47). Since 2001
the National Reporter on Human Trafficking has provided more accurate
yearly figures based on reports of the STV (since 2006 part of CoMensha)
and police records, and notes an increase from 284 cases in 2001 to
1,222 in 2011 (Mensenhandel, 2012:51). The higher number of victims
is partly due to a real increase in trafficking for sex work, but also to
a broader definition of the offence of trafficking introduced in 2005,
which now includes victims of forced labour in sectors such as horti-
culture and the restaurant business. The new article 237a of the Penal
Code recoded forced prostitution as human trafficking, regardless of
whether national borders had been crossed. It is therefore not surpris-
ing that the most frequent country of origin of victims of trafficking
since then has been the Netherlands itself, according to the reports.
In recent years Nigeria figures second, followed by Bulgaria and Romania
(Mensenhandel, 2010:100).
Joyce Outshoorn 75
A third policy shift?

However, legalisation became contested soon after 2000. The religious
parties, opposed as they had been to lifting the ban on brothels, fought
implementation at the local level, and the orthodox Protestants organ-
ised services to help sex workers exit the sex industry. Its television
corporation regularly featured programmes on trafficking and ‘lover
boys’ (pimps) (Bovenkerk and Pronk, 2007:83). In due course the offi-
cial evaluation of the new law gave rise to the interpretation that it
was not effective in preventing trafficking, ridding the sex industry of
crime or protecting sex workers (Daalder, 2002; 2007). Wagenaar et al.
(2013:66) noted that the implementation of the Act left the monopoly
of shady businessmen in the industry more or less intact. In fact, legal-
isation led to the construction of two sectors of prostitution. There was
the licenced sector, where the situation seemed more or less under con-
trol, with legal workers from the EU and no prostitution of minors
or undocumented women. And then there was the non-licenced sec-
tor, consisting of a variety of sex services, where pimping and coercion
were still occurring and many prostitutes were ‘illegal’ or minors. In the
public perception women working here were of foreign descent, were
often trafficked and worked against their will (Outshoorn, 2014). This
dichotomy was shattered when an important police report showed that
in the licenced sector there was still forced prostitution, also of white
Dutch and other EU women (KLPD, 2008). In hindsight, it can be noted
that legalisation did not anticipate the consequences of EU enlargement
for migration and the sex industry.
These events, along with strong media interest, were a major driver
in changing the framing of prostitution and sex workers from mod-
ern workers into victims of coercion. There were several popular books
published that depicted young women as victims of pimps and traf-
fickers. This gave rise to the moral panic about ‘lover boys’ – usually
of Moroccan or Antillean descent – who lured young white girls into
prostitution, but Bovenkerk et al. (2006), researching the phenomenon,
found few lover boys but plenty of good old-fashioned pimping. Femi-
nists also joined the debate. Researchers of the Red Thread showed that
sex workers still often had to work under confining circumstances and
that their rights had not been improved (Altink and Bokelman, 2006).
The Red Thread supported the legalisation, as did the former activists of
the STV.
Other new voices joined the debate. Karina Schaapman (2005) was an
ex-sex worker who wrote about her personal experiences and rejected
the concept of voluntary prostitution; later she came out in favour
of the criminalisation of clients. As a member of the Amsterdam City

Council, she managed to convince her fellow Social Democrats, includ-
ing the leading alderman Lodewijk Asscher (vice-prime minister in
the ruling cabinet Rutte II), of her views. Younger feminists started
to look to Sweden for its abolitionist position, with its criminalisa-
tion of clients. ‘Sexual slavery’ became a key term; many younger
feminists found the idea that a woman might choose to do sex work
unimaginable.
In the course of these debates, a new discursive framing emerged that
stressed organised crime, human trafficking and the victimisation of
women against the discourse of sex work with its self-determination of
the modern sex worker and migrants coming to make a living in the
sex industry in the Netherlands. This opened up the political opportu-
nity structure for revising the legislation of 1999–2000. New political
demands, such as raising the age of consent from 18 to 21, tackling
the displacement of prostitution from licenced sex clubs to mobile
escort services, the registration of prostitutes and the criminalisation
of clients who use the services of an unregistered prostitute, made it
to the national political agenda. The coming of a new cabinet in 2007
(Balkenende III) with the Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats
and the orthodox Protestant Christian Union, provided the critical junc-
ture. The Christian parties seized the window of opportunity to revise
the legalisation, and the Social Democrats, given the changes in their
Amsterdam branch, were not totally opposed to their ideas.
In 2009 the cabinet came with a new bill (TK, 2009–2010, 32211,
Bestrijding misstanden sex branche) which proposed a licensing regime
for all forms of prostitution with uniform regulation across all commu-
nities (but keeping the option of a local ban open8 ) and the registration
of prostitutes. Clients would be liable to prosecution if they used the
services of undocumented or non-registered workers. The proposal for-
bade non-EU residents to work in the sex industry, as this was assumed
to increase trafficking. After an amendment of the populist PVV, the
bill also included raising the age of consent to work as a prostitute
from 18 to 21 years (TK 2009–2010, 32211 no. 7, 15 April 2010).
The bill was then adopted by the more right-wing cabinet Rutte I
(Liberals/Christian Democrats, with the support of the far right Party
for Freedom). As the Minister of Justice summarised his aims during the
parliamentary debate: ‘By the introduction of a compulsory licensing
system in combination with compulsory registration and the national
register of escort services, an almost closed administrative system is
erected that can improve the fight against abuses in the sex industry and
Joyce Outshoorn 77
the judicial suppression of forced prostitution’ (TK, 2010–2011, 51-8-60,

Bestrijding misstanden sex branche, 10 February 2011).
The bill passed the Second Chamber in March 2011 with a majority
that cut across the religious/secular cleavage in parliament, in contrast
to the voting pattern in 1999. The Social Democrats and the Socialist
Party supported the bill, while they had been in favour of legalisation
before. However, the First Chamber was highly critical of the registration
of sex workers because of the infringement on their privacy, and of the
criminalisation of clients, which it judged to be unfeasible. It was willing
to accept raising the age of consent and the uniform system of licensing
sex businesses across the country (EK, 2012–2013, Bestrijding misstanden
seksbranche, 8 July 2013). The First Chamber does not have the right
of amendment, but circumvented this by passing a motion suggest-
ing splitting the bill by removing the offending clauses but accepting
the licensing system and the higher age of consent. During the final
debate the motion received an overwhelming majority (EK, 2012–2013,
Bestrijding misstanden seksbranche, 8 July 2013). The bill itself was not
put to the vote. In March 2014, a revised bill was introduced in the Sec-
ond Chamber, which observes the intent of the First Chamber motion
(TK, 2013–2014, 33885, Wijziging Wet regulering prostitutie en bestrijding
misstanden seksbranche, 3 March 2014). There is also a parliamentary ini-
tiative bill from orthodox Protestants and some Social Democrats in the
making that intends to criminalise the client. At the time of writing the
future of both is unpredictable.
Prostitution and Europeanisation

When it comes to prostitution, the EU is not the major source of pros-
titution policy, as it falls under the sovereignty of the national state,
but human trafficking has led to a number of EU measures such as the
Council Framework (Council, 2001) and several funding programmes to
stop trafficking, such as STOP and Daphne (Outshoorn, 2015). Prosti-
tution policies are more affected by international treaties, such as the
UN International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Per-
sons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others in Women
(1949) which calls on states not just to fight trafficking but also to elim-
inate prostitution, making it a prime statement of abolitionism. The
Netherlands never signed it, not because it was opposed to its aboli-
tionist intent, as some politicians fond of Dutch liberal toleration like
to think, but because the Dutch state ran a brothel for navy personnel
in one its colony islands in the Dutch West Indies (Haveman, 1995:98).
In 2000 the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime was
agreed in Palermo, along with a Protocol on Trafficking and a Migrant

Smuggling Protocol. It is a matter of debate how far this treaty allows
for voluntary prostitution; states that have legalised prostitution, such
as the Netherlands, have ratified it. The Netherlands is still bound by
an earlier treaty, the International Convention for the Suppression of
the Traffic in Women of Full Age (1933), criminalising ‘procurement’
for prostitution even if this occurred with the consent of the woman
(Wijers, 2001:212).
When it comes to prostitution, we see the reverse of a top-down
Europeanisation process. Dutch feminists have been highly instrumen-
tal in setting the issue of voluntary prostitution and sex work on the
agenda of the Council of Europe and in the European Parliament and
promoting the distinction between prostitution and trafficking. This
was engineered in alliance with femocrats from the DCE and the Min-
istry of Foreign Affairs and Development Aid. In the mid-1980s feminist
MEPs Hedy d’Ancona (Social Democrat) and Nel van Dijk (Greens) set
the issue on the agenda of the European Parliament when d’Ancona
became the rapporteur of the first report of the parliament on violence
against women. The report implied that prostitution could be volun-
tary.9 The notion of voluntary prostitution then found its way into
the innovative Council of Europe report of Dutch resident Licia Brussa
(1991) that later influenced the European Parliament’s 1995 Colombo
Svevo report on trafficking. This latter report incorporated the dis-
tinction between those forced into prostitution and those voluntarily
entering prostitution, and no longer followed a pure victim approach
to trafficking, holding that trafficking is about coercing people into
work.10
Dutch feminists have also been active in the non-governmental
organisations (NGOs) to aid sex workers and prevent trafficking funded
by the EU programmes, such as La Strada (The Street) and Tampep. La
Strada was set up in 1995 to inform Eastern Europe women about traf-
ficking and to aid victims; Tampep (Transnational STD/AIDS Prevention
Among Migrant Prostitutes in Europe) was started in 1997 and aims at
educating sex workers about STDs, working with migrant sex workers to
promote this knowledge. Both NGOs have residence in Amsterdam.
In February 2014 the European Parliament voted on a resolution
which held prostitution to be sexual exploitation. Although it has sym-
bolic value, it is unlikely that the European Council will act on it, as it
would entail extending its jurisdiction to national states, encroaching
on national states’ sovereignty. In light of the outcomes of the recent
elections for the European Parliament, this is not very likely to happen.
Joyce Outshoorn 79
Comparing the two issues
The comparison of the two issues provides us with a puzzle: why was
abortion pacified, and why has prostitution remained contested in the
Netherlands? The most important explanation is the role of the major
political parties. By the end of the 1970s all of them wanted the abor-
tion issue out of the way, as it was complicating coalition formation, so
they were willing to compromise on a new law. This consensus lasted
into the 2000s; the evaluation of the Abortion Act in 2005 offered an
opportunity for the Christian right to restrict the workings of the Act.
However, the Christian Democrats were divided on how far to go, being
aware that the secular parties in the cabinet were totally opposed to
change and that the majority of its own electorate supported the terms
of the Act.11 Moreover, self-determination has become the cornerstone
of the legal position of patients in its concept of informed consent, as
evidenced by recent debates on prenatal screening. Feminist pressure
and broad acceptance of the right of women to decide about an abortion
form the background of this state of affairs.
On prostitution, however, the major parties have shifted ground,
notably the Social Democrats, many of whom have accepted the sexual
slavery discourse about forced prostitution, and the Liberals, who have
shifted to a law-and-order discourse under pressure from the compet-
ing far right PVV, making for a critical juncture and a possible policy
shift. It is also enabled by evidence that legalisation did not reduce
trafficking or eliminate coercion in prostitution itself. The move away
from the sex work discourse has also been driven by media atten-
tion on trafficking and prostitution, continued opposition from the
religious segment of the population, new opposition from younger
feminists, and the Swedish export of client criminalisation. The ambiva-
lent attitude towards migrant sex workers, seen either as victims of
forced prostitution or intruders in Dutch society, continues to fuel the
debate.
Conclusion
In the Netherlands there have been two major policy shifts in abortion
and prostitution policy. The first was caused by the mobilisation of the
religious population and the resulting majority of the new mass religious
parties around 1900. The Morality Laws of 1911 ended the pragmatic
approach prevalent in the Dutch Republic and the Liberal period of the
19th century. The Laws not only erected formal barriers to women’s
bodily autonomy, but the new moral discourse became so hegemonic

that abortion and prostitution became almost unspeakable issues. This
state of affairs ended in the 1960s, when the social and cultural revo-
lution challenged the political establishment, the institutionalisation of
the Verzuiling and the conventional mores. The new dominant discourse
was about ending state intervention in the private lives of its citizens,
and here the loss of the parliamentary majority of the religious parties
in 1967 provided the critical juncture for policy change.
The re-emergence of the feminist movement was crucial to policy
change on both abortion and prostitution. It provided a new framing of
abortion as a women’s issue, instead of being a moral or medical matter,
casting women as knowledgeable agents able to make their own repro-
ductive choices. ‘Baas in eigen buik’ made the issue of power central to
the debate: who decides about an abortion? Due to the intricacies of
the party system and coalition politics the second policy shift only took
place in 1981, but the compromise – that in fact placed the decision into
the hands of the woman – has proved stable and enduring. There are
still minor skirmishes around genetic screening and prenatal selection,
but women’s right to choose has been upheld by those involved in these
debates. It is noteworthy that abortion was legalised before the advent of
new reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilisation and prenatal
diagnostics. The abortion issue continues to set the framing of these
new issues, despite the lack of women’s movement involvement. Migra-
tion played little role in the debates; the higher abortion rates among
migrant women were framed as a policy problem as failing or inade-
quate contraception. Sequence accounts for the lack of mobilisation of
migrant women around the issue: the issue had already been settled
by 1980, abortion services were accessible to all, significant mobilisa-
tion of migrant women occurred later and their organisations had other
priorities.
On prostitution, specialised feminist interest groups have been piv-
otal in developing the sex work discourse in the Netherlands; the strong
alliance with the femocrats in the women’s policy agency enabled them
to make their framing the dominant one until the 2000s. This also
enabled Dutch feminists to spread the sex work discourse in European
institutions. The discourse became the fundament for the legalisation
of prostitution, also due to its compatibility with the market discourse
of the Liberals. The new framing was also agreeable for policymakers,
as it enabled them to develop a new system of regulation. However, the
second policy shift has not been stable. There may well be a third policy
shift in the near future, following the revival of older law-and-order and
Joyce Outshoorn 81
woman-as-victim discourses that frame all sex workers as coerced into

prostitution. Feminists have become divided on the issue, with some
looking at Sweden for the criminalisation of clients, and others still
defending the rights of sex workers. Given its traditional link to the traf-
ficking of women, migration has been at the core of the debates about
prostitution. Debates became enmeshed by the fear of illegal migration,
while at the same time sex workers from the ‘Third World’ were cast
either as victims or as fortune seekers.
The outcome in terms of bodily citizenship differs for the two issues.
There are two limitations to women’s right to abortion: the upper limit
prohibits abortion beyond viability. This is not specified in terms of
weeks of pregnancy, so it is causing some debate with the develop-
ment of medical technologies enhancing viability of the foetus below
24 weeks. This is problematic for women who want prenatal screening,
as many tests currently can only be performed after 19 weeks of preg-
nancy, leaving them a very short time to decide about an abortion in
case of defects of the foetus. The other limit is at the beginning of preg-
nancy, where new technology can detect pregnancy much earlier than
in 1981. The Abortion Act did not cover very early abortions, as preg-
nancy could not yet be established. Now that this has become possible,
it has become an argument for extending the Act to these relatively
simple abortions. However, a woman’s right to decide herself about an
abortion is firmly established in the Netherlands. For prostitution the
outcome is far less positive. The legalisation opened a space for a sex
worker with full citizenship rights, but her social rights have been under-
mined by government and employers in the sex industry, and her civic
rights, notably the right to privacy, are being threatened by the proposed
registration. At the same time the state has not been effective in stop-
ping exploitation of and violence against sex workers; her bodily rights
are not secured.
The use of a new institutionalist approach also enables the drawing
of three additional conclusions. Firstly, it highlights the continuity of
the autonomy of the major cities in the Netherlands: during the period
examined they took their own approach to controlling prostitution,
regardless of the laws and policy of the national government. Secondly,
it draws out the singularity of the period between 1900 and 1967 with its
religious political majority. The period forms a notable discontinuity in
the pragmatic attitudes towards morality prevalent among Liberals and
other secularists. The religious majority hijacked the expanding state to
establish its discourse on morality, effectively silencing debate on abor-
tion and prostitution throughout the period and embodying a major
barrier to any reform. Thirdly, the examination of parliamentary debates

and voting points to the changing nature of the cleavages in the Dutch
political system. The vote on abortion law reform did not follow the
religious/secular cleavage in 1981 because of party discipline, but later
parliamentary skirmishes conformed to the cleavage, with the religious
parties asking all the critical questions in parliament. On the legalisation
of prostitution, the voting pattern exactly followed the religious/secular
divide. However, the religious/secular cleavage became blurred during
the 2000s: three secular parties voted to include early abortion under the
terms of the Abortion Act, making these more difficult; the secular PVV
came out pro-life on the Embryo Act and initiated raising the age of con-
sent for selling sexual services. The Social Democrat and Socialist parties
supported the (ill-fated) bill for greater control of prostitution in 2011.
This lends support to the contention that the religious/secular divide in
Dutch politics has become subsumed by the new national/cosmopolitan
dimension, cross-cutting the usual left/right dimension (Pellikaan et al.,
2007; Kriesi, 2008).
Finally, although the principle of bodily integrity is enshrined in the
Dutch constitution, the autonomy of women and their right to bod-
ily self-determination are not written in stone. The recent debate on
changing the prostitution law shows how easily it could be transgressed
by those who, although intending to counter coercive practices in sex
work, do not take sex workers’ privacy seriously and curb their right to
work. The rise of new reproductive technologies are having major con-
sequences for women, and although the discourse on these topics is in
terms of the right to choose, the debates are conducted in a gender-
neutral discourse that lacks a feminist analysis, which can lead to the
erosion of women’s rights. The struggle for bodily integrity will have to
be fought anew with every new development.
Notes
1. Minutes of the meetings of WVE 1979–1988 (Archives Joyce Outshoorn).
2. From Henshawe, S.K., S. Singh and T. Haas (1999) ‘The Incidence of abor-
tion’, International Family Planning Perspectives, 25, Supplement, 30–38, in
Sedgh, Gilda, Stanley K. Henshawe, Susheela Singh, Akinrinola Bankole
and Johanna Drescher (2007) ‘Legal Abortion Worldwide: Incidence and
Recent Trends’, International Family Planning Perspectives, 33, 3 (September),
106–116. Authors note that the Dutch rate has increased due to the rise
among ethnic minority groups (p. 109) and that Belgium, Switzerland and
Germany now have lower abortion rates.
3. Saharso’s (2005:259) interpretation of the parliamentary debate as construct-
ing ‘a cultural preference for sons . . . as an irrational preference, springing
Joyce Outshoorn 83
from a backward sexist culture, and minority women got depicted as vic-
tims of that culture’, is not borne out by the parliamentary record of the
debate. The Minister of Health’s major concern was to prevent the Christian
Democrats and the orthodox Protestants inserting restrictive definitions
of the ‘emergency situation’ the Abortion Act requires for obtaining an
abortion, and to stop the orthodox Political Reformed Party (Staatkundig
Gereformeerde Partij – SGP) and the far right framing the issue in terms of
‘foreign cultural elements’ (TK 42, 3388).
4. E-mail Leontine Bijleveld, one of the leaders of WVE, 14 January 2010.
5. The debate about the licence has been protracted, as the ministers of health
in the 2000s have been from different political parties. Els Borst (D66 – Social
Liberal) was in favour, but a later successor, junior minister Clémence Ross-
van Dorp (CDA) was opposed. The Council of State ruled in favour of Women
on Waves in 2006. For an overview, see http://www.emancipatie.nl/home/
Dossiers/Dossiers_op_alfabet/Dossiers_A/Abortus/, date accessed 29 January
2010.
6. Interview was held on 10 July 2010.
7. Botman et al. (2001) make no mention of the issue, nor does the newsletter
of the platform organisation Tije International (1998–2006).
8. This had been a contested point during the parliamentary debates in 1999,
when the Christian Democrats tried to circumvent the Dutch constitution,
which states that the Penal Code applies to the entire state territory, thus
excluding local opt-outs (Outshoorn, 2004a).
9. Interview with Nel van Dijk, Amsterdam, 31 May 2004. Van Dijk started her
work in Brussels in 1984.
10. European Parliament, Proceedings of the Committee for Civil Liberties
and Internal Affairs, DOC-NE/rr/288/288916 (14 December 1995) (Dutch
version).
11. As abortion is no longer an important issue in the Netherlands, there are
no recent opinion polls. In 1989 – the last year figures are available on party
choice and abortion – 71% of the electorate of the Christian Democrats more
or less accepted the terms of the Abortion Act, and there is little reason to
suppose that this support has diminished since then.
4
Contesting Portugal’s Bodily
Citizenship
Ana Prata
Introduction
The woman’s body is a site of contestation and fundamental to

understanding various political power struggles. In Portugal, the histor-
ical legacy of a 40-year dictatorship, the democratisation process and
Europeanisation have impacted how the state has aimed to control
women’s bodies, and how the women’s movement has reclaimed the
female body as a site of contestation and resistance. Therefore, I trace
how body and bodily citizenship issues have emerged in the context
of women’s movement struggles for autonomy, health and reproductive
rights in Portugal. Bodily citizenship only exists when ‘the individual
is autonomous and free from external intervention in relation to deci-
sions about her (or his) body’ (Outshoorn et al., 2012:118). National
states have had a long-standing interest in ‘vital politics’ around health,
reproduction practices and rights about ‘life’ (Rose, 2007). Likewise, the
Portuguese state has repeatedly intervened to curtail women’s autonomy
on decisions about their bodies. It has regulated the female body, and
most of these policies have been aimed at women’s sexuality and their
procreation capacity.
I focus on two ‘body issues’ that have emerged from the agendas
of second wave feminism: abortion and prostitution. I take an his-
torical and discursive approach that emphasises how institutions and
policy legacies have shaped current policies. I look at how women’s
organisations are framing the issue compared to, for example, parlia-
mentary members, and assess the framing contests between different
political actors (Ferree et al., 2002; Gamson and Modigliani, 1989). It is
important to know what dominant frames about the body and bodily
citizenship have emerged during the different debates and the careers
84
Ana Prata 85
of different frames over time. In this chapter, I assess how the abortion
and prostitution issues and policies have evolved historically and pro-
vide an overview of Portugal’s political system before focusing on the
development of the issues.
Historical legacy of issues
Abortion
In the 18th and 19th centuries in Portugal, the issue of abortion was
linked to Roman laws regarding ‘attempts against the life of children’,
such as infanticide and ‘suppression of child delivery’ (Sá, 1992:83).
Abortion was equated with these, and its criminalisation and punish-
ment were similar, although not clearly stated until the 19th century
(Sá, 1994:71). It was during the liberal period and under the first Crimi-
nal Code of 1852 that legislation on abortion was clearly defined and a
hierarchy of punishments established (Anica, 2010; Sá, 1992:86). Begin-
ning in 1852 the punishment for abortion was differentiated and based
on motivation, not the gender of the perpetrator. In order for the judicial
system to be effective in determining who performed abortions, forensic
medicine had to develop, which occurred as part of an overall process
of the medicalisation of society and the pathologisation of crime in the
19th century (Anica, 2010:217; Sá, 1992:83).
There are no estimates regarding the practice of abortion in the 19th
century, but in rural areas it was common (Cunhal, 1997; Almeida
2004), as was the use of the wheel – a roda – a procedure by which chil-
dren could be left at institutions anonymously. As Sá argues, ‘Compared
with the rest of southern Europe, Portugal is striking for its homogene-
ity . . . observed in the fact that the wheel was the national instrument
of abandonment, used widely . . . even before its legalization in 1783’
(Sá, 1994:83).
At the end of the 19th century, the Portuguese feminist movement
began to develop when groups of cultured women from the elite
started to emerge from the literary salons of the time. Nonetheless,
its origins are diverse and connected to a variety of other movements:
republicanism, masonry, monarchism, pacifism (Esteves, 2001:88). The
neo-Malthusian movement also had a brief expression in Portugal at
the beginning of the 20th century, and some of its supporters advocated
the emancipation of sexuality over procreation and started to divulge
information about some contraceptive methods in the newspapers
(Tavares, 2003:14). However, the issues of contraception and abortion
were only rarely addressed by the feminist movement (Esteves, 1991).
86 Contesting Portugal’s Bodily Citizenship
This is similar to what happened in other countries during the first wave
feminism, where feminist militancy included the exaltation of mater-
nity. A discourse analysis of the few instances when activists mention
what leads women to abortion finds that they consider society to blame
for not giving women a fair chance (economically, socially, politically,
educationally), and as such, society ends up condemning those that are,
after all, its main victims. Thus, women endure a double victimisation,
first by society that pushes them into an abortion, and second by the
authorities, who only punish women, not men, for the procedure.
In the 1920s, when the feminist movement was waning, a pro-natalist
movement of Catholic bishops and doctors started a campaign against
neo-Malthusianism. In 1929, only three years into the dictatorship, sell-
ing contraceptives was prohibited and ‘family planning’ came to be
considered subversive (Tavares, 2003:15). The pro-natalist policy of the
Salazar regime reinforced women’s biology and the female body as key
determinants of how women should ‘serve the nation’. Salazar’s slogan
a woman for the home was part of the regime’s underlying philosophy
of ‘God, Nation and Family’. In Portugal, population policies were con-
sidered a nationalist issue as much as they were elsewhere. As Pimentel
argues, increasing birth rates were ‘connected to the goal of mainte-
nance and development of the race. But unlike the Italian fascism that
demanded a population increase for expansionist purposes, the Estado
Novo wanted to keep birth rates at high levels for defensive and ideo-
logical reasons connected to the Catholic Church doctrine’ (2001:64).
The Portuguese regime ideology was different from regimes with a bio-
logical/racist concept of racial purity. For example, eugenic measures
or abortions were unthinkable both to the regime and to the Catholic
Church. The goal of ‘quality’ for the Portuguese population was to be
achieved by decreasing alcoholism, diseases and infant mortality (ibid.).
Pro-natalist incentives were also provided by legislation that excluded
women from the workforce and confined them to the home and to
the mother’s role (Neves and Calado, 2001). Women’s work was regu-
lated through specific statutes dictating that work had to be done in
accordance with ‘special conditions and in conformity with morality,
physical well-being, maternity, domestic life, education, and the social
good’, which hindered women’s independence and their entry into the
labour force.1 Despite this strong pro-natalist policy of the regime, most
women from the lower social strata worked outside the home because of
economic strain.2 Many of these women had to reconcile that activity
with a strong ideological, cultural, political and religious push towards
domesticity and maternity. Births in Portugal were always higher than
Ana Prata 87
in the other European countries (in the 1930s and 1940s), which shows
that the pro-natalist ideology of the regime and the Catholic Church
doctrine did indeed have an effect (Pimentel, 1999:484).
The pro-natalist policy of the regime was also evident in the
regime’s criminalisation of abortion, which had been a punishable crime
since 1852 involving 2–8 years of imprisonment.3 This criminalisation
remained unaltered in the Criminal Code for more than a century
until the legal reform of the 1980s (Pirralha, 2007:55). Nonetheless,
laws criminalising abortion were never rigidly enforced in Portugal as
they were in other countries (e.g. Spain), and even with widespread
abortion practice, only a few cases led to imprisonment. Since mod-
ern contraception was not available to most women (Freire, 2010:241),
illegal abortions affected the lives of many Portuguese women from all
social strata, forcing them to turn to underground abortion performed
by midwives. Abortion rates were high, and women often underwent
the procedure more than once during their lifetime (ibid.:255; Horta
et al., 1975). This shows that there was an ‘alternative morality of ordi-
nary people at odds with the severe prohibitions of church and state’
(Beadman, 2002:56). Women were, in fact, using their bodies to resist
the pro-natalist ideology (Prata, 2010:582) and reclaiming control over
their bodies by undergoing abortions. Despite high abortion rates and
the serious health consequences associated with the practice, the issue
was shrouded in secrecy.4 This echoed what occurred in other European
countries, where abortion remained a largely taboo subject for many
years (Barreiro Pérez-Pardo, 2000; Heinen, 1992).
Prostitution
The Portuguese authorities have tried since the 19th century to socially
control female prostitution. The street was a shared physical space
between ‘decent’ and ‘ indecent’ women (Silva, 2007:794). Therefore,
the first system of policy regulation on prostitution occurred at the
municipal level in 1853,5 and it was followed by other municipal reg-
ulations with the intent to take prostitutes out of sight, off the streets,
to limit their presence and provide sanitary control (Santos, 1982).
These legal efforts were put in place to prevent contact between pros-
titutes and ‘decent women’, since the former could ‘infect, corrupt, and
contaminate’ the latter (Silva, 2007:794).
The discourse in the 19th century regarded the prostitute as ‘use-
ful’, not as a victim, as long as she was controlled (Guinote e Oliveira,
1989:341). The metaphor of ‘disease’ was used by local authorities to
frame the prostitute as one that needs to be contained in order not to
infect the ‘healthy’ and the ‘decent’, and mostly to deem her invisible
to those she could corrupt. The ‘invisibility’ of the prostitute is only
for some but not others, since the prostitute has to be available for
the sexual needs of men (and their perversions) and to serve as a tar-
get of social control by authorities (Silva, 2007:794). The profile of the
19th -century prostitute is a migrant from the countryside to the city,
illiterate, a maid, a domestic or a seamstress (Pais, 1983a:949). However,
some of the regulatory efforts put in place by the authorities to con-
trol prostitution were met with some resistance and in some cases did
not lead to the expected results. They led instead to the segregation of
prostitution in some neighbourhoods, where the activity was tolerated
without being legalised (Silva, 2007:795). By the end of the 19th century,
the discourse on prostitution became more open and less moralising, as
evidenced by the increasing centrality of the value of work and liberal
ideology (Bastos, 1997; Silva, 2007). Nevertheless, authorities still legit-
imised themselves and their role in the social control of prostitution by
claiming that they safeguarded the health and moral fabric of society, at
a time when the discourse on prostitution was still framed as a conse-
quence of the moral decay, criminality and vagrancy that exist in cities
(Pais, 1983:951). At the beginning of the 20th century, prostitution was
‘a socially tolerated reality even legitimised by authorities’ as long as it
followed the regulations (Bastos, 1997:38).
With the political change that occurred in the 1920s and 1930s, as the
country took a political turn towards dictatorship (1926–1974), the soci-
ological phenomenon of prostitution became dependent on the overall
social and political changes going on at the time (Silva, 2007:796; Pais
1983:939). In the first decades of Estado Novo the repression of prosti-
tution and its moral condemnation intensified and was connected to a
reconstruction of the prostitute as ‘a disease’ and as ‘a perigosidade social’
(a social menace of sorts) (Bastos, 1997:38; Silva, 2007:796).
Prostitutes and brothels had to be registered, and prostitutes had
to undergo regular medical exams and compulsory treatment when
infected with venereal diseases. Unlike the body of the prostitute,
the ‘body of the client’ was never the target of any state regulation.
In authoritarian Portugal, the prostitute was much more stigmatised
by the state than in previous periods (Silva, 2007:796), but it was also
seen in conflicting terms. On the one hand, prostitution was a social
institution of public service, which was useful and tolerated because
it helped protect the honour of ‘decent women’ from the dangers of
male sexual prowess. On the other hand, prostitutes were stigmatised
and prostitution was perceived as a ‘necessary evil’ that needed to be
Ana Prata 89
regulated and controlled in order not to contaminate married life (Freire,

2010:173; Tavares, 2008:437). Thus, during the Salazar regime, prostitu-
tion belonged to the realm of the unspoken and shameful, but also to
that of erotic fantasies and sexual expression, which was a realm denied
to wives but possible with prostitutes (Freire, 2010).
The regulatory system for prostitution was in place for more than
a century, until the European abolitionist movement and the Interna-
tional Abolitionist Federation found its supporters in Portugal in the
1920s. At that time, some women started to mobilise and to question the
state’s regulation of prostitution. Activists in the Portuguese Abolition-
ist League were involved in organising two congresses (1926 and 1929)
in which abolishing prostitution was the core demand (Esteves, 2006).
Prostitution was seen in the movement as a form of slavery, which was
incompatible with human dignity (Santos, 1982). This was one of the
first women’s groups to insert into the discursive field regarding the
prostitute the idea that the prostitute is not just a ‘victim that needs
to controlled, but also “saved” (in order to be socially reintegrated)’.
Despite these demands, only in the post-war period do we see the first
legal changes towards the criminalisation of prostitution. In 1949, a
new law prohibited the licensing of new prostitutes and new legalised
brothels,6 and in 1962 a law decree demanded the closing of legalised
brothels and the seizure of their property. There are three main causes
that led to the changes towards deregulation and increasing criminalisa-
tion in the post-war period: the influence of the abolitionist movement;
the ratification of international conventions and the mention of the
1949 UN Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons
and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others; and the aban-
donment of the regulatory system of prostitution by other European
countries. This new 1962 decree forbade the practice of prostitution
and punished prostitutes with imprisonment and other sanctions.7 It
also criminalised those facilitating, promoting or exploiting prostitu-
tion. At that time, the dictatorship became more interventionist and
its legislation regarding prostitution more repressive. The regime’s dis-
course on the issue was that it was a public health problem. Nonetheless,
this institutional repression was always counterbalanced with some pop-
ular acceptance of prostitutes (Duarte, 2010). In fact, following this
criminalisation prostitution practice did not decrease; only the working
conditions of prostitutes were impacted. Prostitutes were now more vul-
nerable than before to violence, sexual assault and blackmail (oftentimes
at the hands of the police and in return for their freedom) (Oliveira,
2004:32).
In conclusion, during authoritarian times both abortion and prosti-

tution issues were affected by political changes and regime policies and
ideologies. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the
20th century, the discourse on both abortion and prostitution softens.
While the 1852 abortion legislation remained unaltered by the regime,
prostitution was only further criminalised in the post-war period. How-
ever, the common thread between the two issues might be the regime’s
lack of interest in strictly enforcing criminalisation. Although the regime
intervened formally through legislation on women’s bodily citizenship,
both abortion and prostitution practices continued and were widespread
throughout the regime. Both issues were part of an ‘alternative morality’
that existed alongside the regime, and one that could count at least on
the regime’s complacency.
The Portuguese political system
Portugal’s political system has changed considerably in the last 50 years.

Following a 40-year authoritarian regime (from 1926 to 1974), the coun-
try experienced the following: a military coup and a tumultuous demo-
cratic transition (1974–1976), its first democratic constitution (1976),
the consolidation of its democracy, a decolonisation process (and over
a half million retornados), and entry into the European Economic Com-
munity (EEC) in the mid-1980s. After about a decade and a half of what
can be described as a period of political stability (from the 1990s to the
mid-2000s), the global economic crisis and the austerity measures have
led to a recent wave of protests and to a decline in citizens’ confidence in
political institutions and leadership, and a certain disillusionment with
the European Union project.
The authoritarian Salazar regime, also known as New State (Estado
Novo), declared Portugal a ‘unitary, corporatist republic’ in which the
government regulated labour–management relations, prohibited polit-
ical parties and advised voters to join the only approved party – the
National Union. The executive and legislative powers were held by
the prime minister. There was only one chamber in the legislature, the
National Assembly, which was subject to elections always won by the
official party. The Estado Novo ‘emphasised order over freedom’ and tried
to neutralise societal discontent and dissent through censorship, propa-
ganda and political imprisonment (Amaral et al., 2014). The regime was
highly nationalist and ideologically conservative, with a strong Roman
Catholic traditionalism (Pimentel, 1999). The regime defended coloni-
sation up to the mid-1970s, despite the economic, military and social
Ana Prata 91
costs of the colonial wars and the increasing disapproval of the interna-
tional community. The Portuguese military was aware that wars could
be fought but not won, and it would be from within the military that
the drive for change would occur.
On 25 April 1974, a non-violent military coup, also known as the
revolution of the carnations, led to the overthrow of the authoritar-
ian regime and to the beginning of the democratisation process in the
country. Internationally, Portugal became the driver to the ‘third wave
of democratization’ (Huntington, 1991), a wave that swept to other
Southern European countries. The process of democratic transition was
initiated with the revolution in 1974 and the threshold for democratic
consolidation was crossed in the 1980s (Linz and Stepan, 1996:125;
Pridham, 1984:16). Portugal’s democratic transition was characterised
by popular mobilisations welcoming the new democracy, but also by
political groups attempting to overthrow it. Those attempts were mostly
made by the extreme left and were highly visible during the ‘hot sum-
mer of 1975’. The transition was characterised by a purge of the state
apparatus and by dramatic political conflicts and revolutionary mobil-
isations, including the seizing of much property (Bermeo, 1997; Costa
Pinto, 1998; Fishman, 1990:439; Huntington, 1991:113). In the first two
years of the transition, the country experienced a turbulent period of
provisional governments and a disintegrated state. After that first stage
of rupture, the Portuguese path took on a more evolutionary trajectory,
similar to that of Spain, and moderation prevailed despite some revo-
lutionary rhetoric (Opello, 1985). Nonetheless, the degree of political
instability and turmoil in the early years of transition was high. At the
end of 1975, some moderate military elements trampled a radical leftist
coup and were able to restore order to the country. In 1976, the Con-
stitutional Assembly rectified the new constitution, elections were held
and a minority government was put in place. From the late 1970s to the
mid-1980s and despite some volatile coalition governments and sev-
eral constitutional reforms, the country was able to meet the criteria
for entry into the EEC in 1986 and democracy was finally consolidated.
Contributing to the democratic consolidation and to a period of stability
was the election (and later re-election) of the first majority government
since 1974 – the Social Democratic government of Cavaco Silva.
In conclusion, Portugal evolved from an authoritarian regime and a
political system with the military involved in politics, to what it is now
a semi-presidential and multi-party parliamentary representative sys-
tem. Portugal is today a consolidated liberal democracy with regular and
free elections that determine the composition of the government (Jalali,
2007:20). The electoral system uses the d’Hondt method, a proportional

representation system that allocates seats to parties in proportion to
the number of votes received, and does not favour electoral majorities
(Lobo, 1996:1085). Two major parties have alternated in power in the
last decades, the Socialists (PS) and the Social Democrats (PSD). This has
happened at times through coalition governments with either the more
conservative Popular Party (PP) or the Communist Coalition (CDU). The
legislative power is vested in both the government and the parliament,
while the executive power is held by the Council of Ministers – a cabinet
led by the prime minister. The judicial branch is formally independent
of the executive and legislative powers. The president of the Republic, in
Portugal’s semi-presidential system, is vested with an important political
role, including cabinet appointment and dismissal, veto power, dissolu-
tion of parliament, referring legislative bills to judicial review and even
agenda setting (Lobo and Neto, 2009).
Since 2010, Portugal’s main political challenges have been connected
to the economic crisis the country is facing. The government has cut
most social benefits and public spending (in programmes, in salaries and
in lay-offs), while it has engaged in tax hikes in order to meet austerity
guidelines. These harsh measures have been met with disapproval by
many sectors of Portuguese society and led to a wave of protests in 2012
and to dissatisfaction with political institutions and its leaders (domestic
and at the EU level).
Bodily citizenship and the abortion issue: The first

abortion proposals, and law n.6/84 (1977–1984)
In tracing the life cycle of the abortion issue since democratisation,

I selected two key moments based on main political debates and policies.
The first spans the period from the first law proposals on abortion up to
the 1984 abortion decriminalisation law. The second key period covers
the two abortion referenda and the 2007 abortion on demand law.
Women’s organisations were the first political actors to demand abor-
tion rights during democratisation. However, selecting abortion rights as
a grievance was a contested process both between and within women’s
groups. This process was strongly influenced by the shifting politi-
cal environment of democratisation, the autonomy and organisational
strategies of women’s groups, and the history of illegal abortion in the
country (Prata, 2010).
In Portugal the second wave of feminism arrived only in the late
1970s because of the authoritarian regime. Research on civil society
Ana Prata 93
in Southern Europe’s new democracies demonstrates that the legacy of

long periods of authoritarianism led to weaker civil societies (Linz and
Stepan, 1996; Diamandouros and Gunther, 2001), which is in contrast
to Western European democracies, where authoritarianism never existed
(e.g., the Netherlands or Sweden) or lasted only for a few decades (e.g.,
Germany and Italy). The state-sponsored corporatist institutions put in
place during the Salazar regime were not intended to mobilise or gen-
erate political consciousness in the Portuguese citizenry, but rather to
control and to create a sense of political apathy in its citizens (Schmitter,
1999; Fernandes, 2014). Despite the legacy of authoritarianism that
might have delayed the emergence of a Portuguese women’s move-
ment or even a strong civil society, the democratisation process did
create conditions for the rise of women’s organisations. In Portugal, the
democratisation process led to unique opportunities for social move-
ments to raise new issues and to influence the process of democratic
construction (Costa Pinto, 1998). Women’s organisations were part
of this wave of mobilisation released by the democratisation process.
Women had been part of the underground resistance to the regime
along various fronts, but most organisations only emerged after the
coup in the political context of democratic transition. The 1974 rev-
olution represented a critical juncture in the political participation of
women, who were now involved in social movements, political parties,
strikes, unions and so on (Tavares, 2000:26). This political involve-
ment led to the emergence of several women’s organisations by the end
of the 1970s, and many activists had double militancy. The commit-
ment of these activists to different political organisations was a main
source of tension within the women’s movement (Magalhães, 1998) and
one that contributed to a delay in abortion grievance formation. The
process was at first highly contentious, since not all women’s groups
wanted to prioritise the abortion issue during democratisation. Two
main reasons account for that delay. Firstly, during democratic transi-
tions women’s organisations typically voice multiple demands (Alvarez,
1989; Prata, 2010; Tavares, 2000), so there were challenges of issue selec-
tion. As one activist pointed out, ‘At the time [1975] the Women’s
Liberation Movement had . . . not just one issue, one issue . . . that was
impossible, all issues!’8 The second reason was related to the type of
transition the country experienced. Portugal’s revolutionary type of
transition led many activists to challenge the appropriateness of press-
ing for abortion rights (a highly contested issue) during a period of
political instability (Prata, 2010:581). At the time, abortion decrimi-
nalisation was deemed by some women’s organisations and by some
double militants as too divisive and as an issue that did not help the
democratic process. The lack of autonomy of most women’s organisa-
tions also contributed to the sidelining of the abortion rights agenda
by the movement.9 Only by the late 1970s, when most of the politi-
cal instability had dissipated, did the women’s movement espouse the
abortion rights agenda. In the early 1980s, the illegal abortion problem
remained unsolved, so the abortion rights agenda gained priority and
began to unify and generate consensus among the various strands of
the movement.
In the 1970s, illegal abortion was still a generalised practise and
abortion-related hospitalisations and deaths were common, thus repre-
senting a public health crisis (Silva, 1998:53; Tavares, 2003:25; Expresso,
2 January 1975). The seriousness of the social and health consequences
of illegal abortion, particularly among poor and working class women,
was a contributing factor in women’s organisations’ selection of the
issue. In addition, two abortion trials led to an increase in the polit-
ical saliency of abortion criminalisation.10 These trials captured the
attention of movement actors, government leaders, policymakers, the
media and the public (Prata, 2010:585). This happened at a time when
women’s collective agency was still nascent and women’s groups were
still isolated from each other and pursued few joint actions (Ferreira,
1998). So, abortion trials were moments of event-induced mobilisa-
tion for many women’s organisations. Activists from ideologically dis-
tinct feminist backgrounds were now able to reach agreement. This
was important for enacting joint framing strategies and for mobilis-
ing collectively for the first time as a movement regarding the abortion
decriminalisation grievance.
The first trial was of journalist and activist Maria Antónia Palla.
In 1976, Palla aired on TV an illegal abortion being done at a clinic on
the outskirts of Lisbon. The second trial involved a young woman, Con-
ceição Massano, who was on trial for having an illegal abortion. Beyond
the prosecution itself, which was rare in Portugal, there were specific
features that contributed to the salience of this trial within women’s
organisations and the news media. The police investigation that led to
Massano’s arrest outraged activists and the public, since it was seen as an
invasion of privacy and personal freedoms (although she was acquitted).
Some analogies can be drawn between Massano’s trial and other trials
going on in Europe at the time. In Massano’s trial ‘class issues’ emerged
as the dominant interpretive framing of the trial’s injustice. Women’s
organisations helped shape and reinforce views that criminalisation of
abortion was unfair, while defending the worthiness of its most frequent
Ana Prata 95
victims – poor and working class women. Women’s groups selected

social class and social justice, not gender, as their main injustice frame.
This specific strategic framing was intended to resonate with a wider
audience and was grounded in the socialist/Marxist political culture
of democratisation (Prata, 2010:585). This framing also pleased many
double-militant activists that were linked to leftist parties, in which
‘social class’ was a preferred frame compared to gender. In fact, both
race and gender were less prevalent than references to social class when
women’s organisations addressed the impact of abortion criminalisa-
tion. The framing about the ‘desperate’ women that need abortions due
to socio-economic reasons also did not single out migrant or minor-
ity women as having a particular group challenge regarding abortion.
In fact, migrant and minority women were completely absent from
abortion discourse.
Following the abortion trials, women’s organisations engaged in sev-
eral collective actions to demand abortion reform. As Silva argues,
‘women [in Portugal] mobilised significantly for abortion legalization,
and if parties were also defending that right it was, in fact, because
many women had mobilised and tried to make sure that right, and that
grievance, was assumed by the political parties’ (1998:52). It took eight
years after the fall of the dictatorship for abortion reform to be debated
in parliament. The Communist Party (PCP) presented for the first time
in 1982 a law on abortion decriminalisation but it was rejected.
Several political constraints led to the rejection of the Commu-
nist abortion proposal. Firstly, the governing coalition (AD) did not
support the bill. This coalition included the largest party, the Social
Democrats (PSD), and the right-wing Christian Democrats (Partido do
Centro Democrático e Social (CDS)). The CDS always adopted the official
position of the Church on the matter, so they totally opposed abortion
decriminalisation. Once the Christian Democrats acknowledged that
there was support for abortion reform among the Social Democrats, the
party fought back. They promptly threatened the Social Democrats that
if they voted in favour of the Communist proposal, the coalition would
cease and the government would fall. This was a serious political threat
due to the coalition nature of the government. The Social Democrats,
who initially supported abortion decriminalisation, backed down and
demanded that its MPs vote against it and imposed voting party disci-
pline (Expresso, 23 October 1982). Within the print media, the dominant
interpretation was that the Social Democrats had succumbed to the pres-
sures of the Christian Democrats and partisan politics had won.11 Two
years later, the Socialists won the elections and overturned the previous
centre/right Democratic Alliance (AD) and brought back the abortion

bill. Although their law proposal was much more restrictive than the
one presented by the Communists, an abortion decriminalisation law
was approved on January 26, 1984.
Abortion reform enters the governmental political agenda with the
Socialists, a party that did not always have a clear position on the abor-
tion issue, mostly due to internal divisions and a catch-all party strategy.
The Socialists’ law proposal was more strict than the one presented by
the Communists two years earlier. Decriminalisation was on only three
grounds: physical and psychological health of the mother (determined
by a doctor); deformity of the foetus; and when a pregnancy was due to
rape (until 12 weeks). The PS proposal excluded socio-economic grounds
and was met with disapproval by most women’s organisations, who con-
sidered it too restrictive and inadequate to fully decriminalise abortion.
Nonetheless, the Socialist abortion law proposal was approved and led
to the law n.6/84.
Since the abortion trials in 1979, the Portuguese women’s movement’s
top priority had been abortion reform. Women’s and feminist organisa-
tions began mobilising during democratisation and in solidarity with
those facing abortion trials. The Campanha Nacional pelo Aborto e Con-
tracepção (CNAC – National Campaign for the Right to Abortion and
Contraception) and the Comissão para a Legalização do Aborto (CLA –
Commission for Legal Abortion) were the two main women’s platforms
promoting abortion and contraception issues. The tactics of Portuguese
women’s and feminist organisations were frequently inspired by actions
tried by women’s organisations in other countries, particularly in France
(due to close networks with French activists). This happened not only
during the process of abortion claim-making, but also later in pres-
suring legislators. Women’s organisations demanded legal reform on
abortion in tandem with an overall contraception/sexuality law reform.
These organisations also framed the abortion issue predominantly as
a matter of social justice (‘safe abortions are only available to those
with more economic means’); women’s rights (‘affects particularly
Portuguese women’); women’s health rights (‘about 2,000 women die’);
and developmental terms (‘a truly democratic society does not have
repressive, unconstitutional and outdated laws’). Among MPs, the dom-
inant frames used during parliamentary debates about abortion were
‘social justice’ frames and ‘developmental’ frames. Abortion legislation
in more developed countries was mentioned as a useful template for
recent democratisers such as Portugal. Overall, frames that involved the
‘woman’s body’ only rarely appeared in the floor debates. In fact, most
Ana Prata 97
women’s organisations and most parliamentary members played down

the use of this frame and focused on social justice.
Women’s and feminist organisations mobilised significantly and used
different tactics to pressure legislators (e.g. letters, demonstrations, lob-
bying). For the most part they were able to be heard in the media,
which extensively covered their actions. Most women’s organisations
were indeed sceptical that the new abortion law would contribute in
any way to the liberalisation of access to abortion and worried that a
strict decriminalisation law would keep abortion illegal. One day after
the Socialist proposal was presented to parliament, the abortion decrim-
inalisation law was approved. Party voting discipline was determinant
in the approval of the Socialist proposal and leading to the law n.6/84.12
This law decriminalised abortion up to 12 weeks of pregnancy in cases
of rape, foetal malformations and when the psychological and physical
health of the mother was in question. This strict abortion law would be
in effect in Portugal until 2007.
The abortion referenda and the implementation of law

16/2007 (1996–2013)
Women’s organisations soon started to observe a lack of real imple-

mentation of the n.6/84 abortion law in public hospitals. As early as
1985, the Information/Documentation Women’s Group (IDM) argued
in a public letter:
the abortion problem is not solved because the decriminalization

only allows for therapeutic, eugenic, and rape as grounds for abor-
tion. Besides, by allowing the medical class to be conscientious
objectors, the law opened the door for the Doctors’ Association to
take a stance against legal abortions. This impeded the organisation
of services at the hospitals, which could satisfy the demand for abor-
tions covered by the law. This way, abortion is as before, it is still
done illegally.
(Tavares, 2003:31)
By the early 1990s women’s groups, counter-movement organisations,

doctors and politicians were aware that the abortion law lacked imple-
mentation. Since abortion on demand was still illegal, Portuguese
women continued to have underground abortions within the country
or went abroad to clinics in Spain’s bordering towns. Legal abortions
in public hospitals were rare, thus confirming some of the concerns
addressed during the 1984 parliamentary debate, that doctors had too
much discretionary power in implementing abortion legislation.
Politically, the Social Democratic governance also contributed to
stalling the process of abortion reform until the mid-1990s. The abortion
issue returned to parliament only in 1996 with a couple of law propos-
als regarding abortion on demand. The first law proposal (n.177/VII)
was at the hands of the Communists, the first party to resurrect the
issue in parliament after a decade, and consisted of abortion decrimi-
nalisation at women’s request until 12 weeks. The second was by the
more progressive faction of the Socialist Party – the Socialist Youth (JS)
(n.236/VII). Nonetheless, both proposals were rejected in parliament.
Two years later, another JS proposal (abortion on request up to ten
weeks) was voted on and this time approved in parliament (Expresso,
17 January 1998). Nonetheless, this result was later de-authorised in a
political agreement between the prime minister and the leader of the
opposition. Both agreed on having instead a national referendum on
the issue, and this political manoeuvre undermined what the parliament
had approved, causing concern among women’s organisations.13
Socialists and Social Democrats decided that their parties would not
take an official stance on the referendum, relegating the decision to their
individual constituents. According to Pirralha, most of the Portuguese
electorate was accustomed to the centrality of political parties and some-
what dependent on them for guidance on such decisions. The fact that
the two main parties did not take a stance on the first national ref-
erendum of the Portuguese democracy contributed to the electorate’s
confusion and disengagement (2007:178). But it also created a political
opportunity for movements to emerge and participate more actively in
gathering support for their cause in ways that would not have been pos-
sible if the political parties had been more active in mobilising (Baum
and Freire, 2001).
At the forefront of those favouring abortion decriminalisation and
the ‘Yes’ vote in the referendum were feminist and women’s organisa-
tions. Most of the women’s groups that had been involved in the 1984
debate had already demobilised in the 1990s, mostly because the polit-
ical agenda of abortion reform had been absent from the parliament
for more than a decade. The referendum would mobilise some of those
activists back to the ‘Yes’ to decriminalisation camp. The strategy of
the ‘Yes’ campaign was to create only one movement organisation that
would unite disparate organisations and political parties. The goal was
to keep the ‘Yes’ campaign a united front. However, the strategy of unity
under just one umbrella organisation posed several challenges. The
movement became too big to generate consensus, to function effectively
Ana Prata 99
or without conflict (Pirralha, 2007). On the side of the ‘No’ vote cam-
paign and those that opposed decriminalisation of abortion was the
United Pro-life group, which had been involved in a candlelight vigil
during parliamentary debates. The other organisations did not have a
national range but had regional support in the north of the country.
Organisationally, the ‘No’ campaign had more flexibility because it kept
organisations separate, unlike the ‘Yes’ campaign that tried to congre-
gate within the Yes for Tolerance the different factions of the pro-choice
movement, although not successfully. In terms of financing, organisa-
tion and mobilisation, the anti-decriminalisation movement was better
structured than the pro-choice movement, mostly due to the involve-
ment of the Catholic Church, its media organisations and its networks
(Alves et al., 2009:6). And as Baum and Freire pointed out, the Catholic
Church was the ‘most influential actor’ in Portuguese civil society in the
1998 campaign (2001:23).
During the first national referendum, women’s and feminist organisa-
tions framed the issue of abortion decriminalisation mostly in terms
of ‘ending the illegal abortion practice’ and ‘health concerns’. With
both frames, women enter into the discourse through a victimisation
lens. Abortion was perceived as a violent act that victimised women,
and underground abortions added to that victimisation process. Women
were portrayed as ‘desperate’ and as victims of their own circumstances,
thus ‘forced’ into abortion. Examples of this type of discourse permeate
the media and the parliament and are prevalent in both the pro- and
anti-decriminalisation movement. Alves et al. argue that
the demand for respecting the woman’s decision was not integrated
in an emancipated discourse based on the autonomy and respon-
sibility of women as citizens. It was based instead on the view of
women-victim, which resorts to abortion as a necessity, mostly due
to socio-economic reasons, and whose decision was very hard for her
to make.
(2009:12)
The fact that women endured the health and social consequences that
come with illegality was a type of framing that aligned well with the
framing of victimisation and social injustice. But similarly to what hap-
pened in 1984, it did not address women’s bodily citizenship issues and
it did not encompass a discussion on abortion rights as women’s rights.
The referendum had an extremely low turnout of 32%, and the victory
of the ‘No’ vote was 50.1% (Público, 29 June 1998). The main cleavage
in the voting pattern followed geographical lines. The north, part of the
centre and the islands of Madeira and Azores voted mostly ‘No’, while
the south predominantly voted ‘Yes’ (Alves et al., 2009:18).
After the referendum there was no political will by the centre/right
coalition government to change the current abortion law. However, two
main sets of events put considerable pressure on the government and
kept the issue alive within the media and the public. The first were abor-
tion trials. Unlike in the past, when criminal prosecution of abortions
was rare, in the early 2000s several court trials gave visibility to how
women were still prosecuted criminally and to the inadequacy of the
n.6/84 law. Women activists took the lead in making political claims
regarding the injustice of these trials and engaging in several collective
actions to support those on trial (Público, 16 December 2003). The sec-
ond set of events began with the arrival in Portugal of the ship Bordniep
from the Netherlands, which was highly politicised because the gov-
ernment denied the ship entry and blocked it with a navy warship.
This action led to rallies and demonstrations organised by women’s
and feminist organisations in support of the Women on Waves initia-
tive. Extensive media coverage of the abortion decriminalisation issue
followed and led to a petition handed to the government with 3,000
signatures of citizens who were against the government’s ban of the ship
and who demanded abortion reform.
A new political cycle began in 2005 when the Socialists gained an
absolute majority in parliament. In the electoral campaign, the Socialist
leader promised a new referendum on abortion, which was perceived
by those on the pro-choice side as a unique political opportunity to
change abortion’s legal framework. In contrast, another victory for the
‘No’ campaign would mean that the law would remain unaltered for
many years. During the 2007 referendum campaign, more civil soci-
ety groups were formed to advocate for both the ‘No’, and the ‘Yes’
campaign, compared to what happened in the previous referendum.
In 2007, there was more involvement of civil society groups in the abor-
tion referendum campaign, although organisations advocating the ‘No’
vote did outnumber those proposing ‘Yes’ to decriminalisation (Pirralha,
2007:155). On February 11 2007 the ‘Yes’ vote won, thus leading to the
law that decriminalises abortion up to ten weeks of pregnancy upon a
woman’s request in an authorised health care centre (law n.16/2007).
Rallies, demonstrations, petitions, press releases and open letters to
politicians were the main tactics used by activists to demand a new
referendum, the decriminalisation of abortion, or to show solidarity
with those sitting on abortion trials. A characteristic of the political
environment of abortion contestation in the 2000s that is different from
Ana Prata 101
the late 1990s is the close collaboration of women’s and feminist organ-
isations with different political parties. Although to some degree there
had always been some alliance with small left-wing parties, in the 2000s
we see a constant and sustained participation of certain parties in most
of the protest actions organised by women’s organisations.14 The Left
Bloc was one of the political parties that allied closely with women
activists in their collective actions even before the referendum cam-
paign. This party originated among former members of the Platform for
the Right to Decide, and abortion issues were at the core of its members’
concerns.
The main organisational difference between the ‘Yes’ campaign in
2007 and the one in 1998 was that this time around the ‘Yes’ move-
ment targeted different bases of support and did not try to congregate
different identities within one umbrella organisation. This allowed the
pro-choice movement to appeal to different yet specific constituencies.
The ‘No’ movement, on the other hand, did not have the organisational
flexibility shown in 1998. The ‘Thanks But No’ Platform functioned
mostly as an umbrella organisation that linked and exerted control
over the other organisations while centralising resources and impeding
regional organisations from developing independently. Another distinc-
tive feature of the 2007 abortion referendum campaign was the intense
mobilisation of citizens outside of political parties. Although one can-
not ignore the work done by political parties for the ‘Yes’ vote, it was
mostly the pro-choice campaign and its activists that helped mobilise
different constituencies and led to the victory of the ‘Yes’ vote (Tavares,
2008: 409).
In the 2007 referendum campaign, women’s victimisation continued
to be part of the discourse used by both sides. Women were victims
of the processes of criminalisation and prosecution, and of the illegal
abortions that exposed them to health risks. A striking feature of this
campaign is the absence of a discourse on rights (Alves et al., 2009:33).
Frames regarding the women’s control over their bodies and women’s
right to choose were not part of the framing strategy of the pro-choice
movement, mostly because a very moderate undertone characterised the
campaign. Alves et al. argue that ‘contrary to the 1998 campaign, in
which the discourse on rights, even if peripheral could still be heard,
in 2007 it was publicly silenced’ (2009:33). Therefore, victimisation was
reinforced in the discursive field, and women’s rights as well as migrant
and minority women continued to be absent from discourse.
The ‘Yes’ vote won with 59% of the vote, against 41% of ‘No’ votes and
a turnout of 43% (compared to 32% in 1998). The political cleavage on
the abortion vote followed the same geographical lines as before. As in

1998, the voter turnout was still lower than 50%, which was not enough
to formally validate the referendum. Nonetheless, the Socialist govern-
ment interpreted the result as a political message from the electorate
that the current law needed to be altered, leading to the Voluntary Inter-
ruption of Pregnancy law (IVG). The n.16/2007 IVG law decriminalises
abortion on the following grounds: it allows
(1) no time limit when the mother’s life is at stake (or in case of an
extremely serious risk to the mother’s health);
(2) up to 12 weeks when there is a risk to the mother’s physical or
psychological health;
(3) up to 24 weeks when there is foetal malformation;
(4) up to 16 weeks when a crime against sexual freedom has occurred;
and
(5) up to ten weeks by simple request.
In terms of the implementation, more than 97% of all IVGs are under
the ‘abortion on demand’ option, which led to an improvement in
the statistics regarding complications from illegal abortions.15 The 2007
law resolved most of the dangers involved with underground abor-
tions, without completely eradicating the illegal abortion market, which
is still a concern for pro-life organisations.16 Pro-choice organisations
rebut this point by arguing that if the time limitation of ten weeks
was extended to 12–14 weeks (as practised in other EU countries), the
demand for illegal abortions would decrease. Official numbers from
the Direcção Geral de Saúde (DGS) for 2012 show that IVGs did indeed
decrease by 7.6% from the previous year, a trend noticeable mostly
among teenagers. In contrast, IVGs among unemployed women were
on the rise from the previous year.17 Also entering the debate in the
last few years has been the issue of repeated abortions, which concerns
both sides in the debate (Público, 3 May 2012). Pro-legalisation support-
ers have highlighted the importance of improving education regarding
contraception, while pro-life supporters have focused on challenging
the current law (Expresso, 15 June 2011).
Abortion and Europeanisation
Even before Portugal’s formal entry into the European Union, activists
and politicians tapped into abortion legislation and policies of other
Ana Prata 103
European countries to emulate their laws and to legitimise the need for
legal change. The influence of Europeanisation on the abortion issue
occurred because European legislation represented a democratic and
developmental model for Portuguese legislation, which influenced the
political debate from the start.
After 1986, when Portugal became a European Union member, ref-
erences to the European context continued and were mostly utilised
by those demanding abortion rights. EU-level recommendations on
sexual and reproductive rights and the legislation of most European
Union countries were strategically used by activists and by parliamen-
tary members as a way to highlight the importance of this political
agenda or the specifics of how Portuguese legislation should look. For
example, Communist MP Odete Santos criticised the Socialist proposal
on abortion on demand by arguing that comparable legislation in other
European countries covered 12 weeks, not ten weeks – an argument
still used by activists as one of the reasons the illegal abortion market
has subsisted. Likewise, references to Portuguese women going abroad
to other European countries to obtain an abortion were strategically
used by activists since the 1970s as a way to demonstrate the inade-
quacy of the national legislation vis-à-vis more progressive European
legislation.
Europeanisation not only affects the political debate on abortion, but
also creates opportunities for women’s groups to mobilise with other
European movement organisations. For example, during the Women on
Waves campaign, when the Portuguese centre/right government forbade
the ship from entering the country in 2004, Portuguese women’s organ-
isations mobilised with the Dutch group for their right to enter the
country, and more successfully to bring the abortion political agenda
to the public (Santos and Alves, 2009). Also, the Women on Waves
group, together with two Portuguese women’s organisations, Clube Safo
and Não te Prives, also filed a court case at the European Court of
Human Rights against the Portuguese government for curtailing their
right to freedom of expression when their ship was denied entrance
to the country. This joint mobilisation of Portuguese women activists
with European movement organisations, and the networks established
between them, contributed to the shaping of the domestic political
debate on abortion. The aim has been, for the most part, to make
policy changes within the national context and to pressure national
legislators, and less to make demands at the European parliament
level.
Bodily citizenship and the prostitution issue during

democratisation: First debates and decriminalisation
(1978–1983)
In Portugal, the prostitution issue never generated much activism or

mobilisation. Media coverage was slim and legal debates were not
contentious (Joaquim, 2007). The issue was also understood fairly dis-
tinctively by different actors and evolved considerably following the
democratisation. This makes tracing key moments in the life course of
the prostitution issue more challenging. Nonetheless, one can argue that
there are three key periods of change in perceptions on prostitution in
Portugal.
In the 1970s and 1980s, prostitution was not a priority in the politi-
cal agenda of women’s organisations or legislators. The issue was rarely
debated, but there was some consensus regarding the need to decrim-
inalise the prostitute. Prostitutes were liable to prosecution and could
be placed under arrest from 1962, but this law was partially revoked
by the democratic 1983 Criminal Code, in which the practice of pros-
titution was not punished; only its exploitation or facilitation was
criminalised.
Following democratisation, women’s groups took the lead in inserting
prostitution and women’s sex trafficking issues into political debates.
This was mostly to bring visibility to the increasing problem of the sex
trafficking of Portuguese women to Spain, as reported by the media.
The União Alternativa e Resposta (UMAR – Union of Anti-Fascist and
Revolutionary Women) highlighted how prostitution networks operate
under the false pretence of a job or drugs to lure young women into
prostitution, under the protection of corrupt police forces. This group
also organised a demonstration in 1978 in Oporto against women’s
trafficking in the bordering towns of the north of the country, as
well as a petition with thousands of signatures against women’s sex
trafficking. Reports in the media showed that Portuguese border author-
ities reinforced border surveillance after acknowledging the presence
of organised prostitution rings starting in Portugal and that criminal
groups were involved in trafficking weapons and women across the bor-
der (DL, 13 September 1979). Media coverage mentioned ‘300 girls being
trafficked a week to Spain, mostly to Toledo, Madrid and Salamanca’
(Expresso, 22 August 1979), to the point that it was said that the ‘prosti-
tution in Madrid speaks Portuguese’. Two main causes were pointed out
as contributing factors. The first was the agreement between Portugal
and Spain on the free transit of people across their borders (for 90 days),
Ana Prata 105
making it easier for the prostitution networks to operate. The other main
cause was the high unemployment rate in urban and semi-urban areas.
Beyond these mobilisations, there were two Catholic women’s
organisations – O Ninho (The Nest) and Irmãs Oblatas (Sister Oblatas) –
that were actively involved with the issue of prostitution from the
1970s. They launched programmes to rehabilitate and reintegrate pros-
titutes into the workforce, wrote reports on the issue, and provided
counselling and a support system for prostitutes. These groups claimed
after democratisation that prostitutes were victims that needed to be
protected and not just decriminalised.
In parliament, the issue was not prioritised and only sporadically
appeared in political debates; when it did appear it was mostly framed
as a social problem resulting from the development of cities, crime and
poverty.
The dominant framing in this first period connected prostitution to
other criminal activities, social problems and ‘deviant behaviours’, such
as drug trafficking, poverty and homosexuality. Prostitution was framed
as a social/urban problem that should be dealt with by criminalising
those who profited from it, and by protecting its victims: women, chil-
dren and society. Society was affected by prostitution because at the
time there was still the legal notion that prostitution affected public
morality and decency (a legacy from authoritarian times). Prostitu-
tion, like abortion, was also framed in terms of its social injustice,
women’s exploitation and victimisation. Women were framed as pas-
sive agents exploited by male pimps. Of the few women’s organisations
that mobilised around the issues of prostitution and sex trafficking
in the 1970s and 1980s, we find that the UMAR and the Movimento
Democrático das Mulheres (MDM – Democratic Women’s Movement) also
framed the prostitute as a victim, in need of protection and decrim-
inalisation. Catholic organisations in their evangelising missions also
reinforced the framing of the woman prostitute as a victim, a ‘fallen
woman’, and a passive agent that could either be corrupted or reha-
bilitated. Parliamentary members commonly made references to men
as pimps, and framed prostitution in terms of gender exploitation.
However, references to men as clients were almost non-existent. Both
women’s organisations and parliamentary members selected social class,
social injustice and women’s passive role as dominant frames. Yet again,
we see that social class dominated the discourse on prostitution, which
also resonated with the socialist/Marxist political culture of the time,
but led to a process that de-gendered prostitution (as we saw on the
abortion issue). Migrant and minority women were absent from the
discourse, mostly because prostitutes were primarily Portuguese and

white.
The major policy outcome of this first period was the decriminalisa-
tion of prostitutes while considering it a crime to exploit them (article
n.215), as well as the criminalisation of sex trafficking (article n.217).
The untangling of prostitution from sex trafficking (1990s)
The 1990s were characterised by the issue of prostitution becoming less

intermingled with sex trafficking, the persistent focus on women’s vic-
timisation and the influence of supranational political bodies on the
government to adopt and ratify international conventions. This period
is also characterised by incremental changes in legislation on sex traf-
ficking and prostitution and the 1995 Criminal Code revision, which
increased sentencing for the exploitation of prostitution.
From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s the Social Democrats did not
politically prioritise prostitution or sex trafficking issues in the govern-
mental agenda. But in the late 1990s sex trafficking cases increased
considerably and the political salience of sex trafficking and its con-
nections to immigration problems grew. By the late 1990s, the volume
of illegal immigration had increased considerably and abruptly. Peixoto
argues that the first phase of illegal immigration was from Eastern
Europe, and that the absence of previous links between these societies
and Portuguese society contributed to the dependence on established
illegal immigration networks (2007:71). The second phase corresponds
to the influx of Brazilian immigrants, also in the late 1990s and the
2000s (Padilla, 2006; Peixoto, 2007). Portugal and Brazil have long-
standing historical/colonial ties, allowing Brazilians to enter Portugal
without a visa. And while some Brazilian immigrants did rely on exist-
ing informal networks of support among other Brazilian immigrants,
researchers have argued that most of the low-skill Brazilian immigrant
workers that arrived did not and were often exploited by Portuguese
employers or fell into illegal immigration networks (Padilla, 2006:56;
Peixoto, 2007:78). The media started connecting the presence of ille-
gal immigrant women, particularly Brazilians, with the sex industry and
later with sex trafficking, increasing the visibility of this particular group
and the growing awareness of Portugal as a country with an active par-
ticipation in the international sex trafficking routes. Media reports on
sex trafficking multiplied, as did the number of traffickers and victims
caught by authorities, thus generating a critical juncture to demand
more serious criminalisation of sex trafficking.
Ana Prata 107
The issue of prostitution was only sporadically addressed in parlia-

ment, and mostly by left-wing parties or, at times, on the initiative of
individual parliamentary members. The issue of sex trafficking was gain-
ing political salience by the end of the decade, when cases of trafficked
victims increased in Portugal (as mentioned in parliament). At the end
of the 1990s, sex trafficking was mentioned more often than prostitu-
tion in the media, and there was a notion that sex trafficking needed to
be tackled both domestically and internationally. In fact, it was mostly
women’s organisations that kept giving visibility to the prostitution
issue, while most other political actors were more concerned with sex
trafficking.
The Catholic women’s organisation O Ninho continued to be the
main group providing services to prostitutes, raising awareness regard-
ing the networks of sex trafficking, and organising conferences on both
prostitution and sex trafficking. Other civil society organisations also
targeted the issue of prostitution and were involved in several projects
including research, service provision (shelter, counselling, legal support)
and outreach programmes to prostitutes and sex trafficking victims. In
parliament, some MPs started to make references to the Schengen Agree-
ment and how it facilitated foreigners entering the country to engage
in illicit activities such as prostitution (DR 20 July 1996:122). There
were also references in parliament to organised groups in Europe that
promote prostitution and sex trafficking (DR 25 January 1997:5), and
references to informal contacts between Portuguese and Spanish author-
ities with the goal of developing a Portuguese–Spanish Conference on
prostitution and women’s sex trafficking (DR 12 October 1996:7). These
examples show how discourses on migrant and minority women inter-
twine with the criminalisation of sex trafficking, and how international
cooperation is perceived as a way to repress and prevent it.
One main policy outcome of this period is Law Decree 48/95 that
altered the Criminal Code and changed article n.169 on sex traffick-
ing. This article changed the definition of sex trafficking and considered
for the first time a ‘situation of abandonment or need’ of the victim,
thus emphasising the need to protect personal sexual freedom. While
in the 1970s and 1980s the law still viewed prostitution and sex traf-
ficking as offences to morality, in the 1990s the laws were more about
the protection of personal freedoms. The law also increased sentences
for procurement (article 170). The other main policy outcomes were the
ratification of the 1949 UN Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic
in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others (Reso-
lution n.47/V) and Law n.61/91 on Measures of Adequate Protection to
Women Victims of Violence. This decade also ended with the passing
of laws that protect witnesses in judicial proceedings involving cases of
sex trafficking in human beings (with provisions that apply to both wit-
nesses and victims) and the creation of a national network of public
shelters/support centres for women victims of violence.18
The issues of prostitution and sex trafficking had been linked since the
1970s, when Portuguese women were trafficked to Spain for prostitution
purposes, but in the 1990s, with increasing immigration to Portugal and
pressures from supranational bodies to ratify international treaties that
‘combat sex trafficking’, the issues became de-linked, mostly because of
the growing movement to criminalise sex trafficking. Women’s organ-
isations continued to be the main actors organising collective action
on prostitution and sex trafficking. The MDM organised a mock trial at
the University of Aveiro in 1990 in which youth prostitution and sex-
ual exploitation were put on trial.19 The MDM, in collaboration with
the Associação das Mulheres Juristas (AMJ – Women Lawyers Association),
also engaged in a joint debate to change article n.215 and introduce a
distinction between active and passive pimping. The AMJ argued that
there were important differences between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ pimp-
ing although the law did not legally distinguish between the two and
criminalised both equally. They argued that ‘the passive pimp does
not force the woman to prostitute herself and therefore it should not
be criminalized since it does not impose that she sells herself to oth-
ers and it doesn’t go against her sexual freedom’, as stated by judge
Helena Lopes, a representative of AMJ. In article n.125 (n.2) of the
Criminal Code, the active and passive pimp could be imprisoned for
up to two years because ‘they explore the gains of the prostitute, living
out of her income’. This premise of the law was criticised by the AMJ,
which proposed a revision of the Criminal Code to include the distinc-
tion between passive and active pimping.20 This distinction is crucial,
because for the first time the prostitute was framed as making a choice
to prostitute herself. Even references to prostitutes having some degree
of sexual freedom were rarely part of the discourse by any women’s
organisation in the 1990s. The framing strategy of the AMJ is distinct
from women’s organisations, including O Ninho, also present at the
debate. For the Catholic organisation prostitution was ‘not an option,
but always as the last resort’ (DN, 27 June 1990). Their discourse regard-
ing the prostitute was about how she was pushed into prostitution due
to unfavourable circumstances (runaway, pregnancy, unemployment,
poverty), not as a rational individual making a labour choice. Likewise,
the daily income obtained from prostitution did not go to the prostitute
Ana Prata 109
herself but was ‘frequently absorbed by a network of pimps’ (ibid.). This

framing of the prostitute as victim of circumstances and exploited by a
male pimp was part of the dominant discourse of the 1990s and was
shared by most women’s organisations. For example, the MDM in a
press release stated that ‘we consider the pimp, the sex industry, and
pornography responsible for exploiting the woman’s body and to profit
from it’ and ‘the woman prostitute is destitute of free will’ (MDM press
release, June 1990). As the decade progressed, discourse on sex traffick-
ing gained prevalence over prostitution. Migrant and minority women
entered the discourse, and there was also an increasing acknowledge-
ment that networks of sex trafficking could not be stopped just by
adopting international conventions, but that a more holistic approach
was needed.
The emphasis on sex trafficking (2000s)
In the 2000s, we have continued to see women’s organisations, left-wing

parties and supranational bodies pressuring the government to address
issues of women’s victimisation, measures to protect them and the per-
ceived increasing problem of women’s sex trafficking.21 Some of that
pressure has resulted in the government tackling issues of sex traffick-
ing and sexual exploitation. This is visible in the CAIM project22 and
in the First and Second National Plans Against Trafficking of Human
Beings (2007–2010 and 2011–2013).23 In 2001, the prostitution issue
gained some political momentum because of the law proposals of the
German government to legalise prostitution, which impacted debates
on prostitution in Portugal. The Socialist Youth (JS) wanted to discuss
the legalisation of prostitution in parliament, an issue never before
debated, but this progressive branch of the Socialist party was unable
to gather parliamentary support and the proposal on the legalisation of
prostitution was inconsequential.
Similar to what happened in the 1990s, the 2001 Criminal Code
revision continued to increase the penalties for the exploitation of
prostitution, particularly of child prostitution. This period was charac-
terised also by the signing of important international conventions on
sex trafficking, the reinforcement of protection of women victims of vio-
lence, and the implementation of measures that target sex trafficking in
its different dimensions: migration, international cooperation, judicial,
health, support system and so forth.
Women’s and feminist organisations continue to engage in collec-
tive action, as exemplified by the UMAR promoting workshops on
prostitution and sex trafficking throughout the decade. Some women’s

organisations are part of the CAIM project and have designed the ‘Train-
ing Toolkit for the Prevention and Combating of Sex Trafficking Women
for Sexual Exploitation’; some have also been involved in the Pessoa
Space project, where they provide counselling on sexual and reproduc-
tive health to prostitutes on the streets of Oporto. These organisations
have also made political demands to authorities to protect and sup-
port victims of prostitution and sex trafficking, but they have not taken
any official stance on prostitution. In fact, women’s organisations are
either against the legalisation of prostitution or avoid any public state-
ment on the subject (Santos et al., 2008:206). Duarte also contends
that ‘even within the feminist movement . . . there is still no serious dis-
cussion about prostitution. This theme has not yet appeared in the
feminist agenda’ (2010:17). The discourse is centred on victimisation
and how prostitution represents violence towards women. Within this
discourse, migrant women are always the main group highlighted as
being particularly vulnerable to victimisation.
The high incidence of migrant prostitution and sex trafficking vic-
tims contributed to the salience of migration within the overall debate.
In 2006, about 60% of prostitutes in Portugal were estimated to be
migrants (DN, 28 January 2010). And although there is no statistical
data or even estimates regarding how many victims of trafficking are
migrants, the discourse on trafficking in the media, NGOs, academia
and in parliament consistently ties sex trafficking to migrant women.
This is in contrast to what happened in Portugal in the 1970s, when
most of the discourse regarding trafficking victims was about national
women being trafficked to Spain.
Throughout the 2000s, the media gave considerable coverage to
migrant sex workers and sex trafficking victims. It actively constructed
a narrative in Portugal that the majority of sex workers and traffick-
ing victims originated in Brazil and Eastern Europe (Correio da Manhã,
27 October 2010). The visibility of Brazilian sex workers in particular
was tied to the extensive media coverage of the Mothers of Bragança
Movement (Mães de Bragança). This grass-roots movement created in
2003 in the northern city of Bragança had the goal of expelling from
the city ‘the Brasilian prostitutes that were perverting our husbands’.24
At the time, this movement put considerable pressure on local authori-
ties to investigate such brothels, which led to the closing of four of these
houses, several raids, criminal prosecutions and the repatriation of pros-
titutes.25 It also reinforced the stereotype that most Brazilian women
go to Portugal to become prostitutes. The media and academic research
Ana Prata 111
have intertwined prostitution and trafficking with migration and have

reinforced this link. Academic research has found that the majority of
women working in prostitution or being trafficked come from coun-
tries outside the EU and are immigrants (many illegal) (Oliveira, 2004;
Ribeiro et al., 2005; Peixoto et al., 2005). Oftentimes different forms
of prostitution (street, clubs, apartments) are linked to specific migrant
groups.
The discourse on prostitution and sex trafficking had been linked
to migration since the late 1990s, but statements that ‘sex trafficking
supplies the prostitution market with sex slaves’ increased consider-
ably in the media (DN, 28 January 2010; Correio da Manhã, 27 October
2010). Discourse on prostitutes and migration described immigrant
women as more vulnerable to both prostitution and sex trafficking,
and therefore to victimisation. Women’s exploitation was the domi-
nant discourse and was shared by Catholic women’s organisations and
by women activists and feminists. In this discourse, ‘migrant status’,
‘gender’ and ‘class’ act jointly to determine a strained situation. Addi-
tionally, there has also been considerable misrepresentation of migrant
women in the media, which has contributed to negative stereotypes of
specific migrant groups. Brazilian and Eastern European women are the
two main groups often portrayed as prostitutes, and such stereotypes
pervade Portuguese society (Santos, 2006; Peixoto, 2007). Surprisingly,
the discourse on prostitution and migration was constructed without
including migrant, minority ethnic or anti-racist organisations, since
these organisations have focused more on labour issues. In fact, it has
been mostly women’s organisations, such as UMAR, MDM, some local
and regional organisations, police authorities and NGOs aiding victims
(e.g., APAV – Associação Portuguesa de Apoio à Vítima) that have mobilised
and organised several actions raising awareness on sex trafficking and
debating policies on trafficking. Oftentimes this happens in collabora-
tion with the women’s state agency – Commission for Citizenship and
Gender Equality, which has a pivotal role in Portugal in designing and
implementing anti-trafficking programmes.
Since 2007 there has been a more contentious debate among activists
regarding the issue of forced and voluntary prostitution. In fact, the
term ‘sex worker’, which had been discursively absent from prostitution
debates, emerged mostly due to the work of Ana Lopes, a Portuguese
researcher and founder of the first sex workers’ union (IUSW – Interna-
tional Union of Sex Workers). Politically, the discourse was mostly about
the need for new legislation to combat organised crime (both on pros-
titution and sex trafficking) due to the loopholes and shortcomings in
the legal framework governing these matters. But in recent years, dis-
tinctions between forced and voluntary prostitution have emerged in
parliament. The political debate on prostitution has expanded and now
includes debates on the legalisation of brothels, the need for sanitary
control over prostitutes, the criminalisation of clients and overall regu-
lation. Nonetheless, frames of victimisation and exploitation continue
to prevail.
Portugal is now one of the few countries where migrant prostitu-
tion is on the decline (Greece is another).26 And alongside the United
Kingdom, Portugal is one of two countries within the EU with as many
native-born prostitutes as foreigners (DN, 28 January 2010). Therefore,
following the 2009 economic crisis, economic strain entered the dis-
course of the media and NGOs as the main motivation for engaging in
prostitution. The poverty frame was always prevalent in the narrative
of prostitution in Portugal, particularly connected to immigrant women
coming to the country to become prostitutes. However, in recent years
it has become the dominant discourse, one that applies to nationals and
connects prostitution to unemployment and recession.
Policy outcomes in the last decade have been mostly on sex traffick-
ing and its victims, not on prostitution. In terms of legislation, Law
n.99/2001 altered articles 169 and 170 to broaden the understanding
of crimes of sex trafficking and sexual exploitation to include refer-
ences to victims’ ‘particular vulnerability’. Also Law n.59/2007 revised
the Criminal Code and altered the legal scope of the crime of sex traf-
ficking of women for sexual exploitation purposes, in accordance with
what has been imposed by European Union decisions and by other
supranational legal frameworks (Santos et al., 2008:575). Law n.59/2007
increased penalties, including punishment of the client, and sex traffick-
ing is now considered ‘a crime of slavery’ (previously it was considered
a crime against sexual freedom).
Prostitution/sex trafficking and Europeanisation
The impact of the EU and supranational political or civil society bodies

on prostitution and sex trafficking has occurred mostly in terms of rec-
ommendations, signing of conventions and international resolutions.
Portugal followed most of the EU and international bodies’ directives
on prostitution and sex trafficking through a high number of national
reports and action plans. This happened through amendments to gen-
eral laws or resolutions, signing of conventions and treaties, and within
the gender equality governmental agency.
Ana Prata 113
As seen with the abortion issue, oftentimes legal debates going on

in other European countries on prostitution also permeated domestic
parliamentary debates. Nonetheless, specific regulations on prostitu-
tion and sex trafficking have not generated a widespread debate, but
have resulted in pressure on the national government to implement
directives, which are typically added to the general law.
The Europeanisation process has been mostly top-down and focused
on the issue of sex trafficking, and it has generated close collabora-
tion between private and public institutions. An example of this is the
CAIM project, which was funded by the EU and its EU EQUAL Initia-
tive. Recent major developments on the issue of sex trafficking have
been connected to the CAIM project and the First and Second National
Plans Against Trafficking of Human Beings in a coordinated strategy
of preventing and fighting sex trafficking. In recent years, the issue of
prostitution has been addressed mostly in connection with prostitu-
tion legislation being debated elsewhere in Europe. Nonetheless, most
of the debates, measures and plans have been on sex trafficking, not
prostitution, similar to what happened in the 1990s.
Outcomes on bodily citizenship: Comparing the two issues
Throughout the years, women’s organisations have contested political

discourses and policies that impact the female body and overall bod-
ily citizenship, but they have done it very distinctively for each of the
issues.
On the abortion issue, women’s organisations were the main actors
calling for abortion rights and for its decriminalisation. And although
this did not happen without disagreements, the Portuguese women’s
movement did develop in part due to the collective actions and consen-
sus abortion reform generated within the movement. The prostitution
issue, on the other hand, was not as controversial, it never involved
much mobilisation, and activists have not taken a clear position on the
issue.
In regards to political discourse, we see mostly continuity between
the two issues. The discourse on victimisation and social injustice pre-
vails and persists over time. In both issues women enter the discourse
mostly through a victimisation lens. In the abortion discourse, women
are victimised by laws that criminalise and prosecute them, and by the
illegal abortion market that exposes them to health risks. Regarding
prostitution, the dominant discourse focuses on women’s victimisation,
exploitation, social injustice either by a male pimp or by networks of
trafficking or the sex industry. Following the late 1990s immigration

wave, the discourse on the victimisation of prostitutes and traffick-
ing victims has been attached to ethnic and minority groups. The
immigrant women in the sex industry and in trafficking tend to be dis-
cursively constructed as non-citizens. They are framed as victims that
are exploited and need to be rehabilitated, but the problem is viewed
mostly through a criminalisation and law enforcement lens. The rights
and the needs of these immigrant women are not taken into account,
and it is mostly about how prostitution and trafficking affects Portuguese
society. Absent from the discourse on prostitution is the framing of
prostitutes as empowered individuals making rational economic deci-
sions to work in the sex industry. Only in recent years have a few
women’s groups inserted into the discourse on prostitution the dis-
tinction between active and passive pimping and forced and voluntary
prostitution.
Additionally, social class and social justice, not gender, are the main
injustice frames. Only very rarely do women’s organisations mention
the ‘woman’s body’ and ‘women’s rights’ in terms of women’s autonomy
and freedom to dispose of their own bodies. In parliamentary debates,
women’s bodily citizenship rights are also played down. Women are
not often portrayed as fully emancipated individuals or citizens with
autonomy and rationality to act. They are oftentimes framed as passive
victims, paternalised and having their complex narrative of motivations
for abortion or prostitution simplified into economic issues.
Regarding policy outcomes on abortion and prostitution, we see that
these are intertwined with several factors that impose both opportuni-
ties and constraints on the strategies used by women’s organisations.
In the late 1970s, democratisation opened a space for women’s groups
to mobilise and target political parties, the media and the govern-
ment. Women’s organisations played a crucial role in bringing visibility
mostly to the abortion issue and defining illegal abortion as a social
problem. Women’s groups mobilised and pressured political parties to
discuss abortion decriminalisation in parliament, but only with a Social-
ist government was the passing of a strict decriminalisation law possible
in 1984. In the 2000s it was mostly due to the collective action of
women’s organisations (their collaboration with the Women on Waves
campaign and the domestic and international pressure it generated) and
the new political cycle of Socialist governance that conditions leading
to a second abortion referendum were created. This referendum cam-
paign involved several women activists and resulted in the approval of
an abortion on demand law in 2007 (IVG – law n.16/2007).
Ana Prata 115
In terms of policy outcomes on prostitution, mostly women’s organ-

isations and the women’s state agency have made claims regarding the
rights of prostitutes, creating awareness of sex trafficking (and pro-
tections for its victims) and providing services for prostitutes. With
democratisation, the first main policy outcome was to decriminalise
the prostitute, while criminalising procurement and sex trafficking.
In the 1990s, most of the legal changes on prostitution and sex traf-
ficking were incremental and consisted of increasing sentencing for
the exploitation of prostitution and ratifying international conven-
tions and implementing EU regulations on sex trafficking. In the
last decade, women’s organisations, leftist parties and the govern-
ment have been addressing issues of women’s victimisation and sex-
ual exploitation mostly in the context of sex trafficking. Increased
sentencing has also continued with each revision of the Criminal
Code, in particular in regards to child prostitution. Only a handful
of women’s organisations seem to have continued to address prosti-
tution issues, while most debates, measures and plans that have been
adopted have been on sex trafficking. With the increase in immi-
gration in the late 1990s and early 2000s (mostly from Brazil and
Eastern Europe), the number of immigrant women in the sex industry
and in trafficking grew, and public perceptions and stereotypes link-
ing specific ethnic groups to prostitution also took hold in Portuguese
society.
Conclusion
In Portugal, debates on abortion and prostitution were framed along

the victimisation spectrum. Women engage in abortion procedures or
prostitution because society or economic conditions do not provide
them with an alternative. Women are vulnerable because of their social
class, they are poor, they are migrants or immigrants, and since the
recession unemployment has also become a new category of perceived
vulnerability for both IVGs and prostitution. This emphasis on vic-
timisation excludes from discourse the right to self-determination and
bodily integrity, and women’s autonomy over their bodies is rarely
featured in debates on reproduction and sexuality. This is even more
striking if one considers that in the last referendum debate, as recently
as 2007, women’s rights (not just bodily citizenship rights) were not
even part of the discourse.
Women’s citizenship in regards to reproduction and sexuality in
Portugal were constructed without focusing on the centrality of
women’s bodies to women. But the autonomy over one’s body is a

prerequisite to full citizenship, and in most of the discourse on these
issues, women are featured as passive agents (not full citizens), as vic-
tims (of a criminalisation process, of sex trafficking networks, of a
bad economy, of a male pimp), or as non-citizens (immigrant women
get trafficked, not ‘us’). Regulations on women’s bodies in Portuguese
society have been mostly about how bodies can be controlled and dis-
ciplined by authorities, politicians, doctors and legislation. In Portugal,
there have been examples of specific groups depriving women of bod-
ily citizenship rights. When the first abortion decriminalisation law
passed in 1984, doctors did not implement the new law in public hospi-
tals. This curtailed women’s bodily citizenship rights. There was in fact
an external intervention in relation to decisions about women’s bod-
ies that stripped women of the autonomy to make those decisions –
an autonomy granted by the law and achieved through a democratic
process but taken away by doctors. Women’s groups did bring visibil-
ity to the lack of implementation of the new law and how it affected
women’s lives, but they did it without inserting claims connected to
women’s rights or to bodily citizenship. Likewise, women’s organisa-
tions have also been the main political actors calling for more rights
for prostitutes and for the protection of victims of sex trafficking. Since
democratisation, the women’s movement has been pivotal in reclaiming
women’s rights, but most of the organisations fall short of addressing
women’s bodily citizenship rights. In this chapter, I have demonstrated
that the focus on victimisation and class issues contributed to the
de-gendering of the overall process of sexual and reproductive rights
in Portugal.
Notes
1. Law n.3048 (3 048 (9/23 September 1933), article 31.
2. Mostly as farmers, factory workers and maids.
3. Law n.358 of the 1852 Criminal Code (continues in the Criminal Code of
1886).
4. The regime opted to deny its existence, by neither prosecuting the practice,
nor keeping any official records regarding the rate or impact of abortion.
5. Regulamento sanitário das meretrizes do Porto.
6. Law n.2036/49 (9 August 1949).
7. Law decree n.44579/62 (19 September 1962).
8. Interview (17 June 2005).
9. During the democratic transition, women’s movement organisations lacked
autonomy mostly due to activists’ double militancy and to the novel
character of these organisations.
Ana Prata 117
10. Researchers have highlighted the importance of sudden, attention-grabbing

‘focusing events’ (Baumgartner and Jones, 1993; Cobb and Elder, 1983) to
inject issues into the public arena (Birkland, 1998:56).
11. Expresso, 13 November 1982:14. As a journalist alluded to at the time, ‘elec-
toral calculations conditioned the PSD . . . ’, Expresso, 13 November 1982:15.
12. Diário de Notícias, 27 January 1984.
13. Público, 17 February 1997. It was well known that the Socialist Prime Min-
ister António Guterres was a Catholic conservative who did not favour any
liberalisation of abortion procedures.
14. Mostly the Left Bloc but also the Communists and some members of the
Socialist Party (Source: Público, 15 June 2004; 16 June 2004).
15. According to the Director of the Health Department (DGS) (TVI, 4 July 2009).
16. Portuguese Pro-Life Federation (FPV), 2 October 2009.
17. Diário de Notícias, 14 May 2013. In the DN Portugal Portal, http:
//www.dn.pt/inicio/portugal/interior.aspx?content_id=3217671 and http://
www.dn.pt/inicio/portugal/interior.aspx?content_id=3217673, date accessed
20 May 2014.
18. Respectively Act 93/99 of 14/7/1999 and Law n.107/99 of 3 August 1999.
19. UMAR newspaper archives (1990).
20. Diário de Notícias, 27 June 1990.
21. Santos et al. 2008:604.
22. CAIM (Cooperation, Action, Investigation, World View) is a project set in
place to adopt a coordinated strategy to fight women’s sex trafficking for the
purposes of sexual exploitation and to support and protect its victims. The
partnership of the CAIM project includes private and public institutions.
23. The National Action Plan Against Trafficking in Human Beings (2007–2010)
has been structured according to four strategic intervention areas: To Know
and Spread Information; To Prevent, Spread Awareness and Train; To Pro-
tect, Support and Integrate; To Criminally Investigate and Suppress Sex
Trafficking (Source: http://www.cig.gov.pt/).
24. There was international media coverage of this movement. An example is
the cover of Time magazine of October 20, 2003, under the title ‘Europe’s
New Red Light District’, Público, 14 October 2003; Expresso, 28 April 2008.
25. Jornal de Notícias, 17 June 2007; Pais, 2010:9.
26. The number of migrant prostitutes decreased slightly (from 60% in 2006 to
56% in 2010).
5
In Pursuit of Bodily Integrity
in Sweden
Lenita Freidenvall
Introduction
Ever since the emergence of the first wave women’s movement in

the late 1800s, Sweden has had a long-standing tradition of women’s
organisations (Florin and Kvarnström, 2001). Mobilising in autonomous
women’s groups as well as within established organisations, includ-
ing political parties, trade unions and professional organisations, the
women’s movement has addressed a wide range of issues. Although
bodily issues were integral to their agenda, both in the first and sec-
ond wave of mobilisation, they figured as secondary to redistributive
issues within the Social Democratic welfare framework. While Sweden
was among the first movers in the politicisation and institutionalisa-
tion of gender equality issues in the 1960s, women’s organisations were
not at the forefront of reforms relating to the body. It was not until
the 1970s that such issues, particularly abortion, were placed at the top
of their agenda. Women’s organisations framed the issue of abortion in
terms of women’s self-determination, and in 1975 the law was adjusted
accordingly. Abortion on demand was permitted until 12 weeks of preg-
nancy, and until 18 weeks after consultation with a social welfare officer.
Prostitution did not become a top priority until the 1990s, when the
women’s movement organisations and women parliamentarians were
able to make their discourse about prostitution as a form of power the
dominant one. In 1999, Sweden changed its prostitution regulation,
by criminalising the purchase of sexual services, hence punishing the
client, usually a man, while the seller was left aside.
In this chapter, following a new institutionalist approach, the history
of abortion and prostitution in Sweden will be analysed, with a spe-
cific focus on the role of the new women’s movement in the policy
118
Lenita Freidenvall 119
change. At the centre of attention are the ways in which the discursive
shifts took place and resulted in policy change, and the extent to which
the women’s movement, including migrant women’s organisations, has
been able to challenge and change the dominant political discourses on
abortion and prostitution. Taking into account Sweden’s accession to
the EU in 1995, the ways in which the process of Europeanisation has
affected the political debates on the two issues in Sweden will also be
addressed. It will be argued that two discursive shifts have taken place,
one affecting abortion and the other having an impact on prostitution.
A first discursive shift occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, when gender
inequalities were politicised in Sweden. In contrast to the prevailing dis-
course in the 1930s to 1950s, which held that women wanted abortion
mainly because of poverty, a circumstance that could be prevented by
social policy, abortion was now framed as a question of women’s right
to self-determination. A second discursive shift occurred in the 1990s,
when the gender political agenda moved beyond the redistributive equal
opportunity frame to a question about unequal gender relations and
power. Gender relations were now seen as made up by structural rela-
tions of power. Interestingly, the issues of abortion and prostitution are
based on two divergent framings of women’s bodily rights. The former
highlights women’s right to decide over their own bodies, and the latter
stresses women’s right to not be exposed to violence.
The Swedish context
Sweden is often portrayed as a model in which participatory democracy

is combined with an extensive welfare state. Historically, it has been
formed by a political culture with a strong state that has been respon-
sive to the demands of civil society (Christiansen et al., 2006). Various
kinds of movements, including women’s movements and labour move-
ments, were influential in shaping the welfare state during its formative
years. Class compromises were facilitated by institutionalising the influ-
ence of the social partners. Sweden, as well as its Nordic sisters, has also
been regarded as a forerunner in terms of gender equality. According to
political scientist Helga Hernes (1987), the Nordic welfare states devel-
oped woman-friendly infrastructure and policies. A key dynamic of this
woman-friendliness was the interplay between a broad political mobil-
isation of women ‘from below’ and responses ‘from above’ in terms of
state feminism and institutionalisation of gender equality (ibid.).
Gender equality was institutionalised in Sweden in the 1970s, when
the main infrastructure for gender equality issues was established
120 In Pursuit of Bodily Integrity in Sweden
(Bergqvist et al., 1999). Key parts of this infrastructure were a Gender

Equality Minister, a Gender Equality Division (an administrative body
with the task to assist the minister to develop gender equality policies,
prepare legislation and coordinate work with the other ministries), a
Gender Equality Law regulating gender equality in the labour market,
as well as a Gender Equality Ombudsman (to monitor the enforce-
ment of the gender equality law) (Borchorst et al., 2012). Since then
women’s movement organisations have been identified as important
stakeholders; they are represented in the Gender Equality Board (Jäm-
ställdhetsrådet), a consultative body to the Gender Equality Minister,
and consulted by the government before a position on the recommen-
dation of a commission of inquiry related to gender equality issues is
taken.
Politically, the Social Democratic Party has been a dominant player
in modern Swedish politics, having been in government in the peri-
ods 1932–1976, 1982–1991, 1994–2006 and 2014–, and having received
between 42% and 50% of the votes between 1932 and 1988. Coali-
tion governments have on a few occasions taken over, most recently in
2006, when the Alliance government, consisting of the Moderate Party,
the Liberal Party, the Centre Party and the Christian Democratic Party,
was installed and re-elected in 2010. The left/right axis has been a key
dimension of the Swedish party system.
From a historical perspective, the population of Sweden has been
quite homogeneous. During the 1950s and 1960s, the number of
migrant labourers increased, primarily from the Nordic countries, but
also from Southern Europe, particularly Italy, Greece and Turkey. Since
the early 1970s, migration to Sweden has increased due to refugee migra-
tion and family reunification from countries in the Middle East and
Latin America. The population also includes the indigenous group, the
Sámi.
My analysis primarily rests on the major state investigations of
abortion and prostitution and the women’s movement organisations’
mobilisation and demands on the state pertaining to the two issues.
Documents from the parliamentary process as well as articles on abor-
tion and prostitution in the journals of women’s organisations will also
be taken into account. In this analysis, the major actors involved in the
processes as well as their framings of abortion and prostitution and their
impact on the policy process will be identified and assessed. I will also
draw on the major secondary literature (Eduards, 2007; Erikson, 2011;
Svanström 2006a, b; Swärd, 1984) to complete my account.
Policy legacy
Abortion: From a moral problem to a social problem

From a historical perspective, abortion has been a criminal matter in
Sweden. According to the 1734 Abortion Law, abortions were punished
by death (the same penalty as manslaughter). Only late abortions were
punished; early abortions were generally not punished if performed
before quickening (Eduards, 2007:90). In the 1864 Abortion Law the
death penalty was replaced with penal labour for two to six years for
both the woman and the person assisting her (ibid.). At the end of
the 1800s, the sentence was mitigated for the woman to a minimum
of one year of hard labour and made stricter for those who performed
abortions.1
As political scientist Maud Eduards demonstrates, issues concerning
the body, including abortion, were not the focus of attention of the
first wave women’s movement (Eduards, 2007:90–91). The first wave
women’s movement was mainly involved in the suffrage issue, and sen-
sitive questions relating to the body, particularly sexuality and the use
of contraceptives, were not prioritised (Manns, 1997 cited in Eduards,
2007). The Fredrika Bremer Association (Fredrika Bremerförbundet), a
powerful liberal feminist women’s organisation founded in 1884, even
claimed that an increased focus on sexuality would benefit men at
the expense of women (Eduards, 2007:91).2 In line with the dominant
discourse on sexuality, the women’s movement argued that sexuality
should be kept within marriage (ibid.). In fact, in 1911, information
about contraceptives was prohibited by law, based on the assumption
that the use of contraceptives would cause moral dissolution in society
(ibid.).
A critical juncture
A turning point occurred in 1927 when the first motion on abortion
was submitted to parliament (Eduards, 2007:92). In the motion, submit-
ted by the Communist Party, it was suggested that abortion should be
legalised. Inspired by the law on free abortion in the Soviet Union, Com-
munist Party women had struggled for impunity since the mid-1920s
(ibid.). They argued that the woman herself should decide whether she
wanted an abortion or not (ibid.). The framing of abortion as a right,
based on emancipatory arguments, represents a discursive opening,
although the discussion generally revolved around motherhood (Elgán,
1994 cited in Eduards, 2007).
After 1927 motions on abortion were submitted to parliament almost

every year until an investigation committee was constituted in 1934.
One of these motions was submitted by Kerstin Hesselgren (Liberal
Party), the first woman to be elected to the Swedish parliament. Polit-
ical parties were, however, split on the issue of abortion (Eduards,
2007:92–93). The primary opponents were right-wing male parliamen-
tarians, but also female parliamentarians of the right. The Social Demo-
cratic Party was also against free abortion, arguing that women’s right
to self-determination should not be as excessive as proposed by the
Communists (ibid.). Outside parliament, the National Federation of Pro-
fessional Women (Yrkeskvinnors riksförbund, founded in 1935) and the
National Federation of Left Women (Svenska Kvinnors Vänsterförbund –
SKV, a non-partisan organisation for leftist women founded in 1931)
lobbied for women’s right to abortion, while medical doctors were their
main opponents, claiming that their medical expertise made them bet-
ter equipped to assess and treat women’s bodily functions (ibid.). The
increasing role of medical expertise was intimately linked to the nation
state (Eduards, 2007:106–107); medical experts were regarded as key
in defining and curing sickness in society, including venereal diseases,
uncontrolled sexuality, abortions and problems in racial hygiene, and
they presented themselves as promoters of national health and the
well-being of society (ibid.).
Between 1934 and 1976 more than 60,000 persons were sterilised
under the authority of the sterilisation laws in force at the time (SOU,
1999:2, 29). Sterilisation was possible on several grounds: eugenic (also
racial hygiene), social or medical. Regardless of grounds, the aim was to
secure the growth of the Swedish people. Although sterilisation was vol-
untary, many women, including travellers, were sterilised against their
own will. Telling are the stories of Soraya Post, EU Parliament member
for the feminist party Feminist Initiative since 2014, whose mother was
subjected to forced sterilisation due to her Roma ancestry.
As a consequence of the increasing number of abortions, a state inves-
tigation was commissioned to examine the matter. According to the
1934 Investigation Committee, the penalty threat was not enough to
reduce the number of abortions. Quite the contrary, the number of abor-
tions seemed to be increasing. In line with the new framing of abortion,
that women wanted abortions because of poverty, the committee sug-
gested that abortion be legally performed upon social grounds. It was
also suggested that abortion be prevented via social reforms such as
women’s right to work in spite of marriage and pregnancy, access to
housing for single mothers and subsidies for poor mothers and their
children. The committee also argued for a change in the Penal Code so
that women having an abortion would not be punished in certain cases.
The previous moral discourse on abortion was gradually challenged and
substituted by a social discourse.3
The 1938 Abortion Act

When the Abortion Act of 1938 (1938:318) came into force in 1939,
abortion was still considered a crime, but quite a few exceptions were
allowed. The act stated that an abortion could be legally performed on
medical grounds (risks for the mother), humanitarian grounds (preg-
nancy after rape or sexual abuse of juveniles), or eugenic grounds
(presumed risks for the child’s health because of parents’ hereditary dis-
positions). However, the law was more restrictive than the investigation
committee had proposed. The social indication proposed by the com-
mittee was not enacted, and the penalty for illegal abortion remained
the same as before. The woman as well as the person assisting her could
be punished with prison and penal labour.
The abortion law of 1938 remained largely unchanged with a few
adjustments until 1975 (Lindelöf, 2010). During these years, abortion
was a controversial issue and several state investigations were commis-
sioned. A socio-medical indication and reduced punishment for women
in certain circumstances were introduced in 1946 (prop., 1946:156) and
in 1950, and in 1963 a fifth indication was introduced, making abortion
legal in case of suspected foetal damage (prop., 1963:100). The latter
was mainly a consequence of the thalidomide scandal, in which many
children were born with severe physical injuries due to their mothers’
use of anti-depressive medication during pregnancy. Abortions on the
grounds of social reasons remained prohibited, largely due to the resis-
tance of medical doctors. After the enactment of the 1938 Abortion Law,
the number of legal abortions increased from 523 in 1939 to 990 in
1943 (SOU, 2005:90, 42). After the 1950s the number of legal abortions
increased rapidly: from 2,000–3,000 abortions per year in the 1950s to
almost 30,000 in 1973, the year before a new law was enacted (SOU,
2005:90, 47).
Prostitution – A medical and moral problem

Contemporary legal history on prostitution in Sweden starts in the
mid-1800s. In 1847, the so-called reglementation system was intro-
duced, with the aim to administer local prostitution (SOU, 1981:71,
39). According to this system, prostitutes were obliged to undergo regu-
lar medical check-ups to prevent the spread of venereal diseases. The
main argument for the control of prostitution was medical: if men

refrained from sex before marriage, they would become sick (Svanström,
2004:219). Men’s sexual desire was seen as stronger than women’s, and
that desire had to be satisfied, within or outside marriage (ibid.). A group
of medically controlled women should therefore be at their service, so
that men who frequented them would not get other diseases in place
of the ones they would get if they refrained from having sex (ibid.).
According to Eduards, the driving forces behind the regulation were
medical doctors and to some extent the military (Eduards, 2007:141).
As historian Yvonne Svanström (2000) points out, the new rule rep-
resents an apparent paradox: on the one hand prostitution was not
regarded as a regular job; on the other hand prostitution was regulated
as work with mandatory check-ups. If prostitutes did not abide by the
rules, they were to be sentenced to work at penitentiaries, in accordance
with the Vagrancy Law, which aimed at maintaining law and order. The
1847 regulation thus legitimated prostitution, but brothels were illegal
(Svanström, 2004).
During the period 1847–1918, prostitution was seen as a necessary
evil, tolerated but regulated (Erikson, 2011). The main problem was not
prostitution per se, but the risks of uncontrolled prostitution (ibid.). The
main aim of the regulation of prostitution was gradually changed, from
combating venereal diseases in the 1800s to administering local prosti-
tution at the turn of the century. The framing of prostitution was thus
altered from a medical and hygienic problem to a problem of moral dis-
solution and disrespect for law and order. The solution to both of these
problems was the control and regulation of the problem – the prosti-
tutes. As political scientist Josefina Erikson (2011:65) writes, common to
these approaches was that prostitution itself was not seen as a problem,
only its consequences. According to Svanström (2000), the regulation of
prostitution illustrates the double standards of the Swedish state, imply-
ing that some women, the bourgeois women, should be protected, while
others should be of service by offering their bodies. In a similar vein
political scientist Maud Eduards suggests that men were given an extra
civic right – access to healthy and willing women (Eduards, 2007:141).
As Eduards shows, women’s organisations protested against the
reglementation policy and the ways in which prostitutes were being
controlled (Eduards, 2007:142). For instance, in 1878 a Swedish chapter
of the International Abolitionist Federation, a British Christian phil-
anthropic organisation, was established. As the first mass mobilisation
of women on a political issue in Sweden, the unit organised protest
meetings and petitions to stop the control of prostitutes (Svanström,
2006a:190). A petition set up in 1902 comprising 15,000 signatories was

rejected, and the Swedish Society of Medicine reproved the demand on
the grounds that the reglementation was in the interest of the entire
society (Olsson, cited in Eduards, 2007:142).
A critical juncture
On request of a motion submitted to parliament in 1903, an inves-
tigation was commissioned with the task to analyse and evaluate the
organisation of prostitution in Sweden. In its 1910 report, the so-called
Reglementation Committee proposed that the current reglementation
system be abolished and replaced by a new classification of prostitutes,
namely full-time prostitutes and part-time prostitutes. Only full-time
prostitutes were to be subject to medical check-ups and surveillance
according to the Vagrancy Law. Part-time prostitutes, quite the contrary,
were regarded as less morally flawed because they had other sources
of income and did not have to engage in prostitution on a full-time
basis (Svanström, 2006a:277). Quite paradoxically, as Yvonne Svanström
points out, this view differed from the perceptions of doctors and the
police in the 1800s, who had argued that it was of utmost importance
to keep the women who were positioned in between a moral and an
immoral life under control, ‘the lecherous women’ who could move
between different groups in society and spread infections. Interestingly,
in a reservation to the committee report, the buyers of prostitutes – that
is, men – were also pointed out as subjects in prostitution. In the reserva-
tion, Committee Member Professor Johan E. Johansson claimed that the
classification of full-time prostitutes was based on the idea that there are
clients who demand sexual services. Referring to the ‘unequal treatment
of women and men in prostitution’, Professor Johansson stated that if
the issue of guilt is to be established in prostitution, ‘it concerns both
parties’. As Maud Eduards explains, the idea that both parties were seen
as equals was a new way of thinking (Eduards, 2007:143).
The 1918 Lex Veneris

After five years of investigation and debate, the 1847 reglementation sys-
tem was abolished in 1918 (SOU, 1981:71, 39; Svanström, 2006a:297).
In contrast to the suggestions made by the committee, the system was
replaced by a general law concerning the spread of venereal disease, the
Lex Veneris (1918:460). As Maud Eduards shows, one of the driving forces
behind the new law was Karolina Widerström, the first female medi-
cal doctor in Sweden (Eduards, 2011:143). According to the Lex Veneris
everyone who was infected by a sexually transmitted disease was to
submit herself/himself to medical treatment, which was free of charge.

This law was regarded as unique, because it was aimed at all citizens
(ibid.). Medical doctors were also to report suspected venereal infec-
tions to a health inspector. Prostitutes were still subject to the Vagrancy
Law, but they were no longer subjected to forced medical examination.
As Eduards explains, Professor Johansson’s demand that both parties in
prostitution be treated equally eventually impacted on legislation (ibid.).
Since 1918 Swedish prostitution policy has been characterised by abo-
litionism, criminalising activities related to prostitution such as brothels
and pimping but not the prostitutes (Erikson, 2011). As shown by
Erikson, the institutionalised view of prostitution has from time to time
been challenged by counter discourses (ibid.). An illustrative example is
the protest letter sent to the Bureau of Prostitution by a group of ‘edu-
cated married women’ in the early 1900s (ibid.). According to Erikson
prostitution was constructed here as a problem of sinful and immoral
living, caused by men’s sexual desire, for which criminalisation would
be a proper solution. In the view of the petitioners, the state should
demand
[ . . . ] more of the fallen men than of the fallen women, and it is men
that should be punished and stigmatized. If men did not pay for sex,
women would not have prostitution as a profession; therefore, the
man is the guilty party, and the punishment should target him.
(Svanström, 2004:227)
Thus, as shown by Erikson and Svanström, the idea of criminalising the

purchase of sexual services is not a novelty of recent years. Rather, it is a
demand that can be traced back in history. The framing of the question,
however, has changed, as will become clear in the analysis to follow.
The bloodless revolution
The 1970s represents an important formative phase in Swedish history

(Bergqvist et al., 1999; Borchorst et al., 2012). It was a period when
gender equality was politicised and institutionalised and the male bread-
winner model gave way to the dual career and earner model and the
two-income family. It was also a time when women enrolled at universi-
ties and an increasing share of women entered the labour market. In this
period, the so-called ‘housewife contract’, which stressed women’s roles
as mother and housewife, was transformed into a model consisting of
apparently independent and equal citizens, or an ‘equality contract’ in
historian Yvonne Hirdman’s (1989) terminology. A battery of gender
equality reforms was introduced alongside the establishment of the

Swedish gender equality machinery. Historians have even characterised
the period as a ‘bloodless revolution’ given the multitude of reforms
that were adopted and the ease with which they were introduced (Florin
and Nilsson, 1999). The framing of gender equality shifted from equal
choice to equality and enhanced democracy, and claims for gender
equality were integrated in the larger debate on equality (Sainsbury,
2005).
The 1970s was also a time when the women’s movements experi-
enced a revitalisation. The second wave women’s movement – a new
socialist and radical women’s liberation movement – mobilised thou-
sands of women. The slogan ‘the personal is political’ became a shared
claim and encouraged women to protest against pornography, prosti-
tution and violence against women. Women challenged the traditional
male concept of citizenship, arguing that male norms dictating the rules
in society was unacceptable in a democracy (Dahlerup, 1998). One of
the most powerful groups was Group 8 (Grupp 8), established by eight
women in 1968 with the aim of achieving a socialist society in which all
kinds of discrimination against women were eliminated. The struggle for
women’s emancipation was intimately linked to the struggle for a class-
less society (Isaksson, 2007:120). Simultaneously, the national women’s
federations within the political parties were revived, having indepen-
dent membership, separate statutes and budgets of their own. Although
the very existence of separate sections for women was questioned in the
name of gender equality, they carved out a space by distancing them-
selves from ‘the feminists’ in the more radical autonomous movements
(Freidenvall, 2006; 2013).
Women’s issues were also gradually placed on the agenda of the politi-
cal parties, particularly the Social Democratic Party and the Liberal Party.
For instance, in 1960 a study group on women’s issues – the Women’s
Committee – was established within the Social Democratic Party, and
in 1964 it presented the report Woman’s Equality, the first women’s
programme to be adopted by the party. Similarly, at the Liberal Party
Congress in 1964, a group of young liberal academics presented a new
family programme, Radical family politics (Freidenvall, 2006).
Abortion
In the early 1960s the debate about women’s right to decide about
abortion gained new life. The Liberal Party’s Youth Section was one
of the strongest pro-choice proponents, stressing equal rights of indi-
viduals. Also the Social Democratic Student Section became active on
the pro-choice side, taking a stand in favour of free abortion in 1963.

In the debate book Fri abort (Free Abortion), published in 1964, the
social democrat Jacob Palme described the Swedish law on abortion
as undemocratic and a means to restrict the freedom of individuals.
According to him the pregnant woman should have ‘the same right to
choose over her actions as any citizen’.
Although the Social Democratic Party as well as the National Federa-
tion of Social Democratic Women still viewed abortion as an issue about
class and poverty, in 1963 they requested that the government should
appoint a committee to investigate the adoption of a new abortion law
(Swärd, 1984:70). Among the opponents to this request were represen-
tatives of the Church of Sweden (Lutheran state church 1527–2000)
and various Christian communities. Many of the opponents argued
that pregnant women were mentally unstable and should therefore
not decide about abortion. Instead, ‘objective experts’ should make the
decision.
A critical juncture
One occurrence that received quite a lot of attention was the so-called
Poland case in 1964–1965 (SOU, 2005:90; Swärd, 1984). With the help
of the journalist and pro-choice proponent Hans Nestius, around 1,000
Swedish women had travelled to Poland to have abortions. The Swedish
Prosecutor General regarded these activities as illegal and stated that it
was a crime against Swedish interests to abort a Swedish foetus. After
massive coverage in the mass media, which also contained informa-
tion about bad treatment of women applying for abortion in Sweden,
the Social Democratic government was forced to act. Eventually it
decided to acquit Nestius and the women, which is an exceptional mea-
sure in Swedish jurisprudence, and the juridical process was cancelled.
In the spring of 1965 the government set up a parliamentary commit-
tee with the task of investigating the possible introduction of a new
abortion law.
Although it is difficult to assess the importance of the Poland case,
it triggered an important public debate on abortion. Within a couple
of weeks the opinion had changed in favour of a more liberal view on
abortion. By organising travel to Poland, women took the step from an
individual decision to viewing abortion as a basis for collective action
(Eduards, 2007:96). In this way, the issue of abortion was transformed
from a private issue into a political problem (ibid.). Historian Gunnel
Karlsson (1990) views the trips to Poland as a form of civil disobedience,
a way of protesting against the existing Swedish abortion laws.
The Poland case challenged the view of abortion-seeking women as

weak and incapable of handling their situation. By the end of 1966 sup-
port for free abortion had become widespread in Swedish society. At the
1967 congress, the Social Democratic Youth Section decided to support
free abortion, to be accompanied by the Centre Party Youth Section in
1968. In 1971 the Moderate Party Youth Section also officially declared
itself pro-choice until the 12th week of pregnancy (Swärd, 1984:42).
One of the organisations pursuing a wait-and-see policy was the Swedish
Association for Sexuality Education (Riksförbundet för Sexuell Upplysning –
RFSU), but in 1968 it changed its mind, declaring that the ‘RFSU recom-
mends that the coming legislation on abortion will be based directly
on the women’s own standpoint, instead of on unclear abortion indica-
tions’ (cited in Swärd, 1984:91). As Maud Eduards maintains, there was
a general trend of critique against the traditional family in the 1960s,
which included demands for women’s right to refuse procreation and
motherhood (Eduards, 2007:97).
The issue of women’s right to decide over their own bodies was now
on the political agenda. In relation to the Poland case in 1965, the
National Federation of Left Women (Svenska Kvinnors Vänsterförbund –
SKV), a non-partisan women’s organisation, made a statement to the
Minister of Justice, Herman Kling: ‘It must be allowed for every woman
to decide whether she wants to give birth to a child or not’ (cited in
Swärd, 1984:88). Even if it was not until the 1970s that abortion became
a topical issue among the women’s organisations, it became an issue that
involved both the first wave women’s movement, such as the liberal
Fredrika Bremer Association, and the second wave women’s movement,
such as the socialist and radical feminist organisation Group 8. How-
ever, women’s organisations took divergent views on abortion. At its
1968 congress, the National Federation of Social Democratic Women, for
example, informally supported free abortion, but in obeying the party
line it chose to wait for the result of the ongoing state investigation
before taking a formal vote. Divergent views among board members,
however, resulted in a vote of seven to five in 1970 in favour of free
abortion (Karlsson, 1990:147).
A discursive shift – From a social problem to women’s right

to self-determination
In 1965 an official state committee was established to investigate the
prospects of legalising abortion. In its final report Rätten till abort (SOU,
1971:58 – Right to Abortion), an entirely new view on abortion was
presented: abortion was to become decriminalised and women were
to be given the right to self-determination. The report referred to the

fact that times had changed. The values and norms (as well as medi-
cal science and knowledge) on which the 1938 abortion legislation was
based were out of date. Increased knowledge about sexuality as well as
access to contraception had changed attitudes towards sexuality. Sexual
abstention was not seen as desirable in itself; rather, sexual intercourse
was seen as having a positive value in itself. The insecure situation of
migrants and refugees in Sweden was also discussed as a possible reason
to have an abortion. It was taken for granted, however, that the new law
should only be applicable to Swedish citizens or women with permanent
residence in Sweden.
The majority of the national federations of party women were in
favour of the proposal suggested by the committee, but they differed in
their views on the proper time limit. The National Federation of Social
Democratic Women was in favour of the 18th week time limit, as sug-
gested by the committee. In its journal, the Federation claimed that ‘It is
a demand for gender equality, for women not to be forced against their
own will into worries and difficulties’ and that it must be recognised
that ‘the principle of pregnancy primarily (is) the woman’s own busi-
ness’ (Morgonbris, Morning Breeze, 1971:1). The National Federations of
Centre and Liberal Women stated that abortion should only be allowed
during the first trimester, and under specific conditions (SOU, 1972:39).
Positive attitudes towards legalised abortion were also displayed by
the autonomous women’s organisations. For instance, the Fredrika
Bremer Association (FBA) supported free abortion until the 12th week,
although it was not united on the issue. In its comments to the
Committee report, it stated that:
The FBA wants to place the decision-making on abortion in the

conversation between the woman who seeks abortion and the gynae-
cologist, a situation where the woman’s own wish should be decisive
and put in relation to the doctor’s judgement of any possible medical
contra-indications. After the 12th week, a psycho-social counselling
should be mandatory.
(SOU, 1972:39, 268)
Women’s bodily citizenship was thus based on the trust in women’s

ability to make an informed decision, although a certain authority in
the form of medical and psycho-social expertise remained. Not only the
importance of making an informed choice, but also the responsibility of
society to care for its citizens, was emphasised by the FBA. In its journal,
the FBA noted:
As much as every child should be guaranteed the right to come

wanted to the world and the woman not be forced by society to give
birth to a child she does not want, as much must society with every
means facilitate for the woman who wants to give birth to a child in
spite of difficult personal circumstances.
(Hertha, 1971:5)
Positive attitudes towards free abortion were also expressed by Group

8, which demanded free abortion without time limits, demanding that
‘the woman alone is to decide over her body and the right to give birth’
(SOU, 1972:39, 347–348). It also questioned the assumption of women
having a natural desire to have children, arguing that ‘it is not unnatural
or unreasonable not to want to bring children into the world’ (ibid.).
Responding medical personnel, such as doctors, nurses and midwives,
were also in favour of legalised abortion but stressed the importance
of time limits being included in legislation. Many other institutions
and organisations that responded to the committee report, however,
opposed the proposals suggested by the Committee, arguing that they
were too far reaching. In particular, various Christian organisations were
critical, including the newly formed Christian Democratic Party, which
argued in favour of the right of the foetus. Among party women, the
National Federations of Christian Democratic Women and Moderate
Women were critical to the proposal as put forward by the Committee
(SOU, 1972:39, 243–248, 345–346).
Based on the critique raised, the Minister of Justice, Lennart Geijer of
the Social Democratic government, decided to appoint a new working
group to present a revised law proposal. According to the new pro-
posal, presented to parliament in 1974, a woman could have an abortion
without having to give any reasons for her decision.
The 1974 abortion law

In the parliamentary vote on 29 May 1974, 214 members of parliament
voted in favour of the law, 103 against it (Eduards, 2007:101). The new
abortion law was based on the belief in women’s capacity to assess their
own situations. The Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party
voted in favour of the law, the Moderate Party voted against it, and the
Centre Party and the Liberal Party were divided. Two party leaders tried
to obstruct the enforcement of the law: Gösta Bohman of the Moder-
ate Party and Thorbjörn Fälldin of the Centre Party (ibid.). As Eduards
writes, the first argued that the new abortion law ignored the human
rights of the foetus and put an unreasonable responsibility on pregnant
women (ibid.). According to Eduards, the abortion law can be seen as
a conflict between, on the one hand, right-wing parties and the inter-
est of the Church of Sweden, and on the other hand, left-wing parties
(Eduards, 2007).
The 1974 Abortion Act (1974:595) applied to all women who were
Swedish citizens or residents of Sweden. The law entitles the woman
herself to decide up until the end of the 18th week of the pregnancy
whether or not she wishes to have an abortion. If the woman demands
an abortion before the conclusion of the 12th week of pregnancy, she
is, as a rule, entitled to an abortion, for any reason whatsoever. If the
abortion is to be carried out after the 12th week but before the con-
clusion of the 18th week of pregnancy, there is a requirement that the
abortion is preceded by an investigation of the woman’s personal cir-
cumstances. After the end of the 18th week of pregnancy, the approval
of the National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) is necessary
to obtain an abortion,4 and there must be special reasons for the per-
mission. Such approval may not be granted if the foetus is judged to be
viable, which generally means that abortions after the 22nd week are
not allowed.
Since the Abortion Act was passed, the number of abortions per
1,000 women aged 15–44 remained stable. The figure for 1982 was
32,602, which was below the figures for the three preceding years and
roughly the same as the figure for 1975 (SOU, 1983:31, 15). The fear
that women would misuse the new law was thus refuted. Women from
Southeastern Europe (representing major groups of migrants to Sweden,
besides women from the Nordic countries) had about twice as many
abortions than Swedish women. In explaining this observation, state
investigations mentioned factors such as patriarchal family structures,
taboos about sexuality and contraceptives, and different moral and
sexual expectations for women and men (ibid.). Abortion patterns for
second-generation migrants and other women born in Sweden, how-
ever, were similar. State investigations therefore concluded that it is
important to observe abortion patterns among migrants as well as to
cooperate with migrants’ organisations on issues of contraceptives and
planned parenthood.
Counter discourses on abortion

The Abortion Act came into force in 1975, after which the issue lay more
or less dormant until the EU accession debate in 1990s. That abortion
is an issue of bodily integrity and a woman’s right to self-determination
was still a dominant discourse, but counter discourses gradually made
their way onto the political agenda. For instance, in the final report
of the 1989 investigation on artificial insemination and in vitro fer-

tilisation, Den gravida kvinnan och fostret – två individer (SOU, 1989:51,
The Pregnant Woman and the Foetus – Two Individuals), the pregnant
woman and the foetus were regarded as two individuals for the first time.
In the viewpoint of the Committee, ‘one must work on the premise that
the mother and the prospective child are two separate individuals, both
of whom are deserving of protection’ (SOU, 1989:51, 127). It was also
maintained that there is a weighing of conflicts of interest between the
mother and the foetus that applies right at the start of the pregnancy.
This new counter discourse of abortion was also reflected in the par-
liamentary debates following the government’s law proposal (prop.,
1994/1995:142). For instance, in some motions on abortion submitted
by the Christian Democratic Party, the right of the foetus, not being
capable to claim its interests, was also stressed. The right to life was
defined as a fundamental right, and references were made to ‘the invio-
lability of life’ in a Christian point of view. There was a special focus in
many motions on abortion on the issue of when life starts. A Christian
and a human rights perspective was also used as a point of departure for
an argumentation against sex selection of foetuses. In this context, the
motion writers spoke of prenatal sex/gender discrimination of female
foetuses, thereby connecting to a feminist discussion about human
rights/citizenship that was usually employed by leftists and liberals.
An important change in the debate on abortion in the 1990s, hence,
was the emergence of a counter discourse put forward by anti-abortion
organisations connecting foetuses to unborn children and as individu-
als with rights. In the balancing between the status of the foetus and the
status of the woman as individuals, they were increasingly perceived as
equal. Maud Eduards writes that the right of the living, pregnant woman
was not seen as worth more than the foetus she was carrying (Eduards,
2007:104). The view on the foetus is telling, but maybe more so the ways
in which women are evaluated, Eduards observes (ibid.).
Nonetheless, the woman’s right to self-determination regarding abor-
tion still represented the dominant discourse on abortion, as well as the
right to a sex life separate from reproduction. Leftists, Social Democrats
and Greens argued for improved information and counselling, in partic-
ular for young people, as well as for free contraceptives (pills, including
morning-after pills, and condoms). In women’s movement journals such
as Kvinnobulletinen (The Women’s Bulletin, the journal of Group 8), the
woman’s right to choose was explicitly stressed. Abortion as a fun-
damental right was also highlighted by Kvinnor and Fundamentalism
(Women and Fundamentalism), published by the Support Committee for
Women in Iran 1991–2006, and the only migrant women’s organisa-

tion that explicitly discussed abortion. For instance, in its issue 1999:17,
Sholeh Irani writes that ‘the discussion about the right to abortion is
really about a fundamental human right: the right to one’s own body’.
Europeanisation
Sweden’s accession to the EU in 1995 was accompanied by exten-
sive debates within the women’s movement about whether it would
endanger Sweden’s liberal abortion regulations. The feminist journal
Kvinnobulletinen (1992:2) asked: ‘Can we keep our generous abortion law
when the anti-abortionists get increasingly well-organised both here and
in Europe, at the same time as the Swedish medical system will have to
take care of abortion-seeking women from surrounding EC countries
with less generous abortion laws?’
When Sweden joined the EU, the question whether non-resident
women should be permitted to undergo an abortion in Sweden was put
on the political agenda. According to the 1974 Abortion Law, abortions
were only permitted for Swedish citizens or residents of Sweden. A par-
liamentary state investigation, headed by county governor Eva Eriksson
(Liberal Party) and staffed by renowned feminist parliamentarians, sug-
gested that the abortion law should be changed so that foreign women
would be permitted, as are Swedish citizens or residents of Sweden, to
undergo an abortion on request until the end of the 18th week of preg-
nancy (SOU, 2005:90, Abort i Sverige). The woman should also be offered
counselling before and after an abortion. Financing and payment for
abortion should follow the general rules for foreigners getting health
services in Sweden. According to the investigation, there was no accept-
able reason to deny the right to an abortion in Sweden to women from
outside the EU. The reproductive health of women in developing coun-
tries was a high Swedish priority, the investigation maintained, arguing
that an amendment of the Swedish abortion law would have a high
symbolic value. It also referred to the views on abortion by various reli-
gions, including Christian, Jewish and Muslim denominations. It was
stated that according to the Swedish law the right to an abortion was a
‘woman’s choice’. The law grants the woman a politically founded right
to decide for herself if she wants to undergo an abortion, and the woman
alone is the one to consider ethical considerations. The investigation
also made references to the legislation on abortion in other countries,
particularly the Netherlands and Great Britain, in order to assess the
probability of an increased demand by foreign women to have abortions
in Sweden.
A majority of the national federations of party women as well as many

autonomous women’s organisations supported the report. For instance,
the Swedish Women’s Lobby maintained that ‘to have access to legal
and safe abortions is of great importance for women’s reproductive
health and Sweden is one of the countries working for the right to legal
abortions’ (SOU 2005:90). The National Federation of Centre Women
highlighted that ‘Sweden should act as a model and take responsibility
for women’s reproductive health, not only nationally but all over the
world’ (SOU, 2005:90).
Comments were also submitted by professional associations for
nurses, medical doctors and midwives, the RFSU, and the Swedish
Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights, RFSL
(Riksförbundet för homosexuella, bisexuellas och transpersoners rättigheter).
Various Christian groups also submitted comments, including the pro-
life association Ja till Livet (Yes to Life). In the years to come, the-
matic issues on abortion were published in women’s journals such
as Kvinnotryck (published by the National Organisation for Women’s
Shelters and Young Women’s Shelters in Sweden, Riksorganisationen
för kvinnojourer och tjejjourer i Sverige (ROKS)) and Bang (published by
feminist academics).
In 2007 the Alliance government (a coalition between the Moder-
ate Party, the Liberal Party, the Centre Party and the Christian Party)
submitted a law proposal to parliament, suggesting that foreign women
be given the right to abortions in Sweden. Interestingly, despite strong
opposition within his own party, the law proposal was presented by
the Christian Democratic Minister of Social Affairs, Göran Hägglund.
In the parliamentary debate, abortion was framed in terms of a repro-
ductive health issue, women’s right to decide over their own bodies
as well as the right to safe abortions as a human rights issue. While
most members of parliament were in favour of the proposal, Christian
Democratic MPs also stressed the need to protect the rights of the
foetus alongside the woman’s right to decide. Nonetheless, the pro-
posal was passed and the new law entered into force on 1 January
2008. The previous resistance to extending abortion rights to foreign
women, based on the understanding that women from countries with
less progressive legislation (such as Poland) would travel to Sweden for
legal abortions – so-called abortion tourism – had gradually subsided,
and the perception that abortion is a woman’s right, regardless of her
origin, became a dominant discourse. Interestingly, given the progres-
sive 1974 law, which was partly the result of Swedish women’s Poland
trips, it took more than 30 years before Sweden extended its abortion
rights to foreign women, including Polish women, to make ‘Sweden

trips’.
More recent debates on abortion in Sweden concern trends within
the EU. Telling are the reflections made by MEP Anna Hedh (Social
Democratic Party) about her first speech on abortion in the European
Parliament. In an article in the feminist journal Kvinnotryck (2006:8),
Hedh notes, ‘The first time I made a speech in the European Parliament
about abortion, the abortion opponents rose to their feet and shouted
child murderer at me.’ In the same issue, it is noted that Anna Hedh
is worried about developments in Europe, claiming that ‘women’s right
to vote, to economic independence and equal pay, to not be discrimi-
nated against in the labour market, even men’s violence against women,
is on the political agenda. Only when it comes to women’s right to
decide over their own bodies, there is a stop’ (Kvinnotryck, 2006:8). A
similar reflection has been made by MEP Eva-Britt Svensson (GUE/NGL)
and chair of the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality
(FEMM), noting that
I experience a very strong majority in the EU to be in favour of

restricting the right to abortion. Therefore I cannot understand those
who want to make the abortion right an EU issue. Then the Swedish
legislation would lose and Sweden would be forced to take a more
restrictive stand, if not a ban on abortion.
(Kvinnotryck, 2006:8)
Prostitution
The 1970s was characterised by gender equalisation and sexual liber-

alisation. Pornography was legalised when the Act on Discipline and
Morality was repealed in 1970 (1970:125) with reference to the funda-
mental right of expression (Waltman, 2014). As a result, pornography
flourished, sex clubs and posing studios were established rapidly, and the
number of prostitutes increased (ibid.). Brothels, pimping and procur-
ing were still criminalised, while prostitutes were given help, support
and treatment on a voluntary basis within the framework of social and
health care (SOU, 1981:71).
Women’s organisations mobilise

The issue of prostitution regained new momentum in 1976 when
the Minister of Justice in the Social Democratic government, Lennart
Geijer, initiated an investigation in order to assess the rules about
sexual offences and procurement. The topic of prostitution was also

addressed in the investigation. In its final report Sexuella övergrepp (SOU,
1976:9, Sexual Offence), the Committee suggested that the regulation
on procurement be limited and that criminal liability be reduced to
those who ‘improperly make use of a prostitute’ (SOU, 1976:9, 126).
In principle, the proposal implied that procuring should be decrimi-
nalised and that prostitution to some extent be promoted due to the
different kinds of prostitution. Women’s organisations criticised the
proposal for regarding rape as less serious if the woman had encour-
aged the man to make sexual advances (Erikson, 2011). They were
also critical towards the proposal to limit the procurement law. A key
actor was Group 8, which initiated protests against the investigation
and united 13 organisations in a petition demanding a new investi-
gation be appointed (Thomsson, 2015). All of the national women’s
federations of party women were among the petitioners, as well as a
series of fundamentally different non-parliamentary women’s organ-
isations, such as the Fredrika Bremer Association, the Lesbian Front
and the National Federation of Housewives. The mobilisation of the
women’s organisations thus contributed to putting the issue on the
political agenda, albeit from different points of departure (Erikson,
2011:69).
In addition to this united effort, the women’s organisations lobbied
separately. As shown by Erikson (2011:69), Group 8 criticised prosti-
tution and pornography from a feminist perspective, arguing in its
journal Kvinnobulletinen that ‘[Prostitution] recklessly takes advantage
of women’ (1977:1) and that ‘prostitution illustrates the oppression of
women’ (1977:2). The Fredrika Bremer Association organised a nation-
wide cross-party campaign against prostitution and pornography and
demanded criminalisation of the client (Hertha, 1980:2). The public dis-
cussion about prostitution was stoked by the report Små flickor till salu
(Young Girls for Sale), broadcast on national television in 1976 in the
critical programme Studio S (Erikson, 2011). In the report, teenage prosti-
tutes gave first-hand accounts of their lives as prostitutes, experiences of
sexual abuse at an early age as well as drug abuse (Erikson, 2011; Olsson,
2006). Josefina Erikson (2013:162–163), who has analysed the framing
of prostitution in Sweden for the period 1970–1998, argues that the
political debate on prostitution in the 1970s was characterised by three
framings: the dominant institutionalised social framing, the challenging
criminal framing which was promoted mainly by women’s organisa-
tions, and a more marginal normalising framing which advocated the
legalisation of brothels.
Prostitution: From a social problem to a criminal problem

Due to the many requests for further scrutiny, the new right/centre gov-
ernment (the Centre Party, the Liberal Party and the Moderate Party)
installed in 1976, which ended 44 years of consecutive Social Demo-
cratic government, commissioned two investigations in 1976: one on
prostitution and another on sexual offences. That same year, a politi-
cal scandal occurred in Sweden, the so-called Geijer Affair. The Minister
of Justice (1969–1976) in the previous Social Democratic government,
Lennart Geijer, was accused in the media of having purchased sexual
services during his time as minister. Prime Minister Olof Palme defended
his minister, stating in parliament that ‘this is nonsense, pure nonsense’
(cited in Eduards, 2007:170). Lennart Geijer, who was also responsible
for the widely criticised Investigation on Sexual Offences, denied the
charges but was forced to resign.
Competing frames: Criminalising prostitution or not?

The first investigation, the Prostitution Investigation, was headed by MP
Inger Lindquist (Moderate Party), and it produced the most extensive
survey of prostitution available to date (Erikson, 2011). In its final report
Prostitution i Sverige: Bakgrund och åtgärder (SOU, 1981:71, Prostitution in
Sweden: Background and Measures), the investigator claimed that the
diffusion of prostitution had drastically decreased after having increased
in the mid-1970s, and stated that no part in prostitution should be crim-
inalised. To highlight the claim that prostitution was not a woman’s
issue but rather a human problem, the investigator defined prostitution
as a situation in which at least two parties purchase and sell sexual ser-
vices in return for (usually) financial compensation. The main argument
made in the report was thus that an agreement between two equivalent
parties cannot be criminalised. It was also claimed that prostitution was
incompatible with the ideas of freedom of the individual and gender
equality, which had long been prevalent in Sweden. In order to tackle
the problems relating to prostitution, preventive social reforms were
suggested, particularly information campaigns and improved education.
Pornography and sex clubs should be criminalised.
Due to the internal problems of the investigation, all the experts
resigned except criminologist Leif G.W. Persson, and an alterna-
tive report was presented (Erikson, 2011). In the 800-page report
Prostitutionen i Sverige (DsS, 1980:9, Prostitution in Sweden), the resign-
ing members presented a series of measures to be taken, including
increased education and information about sexuality, gender roles and
prostitution. Similar to the main investigator, they were against any

criminalisation of prostitution. In contrast to the main investigator,
however, their analysis was based on a structural view of prostitution.
In their view, prostitution had structural causes, and therefore it would
be wrong to punish individuals. As Maud Eduards writes, the report rep-
resented a critique against a patriarchal society and inequality between
women and men (Eduards, 2007:146–147). According to Eduards, the
committee secretary Hanna Olsson was a key player in the formulation
of prostitution as a problem of unequal gender relations (ibid.)
An essential part of the second investigation – the Investigation on
Sexual Offences – was to consider what penal regulations should exist to
prevent the exploitation of people by prostitution. In its final report,
Våldtäkt och andra sexuella övergrepp (SOU, 1982:61, Rape and Other
Sexual Offences), the investigation proposed several amendments to
the provisions of the Penal Code concerning sexual offences. Primarily,
the investigation proposed that those who promote or exploit another
person in prostitution should be punished with higher penalties. The
committee did not propose any criminalisation of the client, however,
based on the argument that such criminalisation would make women
prostitutes more dependent on their pimps, drive prostitution under-
ground and thus counteract the prevention of prostitution through
social reforms (Erikson, 2011).
As shown by Erikson (2011), many women’s organisations were crit-
ical of the reports and argued that the proposals could be perceived as
a legitimation of prostitution. For instance, the National Federation of
Centre Party Women claimed that ‘prostitution is incompatible with the
principles of equality and freedom’ (prop., 1981/1982:187, 44 cited in
Erikson, 2011:85). One of the committee members in the second inves-
tigation, MP Gunilla André (Centre Party), even made a reservation in
favour of the criminalisation of the client.
The government bill (prop., 1983/1984:105) submitted to parliament
in 1983 by the Social Democratic Party (which had regained power
in 1982) corresponded to a large extent with the proposals made by
the Sexual Offences Investigation. No criminalisation of prostitution
was proposed; rather, increased efforts against procuring were to be
taken. As demonstrated by Erikson (2011), many female parliamen-
tarians argued in favour of the criminalisation of the client. In the
parliamentary debate, MP Kerstin Anér (Liberal Party) stated that crim-
inalisation of the client was ‘a desirable and preventive solution to
reduce prostitution and a clear signal that society does not accept
this form of misogyny’ (prot., 1983/84:152 cited in Erikson, 2011:79.
Likewise, MP Maj-Lis Lööw (Social Democratic Party) claimed that pros-

titution could be seen as ‘the ultimate expression of misogyny and
humiliation of women’, although she was a bit hesitant towards crimi-
nalisation of the client (ibid.). As Erikson (2011) notes, bourgeois women
were active in an issue that had been primarily promoted by the rad-
ical women’s movement such as Group 8. Erikson also points out
that the social framing of prostitution was still dominant during the
early 1980s (2013:165). However, the social and criminal framings were
both based on an abolitionist approach – that prostitution is a prob-
lem and should be abolished – but differed to the extent that the
cause of prostitution can be attributed at the societal or the individual
level (ibid.). Gradually the abolitionist frame became institutionalised,
enabling advocates of client criminalisation to make advancements
while hindering and marginalising pursuers of the normalisation frame
(ibid.).
A critical juncture
In 1991, the Social Democratic government lost the election after nine
years in office and was succeeded by a right/centre minority govern-
ment (the Moderate Party, the Liberal Party, the Centre Party and the
Christian Democratic Party). The election of 1991 was significant, as
the Christian Democratic Party was also elected to parliament for the
first time (albeit having had one seat in 1985–1988 via a collaboration
with the Centre Party) and was also granted seats in the government.
In addition, the populist New Democratic Party was elected to par-
liament. What is more, for the first time since 1928, the proportion
of women in parliament decreased, from 38% to 34%, sending shock
waves across Sweden. Women activists reacted to the decrease in sev-
eral ways, and in Stockholm a small group of non-partisan women,
mainly academics and journalists, began to discuss ways of influencing
the political parties to promote more women in politics. They decided to
work behind the scenes, but eventually a women’s network – the Sup-
port Stockings – was established, demanding ‘half of the power, all of
the salary’ and threatened to found a women’s party if the established
parties did not select more women candidates (Freidenvall, 2006). The
name of the group – the Support Stockings – was a play on words: It sug-
gested that the group primarily consisted of middle-aged and elderly
women (with hosiery) who were tired of waiting and being nice. The
name was also associated with the radical Danish women’s organisa-
tion, the Red Stockings. Gender inequality was again at the top of the
political agenda.
A discursive opening: Prostitution as gendered violence

The demand for criminalisation of the purchase of sexual services was
also a topical issue. The previous social political frame of prostitu-
tion was gradually transformed into a criminal political frame (Erikson,
2011). In the late 1980s ROKS had mobilised around the issue. In 1987,
for instance, it had included the prohibition of the purchase of sex-
ual services in its yearly Action Plan (Ekberg, 2004). This Action Plan
was presented to the female parliamentarians every year. The support
for criminalisation was also increasing in the influential Social Demo-
cratic Party. In the late 1980s, Margareta Persson, chair of the National
Federation of Social Democratic Women, had pressured the powerful
Stockholm District of the Social Democratic Party to take a positive
stand in favour of criminalisation (Erikson, 2011). Now, in the 1990s,
both the National Federation of Social Democratic Women and the
Stockholm District were positive towards the criminalisation of the
client.
The criminal framing also received official support, illustrated in 1992
when the Committee on Justice decided to act in favour of motions
demanding that the government commissioned a new investigation on
prostitution (bet., 1992/1993:JuU7).5 According to Erikson, the decision
represented a turning point and a symbolic victory for the advance-
ment of the criminal framing (Erikson, 2013:168). As a consequence
of the parliamentary decision, the government commissioned the 1993
Prostitution Investigation with Inga-Britt Törnell, former Gender Equal-
ity Ombudsman, as chair. Simultaneously, an investigation on violence
against women was commissioned, with Britta Bjelle (Liberal Party) as
chair. In 1993, a joint motion by the Social Democratic Party, the Left
Party and the Liberal Party was submitted to parliament.6 The joint
motion welcomed a new investigation on prostitution and demanded
criminalisation of the purchase. It also related the problem of prostitu-
tion to HIV, drug abuse and increased prostitution of Eastern European
women (Erikson, 2011).
Frame collision: Criminalising both parties or the client?

The two investigations presented their final reports in 1995, and it
soon became apparent that they were based on divergent frames on
prostitution; one abolitionist and one criminalising the client (Erikson,
2011). In its final report Könshandeln (SOU, 1995:15, Sex Trade), the first
investigation – the 1993 Prostitution Investigation – used the term ‘sex
trade’ to describe an activity in which at least two parties purchase or
sell sexual services. Quite surprisingly, Erikson (2011) concludes, the

Investigation demanded a total ban on prostitution. A double crimi-
nalisation was thus proposed, introducing a ban on both purchasing
and selling of sexual services. The Investigation considered that crim-
inalisation of prostitution was a necessary step to make it completely
clear that prostitution as a phenomenon was not accepted by society.
It claimed that
Prostitution is also harmful to the community at large. The ability

of men to purchase sexual access to women in order to gratify their
own sexual needs runs contrary to the conviction of universal human
equality and to the pursuit of full equality between women and men.
(SOU, 1995:15, 25)
The Investigation also noted that the number of women prostitutes

from ‘the Third World’ and Eastern Europe had increased in Western
Europe, as had the trafficking of women. Although women prostitutes
were the chief focus of the investigation, male prostitution was also
addressed. The diffusion of HIV and AIDS was also noted as a serious
problem.
The Investigation’s proposal, particularly the idea of also criminalising
the selling, resulted in public debates in parliament and in the mass
media, and it was met by extensive criticism, particularly by the
women’s movement (Erikson, 2011). As Erikson has shown, a majority
of the women’s organisations were against the double criminalisation;
most of them proposed continued social measures for the prevention
of prostitution (status quo) and many of them (including the Gender
Equality Ombudsman, ROKS, and the Fredrika Bremer Association) pro-
posed the criminalisation of the purchase (ibid.). No migrant women’s
organisations responded to the investigation.
The second investigation, the Investigation on Violence Against
Women, followed a radical feminist approach, and in its final report,
Kvinnofrid (SOU, 1995:60, Women’s Peace), a series of measures were
proposed that were based on this perspective. It also referred to a series
of international conventions on violence against women, including the
United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against
Women (1993, A/RES/48/104).
The two reports were discussed in parliament, and several motions
were submitted by representatives of the Liberal Party, the Centre
Party, the Green Party, the Left Party and the Social Democratic
Party, proposing the criminalisation of the purchase of sexual services
(Erikson, 2011). In 1996 all national federations of party women, except

the National Federation of Moderate Women, decided to present a
joint motion in favour of the criminalisation of such purchase (mot.
1996/1997:Ju718). Some parties were still hesitant, but at the Social
Democratic Party Congress in 1997, the National Federation of Social
Democratic Women managed to secure party support for criminalisation
(Erikson, 2011).
The 1999 act on criminalisation of the purchase of sexual services

In 1998, Prime Minister Göran Persson of the Social Democratic Party
submitted the government proposal Kvinnofrid (prop., 1997/1998:55)
to parliament, which took the two investigations into consideration
(Erikson, 2011). The bill proposed a large number of measures in differ-
ent sectors to combat violence against women, prostitution and sexual
harassment in working life. Contrary to the suggestions made in the
Prostitution Investigation, it was now proposed that only the purchase
of sexual services be criminalised. According to the bill, men’s purchase
of sexual services was closely related to that of violence against women
and a lack of gender equality. It was claimed that ‘men’s violence against
women is not compatible with the pursuit of gender equality in soci-
ety and must be combated by all means. In such a society it is also
shameful and unacceptable that men obtain temporary sexual relations
with women in return for payment’ (prop., 1997/1998:55, 22 cited in
Erikson, 2011:112). It also argued that ‘even if prostitution as such is
no desirable phenomenon, it is not reasonable to criminalise the per-
son, who in most instances, is the weaker party who is used by others
for the satisfaction of their own sexual desire’ (prop., 1997/1998:55, 55
cited in Erikson, 2011:112). Thus, it was clearly stated that the two par-
ties – the prostitute and the client – have different starting points in
agreements about sexual services. The bill also stated that Sweden, by
introducing a ban on purchasing sexual services, would send an impor-
tant signal to other countries on the Swedish view of sexual services
and prostitution. In addition to the criminalisation of the purchase
of sex, a series of social measures was also proposed. The bill was
accepted by parliament, with 181 members voting in favour of the bill,
92 against.
On 1 January 1999, Sweden became the first country in the world to
criminalise the purchase, but not the sale, of sexual services. According
to the law, a person who obtains a casual sexual relation in return for
payment commits the crime of purchase of sexual service. Purchasing
a sexual service on a single occasion is sufficient for criminal liability.
Compensation can be in the form of money, but payment can also be

made through such means as alcohol or drugs. Promising compensation
so that payment is a condition for the service is sufficient to establish
liability. A crime is committed even if someone other than the person
who avails him or herself of the sexual service has provided or promised
the compensation. An attempted purchase is also punishable. The scale
of penalties for the purchase of sexual services ranges from a fine to
imprisonment for at most six months.
Compared to earlier legislation, in which the two parties in prosti-
tution were seen as equals (and therefore both of them or neither of
them should be criminalised), the ban on the purchase of sexual ser-
vices targets men. As Maud Eduards maintains, the state now speaks
in favour of the prostitutes against the purchasers (Eduards, 2007:149).
A discursive shift has taken place, illustrated in the investigations on
prostitution: in 1910 women prostitutes were seen as the main prob-
lem, in 1976 and 1981 the two parties were seen as equals, and in 1995
men purchasers were seen as the main problem (ibid.). The state had
thus moved from protecting men’s access to the bodies of prostitutes
to making these actions illegal. The public view on men’s sexuality has
thus been changed, from being a force of nature that is difficult to con-
trol and a male right, to a political issue, being subject to negotiation
(ibid.).
In 2008, the Alliance government, which was installed in 2006 after
12 years of Social Democratic rule, commissioned an investigation to
evaluate the application of the 1999 law. In its final report, Förbud mot
köp av sexuell tjänst (SOU, 2010:49, Ban Against the Purchase of Sexual
Services), the Commission concluded that the purchase of sexual ser-
vices is to remain criminalised. The Commission claimed that, since
the introduction of the ban, street prostitution in Sweden had been
reduced by 50%, and while prostitution had increased in the neigh-
bouring Nordic countries in the previous decade, it had not increased
in Sweden. What is more, judging from opinion polls before and after
the introduction of the ban, the Commission claimed that there had
been increased public support of the ban. In the polls conducted since
the ban was introduced, more than 70% of those asked took a positive
view of the ban (SOU 2010:49, 37). As a result of the investigation, the
scale of penalties for the purchase of sexual services was changed to a
fine or imprisonment for at most one year.
The investigation was, however, exposed to academic criticism. In an
article by ethnologist Susanne Dodillet and social anthropologist Petra
Östergren (2011) it was claimed that the investigation lacked scientific
rigour, and that there was a discrepancy between the presumed success
of the law and its documented effects. In fact, when reviewing the
research and reports available, the authors claimed that the Sex Pur-
chase Act had not resulted in decreased prostitution or had a deterrent
effect on clients to the extent claimed. Quite the contrary, they claimed,
the Act could be linked to a Swedish ‘desire to create and uphold a
national identity of being the moral consciousness in the world’. Since
then the Sex Purchase Act has been subject to both academic and pub-
lic debate (Dodillet, 2009a; Erikson, 2011, 2013; Svanström, 2006b;
Waltman, 2011, 2014).
Europeanisation
One result of Sweden’s entry to the EU in 1995 was the emergence of reg-
ulations on human trafficking in connection with prostitution policy.
As Susanne Dodillet (2009b) writes, trafficking was hardly recognised
in Sweden until the 1990s, when EU critics used it as an argument
against Sweden’s membership. For instance, in the booklet Brothel
Europe, Professor Sven-Axel Månsson, a prominent expert on prostitu-
tion, introduced the image of Sweden as a progressive country with
limited prostitution being exposed to the threat of the ‘international
sex trade activities’ in Europe (Månsson and Backman, 1993). He argued
that ‘the organized sex trade is not only tolerated but also actively pro-
moted in most countries in the European community’. Thus, similarly
to the case of abortion, there was an apparent fear that the Swedish gen-
der model was being challenged by reactionary trends within the EU.
There was also a fear that foreign prostitutes would bring not only crim-
inality but also diseases such as AIDS, tuberculosis and venereal diseases
into Sweden. Prostitutes were thus equated with the ‘Foreigner’, bring-
ing contagion and unrest into the supposedly clean and tidy Swedish
society. Quite interestingly, however, the fear that was evoked prior
to Sweden’s accession to the EU was transformed into a strategy to
promote Swedish interests in the EU once a member state. Both the
Social Democratic government (1994–2006) and the Alliance govern-
ment (2006–2014), for example, devoted time to marketing the Sex
Purchase Act internationally. According to anthropologist Don Kulick
(2003), Sweden developed a perception of itself as a ‘moral superpower’
with a special obligation and responsibility to help weak individuals
and small countries. Similarly, political scientist Ann Towns (2002:162)
argues that ‘a gender equality identity’ has been incorporated into
the Swedish representation of the ‘Self’ as a model state with moral
obligations.
As a response to the enactment of an article on trafficking, which

was prompted by the EU, the Swedish government set up an inquiry
in 1998, with a commission of parliamentarians and experts including
Sven-Axel Månsson. In its final report, human trafficking was described
as ‘transnational trade with persons, mainly women and children that
is aimed at introducing them to prostitution in the destination coun-
try or to otherwise expose them to sexual exploitation’ (SOU, 2001:14,
421). Not only sex trafficking but all forms of prostitution were seen
as sexual exploitation. Most victims of sex trafficking were assumed to
be women from Eastern Europe who, due to unemployment, homeless-
ness and poor conditions in their home countries, ran the risk of being
surrendered to intermediaries and thus becoming objects for ‘cynical
exploitation’ (SOU, 2001:14, 421). It was also argued that prostitution is
never an acceptable condition:
Prostitution is not just harmful in many different ways to many of the

women involved, but also incompatible with the pursuit of equality
between women and men, and likely to adversely affect the percep-
tion of sexuality in general. Prostitution is a social evil that must be
fought.
(SOU, 2001:14, 289)
The investigators recommended the introduction of a new article on

trafficking for sexual purposes. They also stressed that the struggle
against trafficking demanded action against prostitution, in particu-
lar against men’s demand for sexual services: ‘A basic requirement for
this trade is that there is a demand for sexual services . . . . Trafficking
for sexual purposes must be tackled not only by new criminalisation
but also with efforts that can combat prostitution, and that can make
men refrain from buying sexual services’ (SOU, 2001:14, 24). Trafficking
was thus intrinsically linked to prostitution and to the hegemonic view
of prostitution as a form of exploitation and unequal power relations
between the sexes.
In their responses to the report, women’s organisations such as
ROKS, Stödcentrum BEDA (a local women’s shelter) and the Left Party
Women’s Committee (Vänsterpartiets kvinnokommitté) supported the idea
that prostitution was also to be seen as gender-based violence. The pro-
posals of the investigation were accepted by most parties involved, and
were adopted in parliament without much debate. Consequently, the
Trafficking Act of 2002 stipulates that any person who by means of coer-
cion or other improper means takes part in the cross-border process of
recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or reception of a per-

son for the purpose of sexual exploitation, may be sentenced to between
two to ten years of imprisonment. In 2004, the Act was amended to
adapt it to the Palermo Protocol and to include trafficking for forced
labour and removal of organs, as well as trafficking within a country.
In 2008 the Alliance government issued an Action Plan against Prosti-
tution and Human Trafficking for Sexual Purposes (Skr., 2007/2008:167),
again reiterating that prostitution and human trafficking are not accept-
able in Swedish society and that far-reaching measures are needed to
combat them. The action plan notes that the underlying reasons for
people to be involved in prostitution vary, but the primary factor that
perpetuates both human trafficking and prostitution is demand. Thus,
governments to the left and to the right seem to agree on a feminist
analysis pertaining to prostitution.
Comparing the two issues
The processes leading up to the adoption of the 1974 Abortion Law and
the 1999 Prostitution Law differ. Not only do the issues of abortion and
prostitution differ in time, they also differ in the major actors involved
and the framings of the issues.
The 1974 legislation on abortion can primarily be explained by the
actions taken by two critical forces: the rise of radical ideas among
groups of young men in the 1960s (particularly in the Social Democratic
Party and the Liberal Party), and women’s concrete actions pertaining to
abortion, especially the so-called abortion trips to Poland. The ease with
which the Abortion Law eventually was enacted can also be explained
by the composition of political parties in Sweden, consisting of five sec-
ular parties in the 1970s. A strong Christian opposition to abortion was
thus more or less non-existent in the 1970s, and the Christian Demo-
cratic Party did not make the 4% threshold to parliament until 1991,
almost 20 years after the adoption of the Abortion Act. The development
of abortion can be described as a discursive and institutional change
from a crime to a reproductive right, and its framing changed from rep-
resenting a moral and a social problem to a discourse on women’s right
to self-determination.
The 1999 legislation on prostitution, in contrast, can primarily be
seen as the result of women’s organisations mobilising both inside and
outside of the political parties. The major actors were women in the
national federations of party women, in particular the National Federa-
tion of Social Democratic Women but also the National Federations of
Centre and Liberal Women. Key actors were also women in the non-
parliamentary organisations, including both second wave organisations
such as ROKS and first wave organisations such as the Fredrika Bremer
Association. The 1999 law can therefore be seen as the result of the
collaboration between non-parliamentary organisations and female par-
liamentarians, against those in favour of the status quo. Considering the
dominant left/right conflict line in Swedish politics, the law stands out
as exceptional. The development of prostitution can be described as a
change from men’s right to women’s bodies to a crime against the pur-
chase of sex, and a discursive shift in which the framing of prostitution
was changed from a medical, moral and social problem to a problem of
exploitation and unequal power relations between women and men.
The rising new women’s movement was important for policy change
on both abortion and prostitution, but in different ways and to various
extents. In the case of abortion, women took a reactive position, waiting
for the Abortion Commission to publish its report, and then respond-
ing to its proposal. Although most women’s organisations framed their
views on abortion in terms of a women’s issue and a woman’s right
to self-determination, they were split on the term limit. In the case
of prostitution, in contrast, women took a much more proactive posi-
tion, demanding new commissions be set up, organising collaboration
between various women’s movement organisations with quite different
agendas and pools of members, and taking advantage of the critical mass
of women in parliament. They also provided a new discourse of prosti-
tution: the discourse of prostitution as a form of violence and as an
illustration of the gendered power order in society. Women’s demands
remained essentially the same throughout the 20th century, but the
development of women’s participation in politics, with women consti-
tuting 40% of elected bodies by 1994, made a crucial difference. As Maud
Eduards (2007) holds, women took advantage of their democratic space
in order to claim bodily integrity and freedom of violence.
The two pieces of legislation are also based on two divergent views
on women’s bodily rights: the issue of abortion highlights women’s
right to decide over their own bodies, while the issue of prostitution
stresses women’s rights not be exposed to exploitation and violence.
The latter legislation can also be seen as a shift from the idea of men’s
legitimate right to women’s bodies, to a view on men’s sexuality as
negotiable. By not criminalising the seller, women are given the right
to speak, as individuals and as a collective (Eduards, 2007). Women are
also given the right to speak against men, and to identify gender rela-
tions that are characterised by domination and subordination (ibid.).
The law has therefore also contributed to stressing men’s responsibility

in the purchase of sex.
Conclusion
In Sweden two major policy shifts have occurred pertaining to abortion

and prostitution policy. The first policy shift was the enactment of the
1974 Abortion Act, which was caused by groups of young men in the
Social Democratic Party and the Liberal Party and the concrete actions
of women having abortions abroad when it could not be granted in
Sweden. The Abortion Act was one of several gender equality policies
adopted in the 1970s as part of the politicisation and institutionalisation
of gender equality in Sweden. The non-partisan women’s movement
organisations such as the liberal Fredrika Bremer Association and the
socialist and radical Group 8, as well as the national federations of party
women, were important actors in policy change: they lobbied the polit-
ical parties and provided them with a new framing of abortion. The
previous hegemonic discourse of abortion as a moral and social prob-
lem was substituted by a new discourse about autonomy and women’s
right to self-determination. This issue fitted well with the dominant dis-
course on gender equality as an equal right. The ease with which the
Abortion Law eventually was enacted can also be explained by the party
system, which comprised five secular parties in the 1970s. The lack of
a Christian Party in parliament, as well as the consistent contestation
between the Social Democratic Party and the Liberal Party to be seen as
the primary promoter of gender equality issues, most likely contributed
to the advancement of the abortion issue.
The second policy change pertains to prostitution and the enactment
of the 1999 Ban on Purchase of Sexual Services. This policy change was
caused primarily by the women’s movement, mobilising both inside and
outside the political parties. The new women’s movement organisations,
in particular ROKS but also the old women’s movement organisations
such as the Fredrika Bremer Association, were crucial to policy change.
Key actors were also women parliamentarians, especially women in
the Social Democratic Party, the Centre Party and the Liberal Party
who mobilised within the party structures and the parliamentary arena.
Thus, key to the adoption of the criminalisation of the client was also
women’s parliamentary presence as illustrated by the record high num-
ber of women parliamentarians, reaching 43% in the 1998 election. The
1999 law can therefore be seen as the result of the collaboration between
women’s organisations acting in various arenas and organisations in
favour of women’s bodily integrity. It contributed to changing the

hegemonic discourse on prostitution from a discourse on prostitution
as a medical, moral and social problem to a problem of exploitation
and unequal power relations between women and men. Interestingly
the feminist framing of prostitution continued to be dominant after
the succession of the liberal Alliance government in 2006. Not only
did women’s collective action change the discourse on prostitution, it
also challenged the dominant left/right conflict line in Swedish pol-
itics. What is more, by criminalising the client, women’s democratic
manoeuvre for agency was enhanced at the expense of men.
Migrant women seem to have played little role, if any, in the debates
leading to the 1974 Abortion Act. The major explanation relates to
historical sequence and timing: migrant organisations were not estab-
lished until the 1970s, and migrant women’s organisations not until ten
years later or so. By the time migrant women began to mobilise in the
1990s, abortion was already accessible to all women in Sweden and pro-
vided for by the Swedish welfare state. They simply mobilised around
issues other than abortion, such as issues pertaining to education,
the labour market and housing. On the few occasions when migrant
women mobilised they argued, more or less in line with women’s
movement organisations in general, that abortion was a human right.
It was not until Sweden’s accession to the EU in 1995 that issues per-
taining to migrant women were on the agenda, in this case whether
EU members should have access to abortion in Sweden. On the few
occasions that migrant women’s abortions were discussed in the inves-
tigations throughout the entire period, it was concluded that migrant
women were ‘imprisoned by’ old-fashioned, patriarchal and foreign
norms, but that they would learn the ’proper Swedish way’ as time
went by.
Similar to the case of abortion, migrant women’s organisations did
not mobilise around the issue of prostitution. Rather, issues pertain-
ing to gendered violence in general seem to have been more important.
In the Swedish investigation procedures on prostitution, quite the con-
trary, migrant women have increasingly been targeted. From having
been a non-issue in the investigations in the 1900s, the influx of ‘for-
eign women’, particularly ‘Eastern European women’ but also ‘Baltic
women’ and ‘Russian women’, has been a topic for discussion in recent
years. In particular, women from the ‘Third World’ or the ‘East’ have
been distinguished pertaining to trafficking, often being described as
poor and destitute in a disparaging and denigrating tone. The Swedish
discourse on prostitution, hence, is constructed of mixed messages: on
the one hand, Sweden’s gender equality model and egalitarian structure
should be extended to all marginalised people including vulnerable for-
eign prostitutes; on the other hand, there is an apparent fear that these
foreign bodies would threaten the purity of the nation.
Concerning the issue of Europeanisation, abortion falls under
national competence, and by the time Sweden entered the European
Union, it had already legalised abortion. Rather than promoting the
issue of abortion at the EU level, many politicians have decided to
refrain from discussing the issue, scared that it would endanger Swedish
‘progressive’ legislation. Quite the opposite, the Swedish prostitution
policy has been heavily marketed by Sweden in the European arena as
part of its gender equality model, despite the fact that prostitution pol-
icy, like abortion, remains within national competence. Nonetheless,
both cases – abortion and prostitution policies – function as national
border control. In the case of abortion, Sweden’s new open borders
(as well as its gender equality model) contributed to removal of the abor-
tion barrier for non-resident women. In the case of prostitution, Sweden
with its self-image as a model of gender equality has attempted to export
the Swedish model. Thus, processes of Europeanisation seem to operate
in various directions.
The issues of abortion and prostitution are also intimately linked
not only to a sexual contract, but also to a national bodily contract.
By contributing to the implementation of legalised abortion and the
criminalising of the purchase of sexual services, women’s organisations
have challenged the idea of the nation as an order in which men have
a natural right to defend and get access to their women, for reproduc-
tion and sexual pleasure. To challenge the components of the nation,
hence, means that hegemonic perceptions of masculinity are being
questioned. As Eduards stresses, by politicising women’s bodies through
the adoption of new policies, women’s organisations have renegoti-
ated the borders of politics and contributed to reshaping the Nation
(Eduards, 2007). They have also contributed to making women’s bodies
less accessible not only for men but also for the state (ibid.). Connected
to the concept of bodily citizenship, women have been granted the right
to their bodies, reproduction, and integrity; their bodily integrity has
been strengthened.
Notes
1. In 1921, the penalty for abortion was reduced to penal labour for 6–24 months
(SOU, 2005:90).
2. The Fredrika Bremer Association represented the liberal currents of the 1880
radicalism, and it consisted primarily of educated women (and men) from the
upper middle class. The organisation had two major goals: women’s individual
emancipation and the improvement of society. Women’s education, women’s
participation in the labour market and women’s suffrage were important
matters for the Association (Manns, 1997).
3. Parallel to the discussion about abortion, there was also a public discussion
about the decreasing population rate in Sweden, as expressed in the publi-
cation Kris i befolkningsfrågan (Crisis in the Population Question) and in the
establishment of the 1935 Commission on the Population Issue. The Com-
mission on Population supported the criminalisation of abortion in order to
increase nativity.
4. The National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) is a government
agency in Sweden under the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs. The Legal
Council of the National Board of Health and Welfare may authorise permis-
sion for an abortion to be performed after the 18th pregnancy week. The Legal
Council examines individual cases based on medical and counsellor investi-
gations. The Legal Council consists of legal experts, medical doctors, social
counsellors and representatives of the social partners.
5. As shown by Erikson, the Committee on Justice and the Committee of Health
and Welfare had worked simultaneously on motions on prostitution without
consulting each other. The former advocated an investigation on the criminal-
isation of the client, while the latter opposed a new investigation based on its
social framing of the problem. When the report of the Committee on Health
and Welfare was to be discussed in the plenary, the report on the Committee
on Justice had already been passed, forcing the former to withdraw and revise
its report (Ericson, 2013:168).
6. Joint motions are rare in Swedish politics, and joint motions by parties to the
left and right are almost non-existent. The 1992 joint motion was therefore
exceptional.
6
Women’s Movements and Bodily
Autonomy: Making the Case for
Bodily Citizenship
Freidenvall
Introduction
In this chapter we return to the major aims of the book and to our
significant questions. We present a comparison of our four country
cases, based on our theoretical approach, and, taking into account our
research findings, we return to the issue of citizenship, in particular bod-
ily citizenship. Our aim has been to analyse the contribution of women’s
movements in four different European countries in achieving the right
to bodily integrity for women, and to argue that the concept of bodily
citizenship is important in this struggle, as well as being a useful tool for
the analysis of women’s issues in politics and public policy. We intend
to show how earlier policy legacies structured the political context
which the new women’s movements encountered when framing their
demands about women’s bodily autonomy, but also show that, despite
these legacies, policy change proved possible because of new political
configurations, new discourses and framings, and organisation. We also
provide answers to our major questions: how have women’s movements
contested state governance and dominant political discourses about the
female body, and changed ‘problem definitions’ and policies impeding
women’s bodily self-determination in different political systems? And
how have the growth of multicultural societies in Europe, notably the
increase in migration, and the process of Europeanisation impinged on
political debates about the body, and possibly impacted on attempts to
enhance women’s rights to bodily integrity?
To make a systematic comparison of our four country cases, we have
operationalised the points of comparison we outlined in Chapter 1.
We shall identify the critical junctures and the configuration of power
153
154 Women’s Movements and Bodily Autonomy
at the time within the political system and its array of relevant actors,
including women’s movement organisations. Policy legacies on abor-
tion and prostitution will be analysed in terms of outcomes and dom-
inant framings. Issues of timing and sequence will be addressed: do
critical junctures occur in similar periods across states and did sequence
have an effect on the power of political actors? The dominant framings
of our issues will be analysed over time, sorted out for important polit-
ical actors, including women’s movement organisations and experts,
and examined for their institutional impact. Particular attention will
be paid to how migration and Europeanisation have affected the domi-
nant discourses on our selected issues, in particular how they led to new
framings of national identity (see Figure 6.1 for the operationalisation).
We shall also compare our two ‘body’ issues – abortion and
prostitution – in terms of outcomes, and examine to what extent
Policy shifts
Which policy shifts occurred in period studied, and when
Critical junctures
Configuration of power government, political parties, women’s movements, other
actors
Causes of change
Policy legacy
Which legacy did women’s movements encounter, and when
Was there a constant despite policy change
Timing and sequence
Did policy shifts on both issues coincide
Did timing exclude women’s movement actors (including migrant women’s
groups)
Framings
Dominant framings during period studied, with approximate dates
Women’s movement framings (specified in time)
How were migrant women framed (only for periods when they were present,
specified in time)
Expert framings (specified in time)
Migration
Did migration figure in policy debates
Were women’s migrant organisations/groups involved
How did migration impact on dominant discourse
Europeanisation
Did it affect issue
Did actors invoke Europe in debates
Did women’s movements use supranational stage to further their demands
Figure 6.1 Points of comparison of country cases on selected issues

women’s movement claims have been realised, as well as iden-

tify current barriers towards women’s autonomy. In addition, the
commonalities and differences in framing of the issues between coun-
tries will be compared. These findings will be discussed in terms of
the case of bodily citizenship and of the work of Michel Foucault and
Nikolas Rose.
Critical junctures, policy legacies, timing and sequencing
Abortion
When looking at the periods in which policy change occurred, we
see major differences between our country cases. Although abortion
was illegal well into the 20th century in all four countries, the timing
of reform diverges widely. Sweden liberalised its law in 1938, allow-
ing abortions on medical, humanitarian and eugenic grounds, and the
Czech Republic allowed for abortion on social and medical grounds in
1957, long before debates on reform got under way in the Netherlands
and Portugal. Sweden then legalised abortion in 1974, allowing it on
demand. The Netherlands changed its law in 1981, allowing abortion
more or less on demand, although in practice women could already
obtain an abortion relatively easily since the mid-1970s. The Czech
Republic allowed for abortion on demand in 1986. Portugal was the last
to reform its law, allowing abortion in cases of serious health threats,
rape and foetal deformations in 1984, and in 2007 allowing abortion on
request up to ten weeks of pregnancy.
Four conclusions can be drawn here. Firstly, the democratic tran-
sitions in the Czech Republic (1989) and Portugal (1974) had no
immediate effect on abortion policy itself. Transition was important as
it created public space to debate the issue: feminists could now organ-
ise and frame the debate in Portugal, and opposition to abortion in
the Czech Republic was now expressed in the free party system of the
1990s and 2000s. Path dependency was strong in the Czech Repub-
lic: abortion was not accessible for short-stay residents – but as there
were few non-residents in the Communist period, this passed unno-
ticed. When it started having a negative effect for migrant women after
transition, it became nearly impossible to change, as it was perceived to
be a liberalisation which was unacceptable to the Christian Democrats.
Secondly, the role of (organised) religion is important in accounting for
early or late reform: Sweden and the Czech Republic reformed early;
being largely secular, they encountered little impediment from churches
and they had only small Christian parties. The later reformers, the
Netherlands and Portugal, both had to deal with organised religion. The
Netherlands had strong Christian parties who could veto reform, and in
Portugal the Catholic Church was the major opponent, with its strong
influence on the right-wing parties and the medical profession.
Thirdly, the actors advocating for changes are distinct in each coun-
try: in the Czech Republic the first reform was due to the Communist
Party following the change in Soviet law after the death of Stalin, and
later due to the looser grip of the party, giving the ‘experts’ such as
gynaecologists and psychologists the opportunity to widen the oppor-
tunities for abortion. In Sweden the early reform can be ascribed to
the dominant position of the Social Democratic Party, with a strong
tradition of women’s organising. The reform of 1974 was due to more
liberal views on sexuality among younger men and the contest between
the major parties (Social Democrats and Liberals) about gender equal-
ity in the context of strong women’s movement organisations. In the
Netherlands reform became possible when the religious parties lost their
parliamentary majority in 1967, and an alliance of progressive med-
ical professionals, sexual reformers, left-wing politicians and a strong
rising women’s movement started to press for reform. Abortion prac-
tice became liberal by the mid-1970s, but law reform was delayed until
1981 as the Christian parties – being essential for majority government –
could veto reform proposals. In Portugal opposition by the Church and
the medical profession blocked reform, but in the 1980s the Social-
ist government allowed the first reform in response to pressure from
women’s organisations; in the 2000s the Socialists obtained the absolute
majority and promised a new referendum which obtained a majority for
a more liberal law. This led to the 2007 reform that permitted abortion
on demand for the first ten weeks of pregnancy and included medi-
cal and psychological grounds for later abortions. We can also conclude
that the feminist movement in general was a major driver in the various
reform campaigns, except in the Czech Republic, where there has been
no such movement since the Communist takeover in 1948.
Finally, the feminist movement and other women’s organisations
encountered similar policy legacies in the four countries when they
started their contestation of abortion law. Abortion was criminal, with
national differences in the exceptions in the law for permitting abor-
tion, which were broader in Sweden and the Czech Republic, and more
restrictive in the Netherlands and Portugal. However, the policy legacy
in Sweden and the Czech Republic included eugenic ideas and prac-
tices, in contrast to the Netherlands and Portugal. The policy legacy in
all four countries displays one outstanding continuity: the control by
the medical profession, which not only determined access and inter-
preted the indications for an abortion, but also had (and has) the legal
monopoly of performing abortion. This allowed the medical profession-
als to become the experts on the topic – a state of affairs contested
by feminist demands expressing women’s capacities to make their own
decisions.
Prostitution
Regulation of prostitution focused heavily on public health issues
around 1900 in all four of our countries. In the first decades of the
20th century, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic turned to abo-
litionism; the former criminalised all third-party involvement, but
not the prostitute, in 1911; the latter ended regulation in 1922, but
retained a strong emphasis on fighting STDs. In Sweden prostitution
remained legal, but the 1918 Lex Veneris imposed medical examina-
tion on prostitutes and clients. Portugal had left regulation up to the
municipalities, but in 1949 the Salazar regime began to restrict prostitu-
tion by national law which forbade new brothels and licences for new
prostitutes; in 1962 further legislation shut down all brothels and con-
fiscated their property. Prostitutes were registered and had to undergo
medical examination for venereal disease.
A wave of reform started in the 1980s. Portugal decriminalised prosti-
tution, but not the exploitation and facilitation of prostitution, in 1983,
while a new article on sex trafficking gave an opening for protecting per-
sonal sexual freedom. Portugal has also taken several steps since 1995
to fight trafficking and stop sexual exploitation, on instigation of the
national women’s policy agency. The Netherlands condoned prostitu-
tion as long as it did not cause too much public nuisance. Public debate
on changing the law started in the 1980s, when migration and tourism
changed the face of the sex industry, as it came to be called. Despite lob-
bies of local government and feminist groups, reform was slow to come
given the pivotal position of the Christian Democrats in coalition gov-
ernment. Reform became possible under the first secular cabinet since
1918, and the legalisation of prostitution became a fact in 2000. The
Czech Republic (which reframed the issue as social parasitism and pros-
titutes as shunning work in 1956) decriminalised prostitutes in 1990,
after the obligation to work disappeared from the legislation with the
end of the Communist regime. Sweden experienced 20 years of public
debate before the Sex Purchase Act of 1998, making for criminalisation
of the client, in the context of a strong women’s movement, inter-
party collaboration between women parliamentarians and the return
to power of the Social Democrat Party in the mid-1990s. Despite these

changes, there is considerable path dependency in prostitution policy
as well. In Sweden and Portugal prostitution was always regarded as a
social problem; Sweden set out to abolish it and Portugal to control it.
In the Netherlands, despite abolitionist legislation, it was always con-
doned by the authorities and the major cities stuck to their autonomy
by setting up their own regulation to maintain the public peace. In the
Czech Republic, the framing of prostitutes as social parasites persisted
in the form of constructing prostitutes as cunning entrepreneurs abus-
ing the welfare system, and as ethnically and nationally different (being
migrants and/or of the Roma minority). Prostitution policy reflected
these dominant discourses, regarding prostitution as a problem that
is external to Czech society and Czech citizens, and dealing with the
prostitutes as the sources, not the victims, of this problem.
The political constellation around the prostitution issue was gener-
ally very different to the one around abortion. Overall, the authorities
were in favour of some kind of regulation to contain the sex indus-
try, and they found their political support, depending on what they
defined as the problem, among a specific set of political parties. In the
Czech Republic, the Communist Party controlled prostitution policy by
criminalising sex workers as unwilling to work and therefore labelled
as social parasites. In Portugal it was the Salazar regime that ended
the more lenient local regulation following the UN 1949 Convention
for the Suppression of the Trafficking in Persons and of the Exploita-
tion of the Prostitution of Others. Likewise, further state intervention
in the 2000s was also induced by international pressure in the form of
UN and EU steps to curb trafficking. In the Netherlands, city govern-
ment was a major driver for regulating the sex industry, and along with
feminist interest groups who stood for sex workers, made the case for
legalising prostitution, finding a willing ear among socialists and liber-
als. In Sweden the Social Democrats adopted the issue in the 1990s, and
in alliance with the women’s movement, women parliamentarians and
the social work profession enabled the passing of the Sex Purchase Act
in 1998.
Despite differences in national policies, women’s movement actors
confronted similar policy legacies of the state in its drive to control
prostitution, with ensuing criminalisation of prostitution and the poor
position of sex workers even if they were not criminalised. However,
women’s groups strove for different aims in the debates on prostitu-
tion, sometimes opting for decriminalisation, as in the Netherlands and
some small groups in the Czech Republic, or sometimes maintaining the
status quo (many organisations in Portugal), and sometimes for abo-

lition of all prostitution, the majority position in Sweden. Moreover,
the feminist organisations were very divided on the issue, in contrast
to their positions on abortion. In the Czech Republic there was no
involvement of the official women’s organisation under Communist
rule, but after 1989 small feminist groups emerged who viewed pros-
titution as sex work. In Sweden a wide array of women’s movement
groups were involved in prostitution debates, but divided on how to
solve the problem, although many chose abolition of prostitution and
client criminalisation. In Portugal women’s movement groups were not
very active on the issue, but traditional abolitionist women’s groups
framed prostitutes as victims needing to be rescued. In the 1990s more
emphasis was placed on migration and poverty as causal factors, as well
as exploitation by pimps. Only in the late 2000s is a distinction opening
up between forced and voluntary prostitution.
Comparing abortion and prostitution
Three important cross-issue comparisons are worth noting. Firstly, we

can observe that the major policy shifts on both issues on the whole
did not coincide within a country. While the common wisdom tends
to regard law reform on what has often been called ‘morality issues’
(Mooney, 2001; Smith and Tatalovich, 2003) as part of a broader reform
programme, we see little evidence of this. Even if there were usually
three major policy shifts over time, abortion and prostitution have
evolved through different trajectories. There are some exceptions. The
most notable one occurred in Portugal, where more liberal abortion and
prostitution laws were adopted in the early 1980s, following the new
majority of the Socialist Party. Another occurred in the Czech Republic,
where the abortion law reform of 1957 and reframing of prostitution
as social parasitism in 1956 more or less coincided following changes
in the Communist regime after the death of Stalin. Before, there was
little connection between the issues; they followed different time paths
as the Communist Party after the 1948 putsch first changed legislation
establishing its power and then turned to other segments of law. A final
instance can be noted in the Netherlands with the criminalisation of
abortion and prostitution in the Morality Laws of 1911, categorising
both as immoral along with contraception and homosexuality (both
male and female).
Secondly, we can conclude that there were specific political constella-
tions of actors for each issue. Although law reform mainly took place in
parliament, usually under the aegis of the Justice Department, there was
a different line-up of other government departments per issue. On abor-
tion, public health authorities were heavily involved, although they
were not entirely absent from prostitution policies given the concern
about STDs. On prostitution law we see a line-up of authorities such
as the police, local councils and immigration officials. Interest groups
on abortion were dominated by various groups of medical professionals
and Church-based groups. The latter were strongest in Portugal, where
the Roman Catholic Church, with its ties to the medical profession,
the media and the conservative coalition government, dominated the
abortion debates. Lawyers played a role in policy drafting and in defend-
ing those accused of illegal abortion. Interest groups and ‘experts’ on
prostitution were not only different ones than those involved in abor-
tion debates, but also varied per country. Social welfare professionals
played an important role in Swedish prostitution debates, and local
authorities in the Netherlands and the Czech Republic after the mid-
1990s, while in Portugal there were Catholic organisations for rescue
and rehabilitation work.
Thirdly, we observed that timing and sequencing had important
effects for the participation of women’s movement actors. The most
notable case occurred in the Czech Republic, where abortion law reform
and changes in the regulation of prostitution took place in the absence
of a feminist movement. The official women’s auxiliary movement of
the Communist Party had little say in these changes. Another important
finding is that if there was no feminist movement at the time abor-
tion reform took place, the new law did not incorporate a woman’s
right to decide. This was very clearly the case in the Czech Repub-
lic, but is also in evidence at the time of the Swedish reform before
1974, when although there were notable women’s organisations within
the Social Democrat Party, they did not formulate feminist demands
in terms of reproductive autonomy. Only in the early 1970s was abor-
tion defined as a women’s issue and women’s right to self-determination
incorporated in law. Given the socialist tradition, women’s mobilisa-
tion occurred mainly around socio-economic issues and it precluded
the emergence of radical feminist framings of body issues until the early
1990s. Timing and sequencing are also important to account for the lack
of involvement of migrant women’s organisations on the abortion issue.
In Sweden and the Netherlands, the abortion issue had been settled
by the time these groups became active, and because in both coun-
tries no distinction was made in the abortion law between migrants and
other women, there was no reason for migrant women to mobilise. The
importance of timing can also be noted for Portugal, where reform of

the prostitution law and changes in sex trafficking legislation occurred
before women’s groups developed the distinction between forced prosti-
tution and sex work. Forced prostitution is illegal, but the law does not
take voluntary sex work into account. A similar occurrence took place in
the Czech Republic, where women in prostitution are no longer prose-
cuted (as not working) since 1989, but as there were hardly any women’s
organisations taking a sex work position, little was done to ensure the
rights of sex workers.
Framing contests
The framing of an issue is always central to political contest. The defini-

tion of the problem allocates blame and responsibility for the problem:
who has the say over it, who has to solve it, who has the right to be
heard? It also determines the direction of the solution of the prob-
lem and who will gain control over the issue (Outshoorn, 2004:3–4).
Women’s movement groups have had to insert their frames into the pol-
icy debates in order to influence policy and gain access to policymakers
and to decision-making arenas, as well as ensure that their frames were
maintained during implementation of policies. On both issues, women’s
organisations developed new framings to contest the dominant defini-
tions encoded in law and policy. What were the dominant framings of
the issues they encountered, and what framings did women’s movement
actors develop to attack and undermine these? To what extent have their
demands been met in policy reform?
Abortion
In all of our countries abortion had been criminalised before the turn of
the 20th century, for varying reasons such as public health (preventing
backstreet abortion) or morality, while there were contending framings
stressing socio-economic circumstances as driving women to abortion.
The early Swedish reform of 1938 framed abortion as a crime, but
allowed abortion on medical and humanitarian grounds, thus creating a
category of needy women who deserved an abortion, but the reform also
included eugenic grounds to improve the health of the nation. Eugenic
considerations are also in evidence in the reform in the Czech Republic
of 1957; abortion was framed as a way to improve the health of women
and the nation, as well as limit illegal abortions which could damage
women’s fertility. Women undergoing abortions were cast as victims
of male lust, but also as irresponsible and selfish, which ‘justified’ the
control of the abortion commissions screening the applications. Debate

among experts prior to the reform of 1986 also framed the issue in terms
of the need to improve the quality of the population, as well as the
reproductive health of women, including the idea that they should not
be forced to have children they did not want. This would lead to inad-
equate mothers and delinquent children. In the Netherlands the 1911
Morality Law turned abortion into a moral issue; the debate created two
categories of women: women in need and women having abortions for
frivolous reasons. In the 1950s the ‘needy’ category became medicalised:
these were women who were psychiatrically disturbed who might be
helped by an abortion. Before the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal, abor-
tion was seen as a result of economic and social strain; after 1926,
during the dictatorship, abortion became immoral and it clashed with
the pro-natalist ideology of the regime. After the democratic transition
in the 1980s it became framed mostly as social justice, and during the
debates around the 2007 reform as an issue of public health and the
victimisation of women by prosecution.
Previous research on Western post-industrial democracies (Outshoorn,
2010:154) has shown that abortion was the second-highest priority issue
of the new wave of feminism emerging since the late 1960s (equality
at work was the top priority).1 Given the early liberal reform and the
lack of a feminist movement under Communism, this does not hold
for the Czech Republic, where there was no mass mobilisation on the
issue and the debate leading to the 1986 reform was very much a mat-
ter for experts. A number of women did acclaim the reform for granting
the decision to have an abortion to women. In the democratic period,
women’s groups have mainly employed the medical frame to oppose
Christian attempts to curtail the terms of the Act, but they did not
frame a claim in terms of reproductive rights. Experts were always essen-
tial to the debates framing the issue in medical terms. Prior to 1986,
doctors were the gatekeepers to the procedure, staffing the abortion
commissions and interpreting the grounds on which abortion was per-
mitted. Psychologists played an important part in the debates leading
to the 1986 reform, by arguing the need to be wanted for the positive
development of children.
In the early 1960s in Sweden, the women’s movement organisations
were not in the forefront of the push to further reform, as they pri-
oritised distributive issues and differed on the scope of revision of the
law. However, with the rise of feminist groups in the early 1970s, the
demand for reform became framed as women’s right to their bodies and
their right to self-determination. The 1974 reform granted abortion on
demand. As abortion was regarded as a medical and a social problem,

physicians and social welfare professionals had key roles in the debate
and in regulating access. Indicative was the legal requirement of consult-
ing a social welfare officer to obtain a second-term abortion (between 12
and 18 weeks). It was only abolished in 1995, when it became optional.
The other two countries, where opposition to a more liberal abor-
tion law was institutionally entrenched and the legal situation more
restricted, experienced large-scale mobilisation of women around the
issue of abortion. In the Netherlands the feminist-led campaign suc-
cessfully reframed the issue as a matter of power: women should be
the ones to decide about an abortion. Against the paternalistic medical
profession it argued that women are mature adults capable of making
their own decisions. Generally feminists did not use the language of
choice, but of self-determination. The framing turned abortion into a lay
issue; the authority of experts such as physicians and psychiatrists was
effectively undermined. In Portugal women’s movement groups took
up the abortion issue soon after transition, framing it, given the class-
determined access to abortion, as a matter of social justice. Later they
framed the issue strategically as being about public health, to fight back-
street abortion. The right to choose or women’s control of their bodies
was excluded from this strategy on purpose.
Prostitution
Prostitution was generally framed as a moral evil and a danger to public
health for much of the 20th century in the four countries, and pros-
titutes were regarded as victims or ‘fallen women’, although people on
the left regarded poverty as the cause of prostitution. In all four cases the
state set out to control the vice of prostitution, which led to a variation
of policy definitions over time. The original image of the prostitute in
the Czech Republic was that of victim, but under Communism she was
framed as a social parasite of the socialist system, unwilling to make an
honest living. After the Prague Spring in 1968, this shifted to a framing
of sex workers as selfish women attracted to the luxuries of the Western
capitalist way of life, and therefore entering the sex industry to make
money. Later in the 1990s and 2000s, they were regarded as dishonest
citizens not paying their taxes in contrast to the honest citizens who did
not abuse the system, a process of ‘othering’ compounded by labelling
sex workers as foreigners or Roma. In the 1990s even experts regarded
prostitution as a part of organised crime and as a trade which threat-
ened public order. However, a counter framing has developed since
the 1990s, when new feminist groups took up the sex work position
and demanded that sex workers needed protection from violence and
social rights. Moreover, under the influence of debates about human
trafficking within the EU and the UN, the new framing recognises that
women might be victims of trafficking. This also allowed for making a
distinction between prostitution with and without the consent of the
sex worker. In Portugal prostitution had been framed as both immoral
and criminal; under Salazar prostitution was seen as a social and moral
menace as well as a public health issue. In the 1980s, while prostitu-
tion was still framed in terms of criminality and deviant behaviour, the
prostitute was framed as a victim who needed to be protected. There
was some consensus that she should not be prosecuted. Feminists saw
her as a ‘fallen woman’ in need of rehabilitation, but in the 1990s they
emphasised her poverty and migrant status, as well as her exploitation
by pimps. Only in the 2000s did the term ‘sex worker’ begin to be used.
In the Netherlands the dominant framing, which had shifted to see-
ing prostitutes as mentally disturbed and coming from dysfunctional
families in the 1960s, started to be contested in the 1980s when femi-
nists introduced the sex work frame. Prostitution was framed as work,
and prostitutes became modern assertive sex workers who needed recog-
nition of their rights. Recently, partly due to the persistence of human
trafficking, the older framing of prostitutes as victims is making a come-
back in Dutch politics. Scholars have generally espoused the sex work
position, as they regarded it as more productive for harm reduction,
while police experts have emphasised regulation to maintain law and
order.
In Sweden, where prostitution was always defined as a social, a medi-
cal and a moral problem, the dominant framing shifted radically in the
1990s when, under feminist influence, prostitution became framed as a
form of gendered violence and an illustration of a gendered power order
in society. The prevalent feminist framing drew on second wave radical
feminism, which sees prostitution as sexual domination and violence
by men. Notable has been the large influence of experts in the area;
defining prostitution as a social problem gave wide berth to sociologists,
criminologists and the social work profession.
The intersection of migration with abortion

and prostitution
The four countries in our study have very different migration histories
which shape the ethnic composition of their populations. Portugal and
the Netherlands have large communities of migrants from their former
colonies (for Portugal Brazil and Africa, for the Netherlands the East
Indies, the Caribbean and Suriname), Sweden and the Czech Republic
an indigenous ethnic group, respectively the Sámi and Roma. In addi-
tion, the Netherlands has large communities of Turkish and Moroccan
people, and Sweden has a diverse population of refugees from different
parts of the world.
Abortion
Despite the increasing presence of migrants, in abortion debates eth-
nicity was generally not the focal point, in contrast to those on
prostitution, although ‘foreigners’ did regularly crop up. In the Czech
Republic, foreign women were cast as ‘abortion tourists’, leading the
government to forbid abortion for women without long-term residence.
Roma women were framed as irresponsible and incompetent in caring
for their children, and they received preferential treatment by the abor-
tion committees when requesting an abortion. Roma women also had
to face sterilisation practices in the period between the 1960s and 1980s;
in many cases these occurred without their consent. After 1989 a debate
occurred about whether migrants from the EU should be given the right
to legal abortion under EU legislation, but that is still not possible. In the
Netherlands ethnicity has been part of abortion debates because of the
much higher abortion rates among migrants; the standard explanation
has mainly been framed as inadequate use of contraception, and the
standard policy response has been to propagate their proper use and pro-
vide sex education among ‘groups at risk’. For abortion, residency was
never a requirement, resulting in large numbers of women from abroad
obtaining an abortion in the Netherlands over the last four decades. Eth-
nicity also cropped up in debates about sex selection and son preference
among ethnic communities, but abortion on these grounds falls under
the terms of the Abortion Act, given that women decide if they are in
an ‘emergency state’ because of the pregnancy.
In Portugal and Sweden, migrant and minority women were more or
less invisible in the abortion debate, although it may be argued that
in Portugal they were included in terms of their class, given the dom-
inant socialist/Marxist political culture. Class discourse overrode other
differences. Residency was not an issue, due to the strict abortion law –
Portuguese women were the ones who travelled to obtain an abortion.
In Sweden there was some initial concern about higher abortion rates
among migrants, but in the course of the 1980s these differences dis-
appeared. Ethnicity resurfaced in debates about sex selection and son
preference among some migrants in 2009 and the question was raised
whether women’s autonomy should be suspended by not allowing abor-

tion on the grounds of sex (unless motivated by genetic diagnostics).
While most Swedes strongly disapprove of the practice, the National
Board of Health and Welfare upheld the decision-making of women.
Residency was required to have an abortion in Sweden until 2008.
In all of our four countries, hardly any migrant women’s organisa-
tions have been involved in the abortion debates. As already pointed
out, this is mainly due to historical timing: in the Netherlands and
Sweden the abortion issue had been settled by the time migrant women
started to organise; there was no need to mobilise around the issue.
The various laws raised no barriers for migrant women and abortion
services were widely available, and, given national health insurance
policies, affordable. The Czech Republic had little migration and no
migrant women’s organisations as well as raising no barriers for long-
term residents. In Portugal these organisations were not yet mobilised
during the first reform (there was also little migration in that period).
In 2007, they did not mobilise around the referendum as they were
more focused on issues around work, integration and HIV prevention
than on reproductive rights.
Prostitution
Given the rise of the modern sex industry in the wake of globalisation,
migration was always an intrinsic part of the prostitution debates. This
was partly due to the high percentage of foreign women working in
the sex industry, but also to the historical linkage of prostitution to
human trafficking and the rising tide of xenophobia in all four coun-
tries. In the Netherlands sex workers from abroad were either cast as
victims of trafficking or enterprising illegal migrants, while in Sweden
the victim image dominated. In the Czech Republic women migrat-
ing from ex-USSR countries were regarded as prostitutes. In Portugal
sex workers from abroad were depicted as more vulnerable to sexual
exploitation, but since the 1990s migrant sex workers increasingly have
also been depicted as migrants coming to profit from prostitution.
What is striking in our cases is that in all four countries, sex workers
serve as a marker of national identity and defining the ‘true’ or ‘real’ citi-
zen. The Czech Republic in the Communist era externalised prostitution
as something ‘Western’; after transition, it tended to depict sex workers
as foreign (if not, they were Roma), while clients were cast as Western
European men. This discourse polarised the issue along the lines of the
decent tax-paying citizen – ‘us’, and the ‘foreigners’ – ‘them’ who abuse
the health care and social insurance system, showing the legacy of the
prostitute as a social parasite. In the Netherlands the concern about vic-

tims of trafficking became intertwined with the fear of illegal migrants,
making for poor victims but at the same time for deceitful migrants who
are out to profit from ‘our’ prosperity or welfare state. In Sweden the
prostitute from the ‘East’ plays a central role in public discussions about
trafficking and prostitution. While on the one hand she is portrayed as
vulnerable and weak, on the other hand she is seen as threatening gen-
der equality and should not be allowed into the country. In Portugal
migrant sex workers are generally seen as more vulnerable to exploita-
tion, while at the same time Brazilian and Eastern European women are
regularly stereotyped as ‘prostitutes’ (ibid.:138).
As with abortion, migrant women’s organisations have not been
involved in debates around prostitution. This cannot be explained
by historical sequence, as the issue is by no means settled and there
have been migrant women’s organisations formed in the Netherlands,
Portugal and Sweden in the last decade (less so in the Czech Repub-
lic). But none of these have taken part or position in the debates. This
can partly be explained by different sets of priorities among migrant
women’s organisations, and perhaps also by aversion to the topic. This
can actually also apply to the non-migrant women’s movements, as
in general they also have not given the issue high priority and have
not mobilised around the issue, with the notable exception of Sweden.
In the Netherlands there were only some small feminist interest groups
active on the issue (these did include migrant women) and in the
Czech Republic, small groups have become active since the mid-1990s.
In Portugal most women’s organisations have not taken a stand on the
issue, generally sharing the view of the Catholic women’s organisations
that prostitution is exploitation of women. Sweden’s ‘exceptionalism’ is
best explained by the constellation of power in the early 1990s, with
its world record-high representation of women in parliament, the rise
of feminism – particularly radical feminism – to the forefront of the
national discourse and the return to power of the Social Democrats
in 1994.
The role of Europeanisation in abortion and prostitution

debates
As pointed out earlier, both abortion and prostitution are under national
jurisdiction and not subject to EU treaties. Human trafficking does fall
under the remit of the EU, which makes (de)linking prostitution and
trafficking prone to contest for those who want to keep the EU out of
the national political arena or, to the contrary, want to use its arena to
further their national positions. For abortion we found that women’s
groups and organisations dissatisfied with the national legislation gen-
erally did not take their cases to the EU level in the period we studied.
If abortion law had become more liberal, there was no need to take it to
a supranational level. In recent years this seems to be changing, as some
women’s organisations have been lobbying the European Parliament to
put pressure on member states which have not reformed or have moved
in a more conservative direction, such as Ireland and Poland (this route
is also being followed by anti-abortion groups and the Vatican). Indi-
rectly, the EU did influence national debates, as other member states
served as comparison. Sweden’s accession to the EU led to extensive
debates, also in the women’s movement, over whether accession would
harm Sweden’s liberal abortion policies, given more conservative poli-
cies in many member states. In the Czech Republic the EU was invoked
during the debate in 2008 on permitting abortion for EU citizens. As
the cabinet fell before voting on the issue took place, the rule requiring
long-term residency was not changed. The comparatively low abortion
rate in the country was strategically used to oppose the stricter measures
favoured by the Christian Democrats. In the 1970s in the Netherlands,
the EU was invoked in Dutch abortion debates to legitimate abortion
law reform by pointing out that the Netherlands would not be out of
step with other countries. Later those in favour of the Abortion Act
always eschewed attempts to transport the issue to the EU level out of
fear of conservative forces within Europe. In Portugal the EU was used
by the pro-legalisation campaign and feminists to argue that Portugal
should modernise its outdated law to bring it in line with other EU
countries; recommendations from various EU institutions on women’s
health issues were used to further the cause of reform. Feminists did
make a remarkable appeal to international opinion when Women on
Waves joined forces to set the issue on the political agenda in 2004.
On the prostitution issue, Europeanisation occurred along two lines.
Firstly, by the linkage with human trafficking, EU regulation on human
trafficking has affected national legislation and implementation of poli-
cies on prostitution. Portugal and the Czech Republic adapted their
trafficking legislation and aid to victims of trafficking following the EU
Framework on Human Trafficking of 2002. Secondly, women’s move-
ment organisations have used the EU channel to promote their framings
of prostitution and its link to trafficking. This route was followed by
Dutch feminists, who have been instrumental at the EU level in pro-
moting the sex work position and delinking the issue of prostitution
from that of human trafficking. Swedish feminists followed the same

channel, helped by the Swedish government after the passing of the Sex
Purchase Act in 1998, by lobbying the European Parliament and allying
with abolitionist feminists within the European Women’s Lobby and
the European Parliament, thus actively promoting the policy on client
criminalisation as part of its gender equality programme. Surprisingly,
Sweden had no anti-trafficking legislation before 2002, when it moved
to conform to the EU Council Framework.
It should be noted that UN treaties have also played an important role
in trafficking debates. The Czech Republic has found it impossible to reg-
ulate prostitution in recent years as this was seen to be in contradiction
to the 1949 UN International Convention for the Suppression of the
Traffic in Women. The Netherlands, which had already had strict anti-
trafficking laws since the early 1990s, adapted the Penal Code in 2005 to
conform to the UN Trafficking Protocol of 2000. Portugal developed its
anti-trafficking policies following EU recommendations and initiatives
to halt trafficking from the early 2000s.
Implications for bodily citizenship
When it comes to assessing the changes and gains for women’s bodily
citizenship, several conclusions can be drawn from our research. Firstly,
women’s and feminist movements did not employ the language of cit-
izenship to express their demands. Although there were instances of
strategic framing of the abortion issue in terms of the dominant dis-
course, such as public health, women’s movements in general framed
their claims on abortion in terms of autonomy, self-determination, the
right to an abortion and the right to decide about one’s body. Citizen-
ship also was not the framing used in prostitution debates, but here we
see much more national variation in framings than in abortion. This is
partly due to the conflicting positions within feminism about the issue,
but the variation also reflects the more heterogeneous prostitution reg-
ulation in the four states studied. Feminists and women’s movement
activists holding a sex work position framed their demands in terms
of sexual self-determination and rights for sex workers; those feminists
and activists regarding prostitution as sexual exploitation or oppression
of women framed theirs as violence and as a serious infringement of the
human rights of women.
Secondly, the presence of a feminist movement affected abortion law
in a more progressive way: if there was no such movement at the time
of reform, as in the first reforms in the Czech Republic and Sweden,
reform was limited and did not allow for women making their own
decisions. When feminists mobilised and campaigned for the right to
abortion, the law was extended to allow for women’s decision-making,
as happened in Sweden in 1974, the Netherlands in 1981 and Portugal
in 2007. For prostitution, no such direct link between feminist mobilisa-
tion and the meeting of movement demands can be established. In three
of our four countries there was no widespread women’s mobilisation
on the issue, Sweden being the exception. Women’s movement actors
saw their framings adopted and become central parts of law and pol-
icy in Sweden and the Netherlands. In the latter there was small-scale
lobbying by feminist groups in alliance with the women’s policy agency,
making for a satisfactory legislative outcome, as well as the compatibility
of their demands with those of the municipalities and the larger secular
parties. Mobilisation was thus not a necessary condition for meeting
movement demands. There was no large-scale mobilisation in either
Portugal, where most women’s organisations accept the view of prostitu-
tion as sexual exploitation, or the Czech Republic, where only recently
new feminist groups have begun to open the debate about sex work.
As we noted in our earlier work, our findings raise questions about the
usefulness of the usual prostitution typologies developed to categorise
different policy regimes, such as prohibitionist or abolitionist or regula-
tory regimes (Outshoorn et al., 2012:139). These do not capture the wide
range of sex work practices or state policies to control the sex industry.
The Netherlands has legalised prostitution by putting in place a system
of regulation which has become more restrictive in recent years. Sweden
has outlawed the buying of sex, not the selling, but makes it very dif-
ficult for sex workers to work. Neither Portugal nor the Czech Republic
criminalise the sex worker, but both countries prohibit exploitation and
facilitation. The Czech Republic has done little in the way of regulation
after the repeal of the Communist law, despite several attempts in this
direction. But the overall policy of Portugal can hardly be labelled abo-
litionist; nor is it convincing to regard the Czech Republic as a case of
decriminalisation.
Moreover, our findings cast doubt on the relationship between prosti-
tution and trafficking as posited by those taking the sexual domination
or exploitation position. For them prostitution leads to trafficking, so
the best way to end trafficking is to eliminate prostitution. In all four of
our countries, however, the majority of sex workers from abroad are not
trafficked women, but women migrants who cross borders in order to
make a living. Exploitation occurs, but that is the result of lack of rights
and lack of enforcement of rights.
Thirdly, national legislation and implementation of abortion and

prostitution policies still raise barriers to women’s bodily integrity. Gen-
erally speaking, there are still several limits to the right to abortion in
the national laws, which prohibit abortion beyond a certain duration
of pregnancy – usually viability of the foetus outside the woman’s body
(around 24 weeks), or more restrictive conditions and procedures after a
certain point in the duration of the pregnancy. In Portugal, abortion is
allowed on request up to ten weeks, to 12 weeks when the foetus endan-
gers the health of the woman, to 16 weeks following rape, and to 24
weeks in case of foetal defects. The Netherlands allows abortion in clin-
ics up to 14 weeks, but for a second-trimester abortion the clinic needs
an additional licence in order to terminate the pregnancy (women can
also choose to go into hospital for a second-trimester abortion). In 1998
Sweden did away with the requirement that, to have a second-trimester
abortion, a woman must consult a second doctor, and it dropped the
residency requirement in 2008. The Czech Republic only allows abor-
tion on request until 12 weeks of pregnancy, and still does not allow
abortion to non-resident women.
Our four cases do not correspond with the contention of Shaver
(1994) in her study of four liberal welfare states about the distinction
between abortion as a medical entitlement (Britain and Australia) and
as a body right (the US and Canada). She argued that in the latter
two, ‘abortion rights were less secure because of the limitation in pub-
lic funding and stronger political opposition, while in the former two
“medically mediated” abortion led to less contestation of abortion rights
and more adequate funding, making it a social right’ (Outshoorn et al.,
2012: 136–137). Our four cases all have different welfare state regimes,
but the outcomes do not correspond with her findings. Three of our
countries have public funding of abortion, in spite of fierce and pro-
tracted opposition to reform in Portugal and the Netherlands. In the
Czech Republic women have to pay themselves. In Sweden and the
Czech Republic women’s body rights are encoded in law: framed as
the right to choose in Sweden, and mentioned in the memorandum
to the Czech abortion act. In the Netherlands the law is ambiguous:
the woman and the doctor together assess if there is an emergency sit-
uation justifying abortion, but if the doctor refuses (s)he has to refer
the woman to another doctor. The Portuguese law does not formulate
the right to choose, but a woman is free to choose her own physician
(ibid.:137). It can be concluded that in our cases medically mediated
abortion is the result of compromise after more contentious debate, in
contrast to what Shaver found – that medically mediated abortion leads
to less contention. We should also point out that the emergence of Inter-
net commerce in abortion drugs is eroding the line between legal and
‘illegal’ abortions and the role of doctors. This process is not only under-
mining legal attempts to ‘freeze’ current abortion law settlements, but
is also undoing Shaver’s distinction in that it strengthens women’s right
to an abortion where these are not explicitly formulated.
Our research also shows that prostitution laws and policies have
tended to curb prostitution in all four of our cases, and it is clear that
this is detrimental for sex workers for obtaining full citizenship rights,
such as the right to work and access to social insurance and security.
The bodily integrity of sex workers is insufficiently protected against
violence, but laws and policies also impede their right to sexual self-
determination. In Portugal, Sweden and the Czech Republic, sex workers
lack social and economic rights, while in the Netherlands their civil
rights are being threatened by compulsory registration. Their social and
economic rights are often still formal rights and are often undermined
by local authorities’ initiatives to retain control. The focus in Portugal
on trafficking, underage prostitution and forced prostitution, as well as
the overall lack of interest among most women’s organisations in the
issue, have led to a neglect of the issues that sex workers still face, such
as stigmatisation and social exclusion. In the Czech Republic recent law
proposals tend more towards state intervention, imposing health checks
and increasing fines for transgression. In Sweden the efficacy of the Sex
Purchase Act is contested by scholars, many of whom contend that it
has driven prostitution underground, making it hard for sex workers to
make a living and putting them more at risk. Other scholars argue that
the law is toothless and should be abolished, while still others argue that
the law should be strengthened.
Classifying feminist public policy and dimensions

of citizenship
In Chapter 1 we explained the selection of ‘body issues’ for our research,

pointing out that feminist public policy analysis distinguishes two
types of body politics: reproductive rights and (sexual) violence against
women. In both types, at stake is not equality, but autonomy and bodily
integrity. Mazur (2002:137) grounded the distinction between reproduc-
tive rights and (sexual) violence on the empirical finding that they are
dealt with in different policy subsystems. This also proved to be the case
in our research; while national parliaments established abortion and
prostitution laws, the actors around each issue differed: other women’s
movement organisations, other professions involved, varying advisory

bodies and different government bureaucracies (for instance, in prosti-
tution, local government is heavily invested). We also found that there
is a difference in historical sequence: reproductive rights were an older
second wave issue, generally arriving earlier on the political agenda and
leading to policy responses long before sexual and violence issues. Given
the different settings in which the issues were processed, we found little
evidence that the outcome of the older issue, abortion, during the most
recent period (from 1970 to the present) influenced the policy constel-
lation or outcomes of policy on prostitution. Perhaps it became simpler
for women’s movement organisations to mobilise for women’s rights
after the first mobilisation around the abortion issue. Sweden is a case
in point: the relationship forged between women MPs, women’s policy
agencies and the movement increased over time and made it easier to
set women’s rights on the agenda.
We also found that prostitution is not a valence issue, in contrast to
other issues of gendered violence. Valence issues are consensual when
it comes to the goal of a demand or policy, and disagreement cen-
tres on the means to achieve it. Eliminating violence against women
is not contested in the countries we studied (as is the case generally in
Europe), but the goal of prostitution policy proved to be highly con-
tested. This was more the case in the Netherlands and Sweden than
in Portugal or the Czech Republic. This finding raises questions about
whether the issue of prostitution can be categorised as an issue of
violence against women. For those adhering to the position that pros-
titution is inherently violent, this is not the question. Those holding
that prostitution is sex work agree that violence and coercion in the
sex industry should be fought, but contest such classification and argue
that prostitution is work which should be regulated as such. While free-
dom from violence is fundamental to bodily integrity, we conclude that
the most promising way to guarantee the rights of those working in
the sex industry is to consider prostitution as an issue for bodily citi-
zenship, stressing the autonomy and self-determination of sex workers.
But it is also an issue for economic and social citizenship; the right
to work in the sex industry which should be regulated by labour leg-
islation, as well as rights to welfare state benefits such as access to
social insurance and health care. Sex workers have also called for sexual
self-determination. Interestingly, in our earlier publication (Outshoorn
et al., 2012:139) we noted that in prostitution debates sexuality was,
curiously enough, barely touched on. However, we can now amend this
finding: in Sweden questions were raised about the sexual dimension of
the issue, and it was set in the context of sexual power relations between
the sexes.
Our empirical finding that body issues are settled in different political
arenas and policy networks is a major reason for us to argue for a sepa-
rate category of bodily citizenship, based on bodily integrity. The other
reason lies in the developments in bio-power over the past two decades,
as analysed by Nikolas Rose. It is why we reject including issues relating
to bodily integrity in the concept of intimate citizenship as developed
by Ken Plummer (2003). For him intimate citizenship is an inclusive
category, encompassing ‘control over one’s body’, relationships, feel-
ings, access to public spaces and representations as well as choices about
‘identities, gender experiences, erotic experiences’ (2003:14). We regard
this as too broad, and we therefore opt for separating the material body
from the sphere of identity and experiences, even though we accept
that the latter are mediated by the body, and can have material con-
sequences. The materiality of the body, in particular women’s bodies,
have been targeted by different authorities such as the state, the Church
and the medical profession in gendered ways that are connected more
to the notion of bodily integrity and reclaiming citizenship over one’s
own body, than to the sphere of intimate citizenship.
Bio-power and bodily citizenship
Women’s bodies have been the target of manifold types of regulation –

by the Church, suzerain authorities and the modern state – as well as
being subject to the power of male family members. Michel Foucault has
argued that since the 18th century, these regulations have increasingly
taken the form of a new kind of power (or rather a technology of power),
which he has termed bio-power. According to Foucault, bio-power is a
power that cares for life – ‘a power that exerts a positive influence on
life, that endeavours to administer, optimise, and multiply it, subjecting
it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations, it acts positively
on life, diversifies it, thoroughly monitors it and generally regulates it’
(Foucault, 1980a:137).
Bio-power is focused on the body as the species-body, ‘the body
imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of bio-
logical processes’ (ibid.:139). It takes the form of various interventions
and regulatory controls that Foucault summarily referred to as the ‘bio-
politics of the population’. The population, and especially the sexual
and reproductive behaviour of the population, came under scrutiny
and became the target of intervention (ibid.:25). We argue that the
existing regulation of the issues that closely concern women’s bodies

and their reproductive and sexual potential – abortion and prostitution –
can be regarded as a combination of disciplinary mechanisms and the
mechanisms of bio-power.
The category of bodily citizenship gains new importance here. It
provides a basis that women can use to resist the pervasive effects of bio-
power. In such personal and life-changing experiences as pregnancy and
motherhood, the category of bodily citizenship allows women to claim a
new position as subjects – making it an issue of individual freedom, self-
determination or autonomy – instead of accepting the positioning of
subjects by what Foucault (1991:102) called governmentality: the insti-
tutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations and tactics
that allow the exercise of bio-power and are applied towards the goal of
building a healthy and productive population.2 Bodily citizenship pro-
vides women with other subjectivities than the ‘control of the self’ that
is in line with the aims of bio-power (Foucault, 1982:212–215).
Bio-power and its mechanisms operate through the knowledge, work
and interventions of medical experts, psychiatrists, psychologists and
social workers in the discourses and policymaking on abortion and
prostitution, of which there is abundant evidence in the four coun-
tries we studied. The ‘global strategy’ of bio-power is directly linked
to the advance of medical power into the sphere of political control
over the population. It entails preventive monitoring of any deviation,
with the objective to ensure the preservation and reinforcement of the
social system against ‘non-normal’ or potentially dangerous individu-
als. In the Netherlands and in the Czech Republic, in different periods,
women in prostitution were marked as mentally disturbed. In Sweden
prostitutes fell under the Vagrancy Act along with other ‘deviants’, while
in Portugal they were even equated with a disease that could contami-
nate decent women. In all four countries, women who resisted the ban
on abortion were labelled criminal, immoral, psychically disturbed or at
least selfish and irresponsible – and as such their right to autonomy was
curtailed. Currently in the Czech Republic, women who refuse routine
medical interventions during pregnancy (including induced abortion
for genetic reasons) and childbirth are labelled irrational, endangering to
society or simply crazy. Elsewhere too, those critical of genetic screening
are increasingly regarded as irrational. The category of bodily citizen-
ship opens the possibility of reinterpreting their decisions, actions and
identities from a different perspective.
As we discussed in Chapter 1, Nikolas Rose (2007) has analysed the
recent biotechnological revolution with its discoveries in genomics and
reproductive technologies, which is leading to a new kind of vital poli-

tics, different to the earlier forms of bio-power that focused on health:
births, deaths, diseases. The four countries we have analysed show dif-
ferent types of bio-power, or ‘citizenship projects’, as Rose has called
them in the past. Portugal for a long time had a pro-natalist popula-
tion policy; under Communism the Czech Republic’s population policy
aimed at improving both the quantity and quality of the population,
and Sweden was long characterised by a qualitative population policy,
including sterilisation of those deemed unfit. In the Netherlands, popu-
lation policy in a quantitative or qualitative sense never took off, but we
do find (as in Sweden) the drive for a healthy population following the
social hygiene movement of the 19th century, resulting in an extensive
public health sector, but only partly administered by the state, given the
autonomy of the pillarisation of society.
According to Rose, arguing on Foucaultian lines, societies are now
moving to a new bio-politics, shifting away from the old bio-power
with its technologies of managing disease and the reproductive and sex-
ual activities of people. The new form focuses on the ‘optimization of
life itself’; intervening in people’s lives to optimise their future vitality
(Rose, 2007:82); individuals are scrutinised regarding their susceptibility
to future symptoms in order to prevent disease and minimise risk. But it
also includes attempts at enhancing human possibilities, such as intel-
ligence or longevity, opening up new ways of managing individuals as
well as new markets (ibid.). This is the domain of biological citizenship,
or bodily citizenship, as we prefer to call it.
The rise of this new kind of bio-power, and the expectation that its
importance will increase in the next few decades, is the major reason to
call for a separate category of citizenship to preserve the rights to bodily
integrity. Developments around in vitro fertilisation, embryo selection,
prenatal screening and the medicalisation of childbirth call into ques-
tion women’s autonomy. Prenatal screening is considered obligatory for
the majority of people in the Czech Republic and is routinely performed
by Czech gynaecologists and obstetricians (suggesting path dependency
of the eugenic tradition in abortion legislation), and pressure on women
in the other countries to conform to medical advice to eliminate risks
is increasing. From advice to pregnant women on diet and physical
activities to growing possibilities of treatment in utero, all are part of
the disciplinary strategies that Rose has discussed. Our research did not
systematically analyse the response of women to these recent develop-
ments, but we found enough intriguing links to make a strong plea
for studying women’s mobilisation around the new bio-power. These
responses will be state-specific: the thriving tradition of home birth and

breastfeeding in the Netherlands provides a different political opportu-
nity structure than that of the Czech Republic, where medicalisation of
reproduction has been so much stronger.
In our study we found that women’s movement organisations have
been crucial to gendering bodily citizenship. However, in the new bio-
politics much of the debate is unfortunately gender-neutral, with little
mobilisation of, and intervention to date by, women’s movements,
despite the fact that some areas of intervention are specifically gendered,
such as reproductive technologies, risk-eliminating interventions on
reproduction or enhancement of female bodies such as breast enlarge-
ments and the tyranny of slimness. We therefore end our study calling
for women’s movement activity to defend and further the case for bod-
ily citizenship, as well as for more research on the genderedness of the
new bio-politics and the initiatives of women’s movements to call these
into question.
Notes
1. The study included 13 countries: Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Finland,
Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the
United States.
2. According to Foucault, bio-power was an essential element in the evolution of
capitalism, which could only proceed through the controlled integration of
the body into the apparatus of production and by adapting the population to
economic processes. ‘The investment of the body, its valorisation, and the dis-
tributive management of its forces were at the time indispensable’ (Foucault,
1980a:141).
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Index
Note: The locators followed by ‘n’ refer to note numbers.
Abort i Sverige, 134 Associação Portuguesa de Apoio à Vítima

abortion (APAV), see Portuguese Association
in Czech Republic (CR), 22–3, for the Support of Victims
25–36, 48–50 Association of Dutch
migration and, 62–4, 80, 164–6 Municipalities, 69
in Portugal, 84–87, 90, 92–103, 105,
113–16 Baak, Anke, 61
in Sweden, 118–23, 127–36, 145, Bacchi, Carol, 4
147–51 Backe, Ian, 10
in the Netherlands, 52–5, 57–69, Backman, Susanne, 145
79–82 Barreiro Pérez-Pardo, Belén, 87
Abortion Act (1938, 1974, Sweden), Bastos, Susana Pereira, 88
123, 132, 149–50 Baum, Michael, 98, 99
Abortion Act (1984, 2005, the Baumgartner, Frank, 117 n.10
Netherlands), 52, 60, 63–6, 68, 79, Beadman, Clive, 87
81–2 Beasley, Chris, 4
abortion tourism, 68, 135 Beckwith, Karen, 16
Act on Artificial Termination of Benford, Robert D., 12, 14, 29, 36
Pregnancy (Czech Republic), 22 Bergqvist, Christina, 120, 126
Act No. 20/1966 Col, 38 Bermeo, Nancy, 91
Act No. 241/1922, 37 bio-politics, 7–8, 33, 176–7
Act on Discipline and Morality, 136 bio-power
AD Aliança Democrática, see bodily citizenship and, 174–7
Democratic Alliance (Portugal) definition, 6, 174
alcoholism, 33, 86 earlier forms, 176
Algemene Wet Bijzondere Ziektekosten – functioning example, 7
(healthcare insurance), 62 in Czech Republic, 49
Aliens Act 1992, 34 intimate citizenship, 174
Almeida, Maria, 85 objectives, 36
Altink, Sietske, 75 biological citizenship, 7–8, 176
Alvarez, Sonia, 93 Birgus, Jan, 31
Alves, Magda, 99, 100, 101, 103 Birkland, Thomas, 117 n.10
Amaral, Ilídio, 90 Blyth, Mark, 10
Andeweg, Rudi B., 54, 57 bodily citizenship, outcomes
Anica, Aurízia, 85 bio-power, 174–7
Animal Rights Party (the in Czech Republic, 35–6, 47–50
Netherlands), 65 in the Netherlands, 79–82
anti-abortion groups, 59, 61, 67, 168 in Portugal, 113–15
Ashanti (black feminist magazine), 60 in Sweden, 147–9
Associação das Mulheres Juristas (AMJ), national variations, implications,
see Women Lawyers Association 169–72
195
196 Index
Bokelman, Sylvia, 75 ČSSD (Ceská strana sociálně

Borchorst, Annette, 120, 126 demokratická), see Czech Social
Bossenbroek, Martin, 55, 56 Democratic Party (left)
Botman, Maayke, 60, 83 n.7 Czech Crown, 51 n.9
Bovenkerk, Frank, 75 Czech Republic (CR)
brothels, 38, 53, 56, 69–70, 75, 88–9, Abortion; Act No. 66/1986, 28; Act
110, 112, 124, 126, 136–7, 157 No. 68/1957, 27;
Buijs, Heleen, 70, 73, 74 Europeanisation, impact on,
33–5; illegal, 28–9; Law on
Artificial Termination of
Calado, Maria, 86 Pregnancy 1957/68, 28;
CŽL (Ceská ženská lobby), see Czech legalisation, 22, 26–33;
Women’s Lobby (CWL) ‘mini-abortion,’ 29; minority
CAIM (Cooperation, Action, women, 33; reproductive right
Investigation, World View) of women, 31; unwanted
Project, 109–10, 113, 117 n.22 pregnancy, 29–30; women’s
Campanha Nacional pelo Aborto e bodily citizenship, 35–6
Contracepção (CNAC), 96 Christian Democrats, 24, 32, 35,
Catholic Church, 86–7, 99, 156, 160 39–40
Catholic women’s organisation, 105, feminist movements, 24–6, 28, 32,
107, 111, 167 36, 43–4, 48–9
Cerný, Miloŝ, 31 old and new controversies, bodily
Christian-Democratic Union - Czech citizenship, 48–50
Popular Party (KDU), 23–4, 35 political system, 23–4
Christian Democrats (CDS), 24, 32, prostitution; Europeanisation,
35, 39–40, 64–5, 67, 71–3, 76, 79, impact on, 44–5; minority
82–3 n.3, 83 n.8, 83 n.11, 95, 155, women, 45–6; regulation,
157, 168 37–41; Regulation of the Capital
citizenship of Prague number 2/1993, 40;
bodily, 5–10 sex tourism, 38; state-socialist
concept, 2–5 system, 41–3; UN Convention
1949, 38–9; women’s bodily
feminist public policy, 172–4
citizenship, 47–8
Civic Democratic Party (CR), 24,
reproductive policies, 31
34, 39
sexually transmitted diseases (STDs),
Cobb, Roger, 117 n.10
26, 37, 43, 46
Comissão para a Legalização do Aborto
trafficking issues, 41–5
(CLA), 96
Czech Social Democratic Party (left),
Committee of Czechoslovak 24, 39
Women, 26 Czech Women’s Lobby (CWL), 45, 48
Communist Coalition (CDU), 92 CZK, see Czech Crown
Correio da Manhã (newspaper), 110–11
Costa Pinto, António, 91, 93 D66 (Democraten 66, the
Council, 77 Netherlands), 83 n.5
Cunhal, Álvaro, 85 DCE (Directie Coordinatie
Criminal Act, 37–8 Emancipatiezaken), see
Criminal Act on trafficking in women Department for the Coordination
(CR), 41 of Equality Policy
Criminal Law (1926, CR), 25 Daalder, Annelies L., 75
Index 197
Daalder, Hans, 54, 57 EWL, see European Women’s Lobby

Dahlerup, Drude, 127 Expresso newspaper, 94–5, 98, 102,
Della Porta, Donatella, 13, 14 104, 117 n.11, 117 n.24
Democratic Alliance (Portugal), 95–6
Den gravida kvinnan och fostret – två Fairclough, Norman, 14
individer (Sweden), 133 feminism
Department for the Coordination of first wave, 86
Equality Policy (the Netherlands), human rights and, 169
69–70, 78, 146 new wave, 162
Diamandouros, Nikiforos, 93 radical, 164, 167
Diani, Mario, 13, 14 second wave, 1, 9, 59, 84, 92
Direcção Geral de Saúde (DGS), 102 state, 119
DL (Diário de Lisboa newspaper), 104 feminist movements, 4–5, 16, 18, 24,
DN (Diário de Notícias newspaper), 169
108, 110–12, 117 n.17 Fernandes, Tiago, 93
Dodillet, Susanne, 144, 145 Ferree, Myra Marx, 16, 84
Donati, Paolo R., 12, 15 Ferreira, Virginia, 94
DR Diário da República (Journal of the Fisher, K., 15
Assembly of the Republic), 107 Fishman, Robert, 91
Duarte, Madalena, 89, 110 Florin, Christina, 118, 127
Dudová, Radka, 1, 22, 31, 33, 36, Förbud mot köp av sexuell tjänst
153 (report), 149
Dytrych, Zdeňek, 29, 30 Foucault, Michel, 6, 7, 8, 14, 21, 36,
49, 155, 174, 175, 176, 177 n.2
Eduards, Maud, 120, 121, 122, 124, Foundation Against Trafficking of
125, 126, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133, Women (STV), 70–1, 74–5
138, 139, 144, 148, 151 Foundation for Medical Interruption
Ekberg, Gunilla, 141 of Pregnancy, 59
Elder, Charles D., 117 n.10 Fredrika Bremer Association (Sweden),
Elgán, Elisabeth, 121 121, 129–30, 137, 142, 148–9
Embryo Act, 65–7, 82 Freedom Party (the Netherlands),
Enschedé, Christiaan J., 58 65–6, 76, 79, 82
Entman, Robert M., 15 Freidenvall, Lenita, 1, 10, 118, 127,
Erikson, Josefina, 120, 124, 126, 137, 140, 153
138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, Freire, André, 98, 99
152 n.5 Freire, Isabel, 87, 89
Esteves, João, 85, 89 Fri abort (Free Abortion, Sweden), 128
EU Council Framework, 169 Fukalová, Drahoslava, 30
EU Framework on Human Trafficking Fuszara, Malgorzata, 18
of 2002, 168
European Women’s Lobby, 45, 169 Gamson, William A., 12, 13, 14, 84
Europeanisation Gendered Citizenship in Multicultural
of Czech Republic, 33–5, 44–5 Europe (FEMCIT), 1–2, 5
of the Netherlands, 53, 67–9, gendered violence, 141, 150, 164, 173
77–8 genetic citizenship, 8
of Portugal, 102–3, 112–13 George, Stephen, 10
of Sweden, 119, 134–6, 145–7, governmentality, 175
151 Group 8 (Grupp 8, Sweden), 127, 129,
Evaluatie WAZ, 65 131, 133, 137, 140, 149
198 Index
Guinote, Paulo, 87 Janda, Petr, 38, 44

Gunther, Richard, 93 Janssen, Marie-Louise, 70, 74
Jechová, Květa, 26
Hall, Peter, 10 Joaquim, Teresa, 104
Halsaa, Beatrice, 1, 2, 5, 13 Jones, Bryan, 117 n.10
Hašková, Hana, 24 Jouwe, Nancy, 60
Havelková, Hana, 26 JS (Juventude Socialista, Socialist
Haveman, Roelof, 77 Youth), 98, 109
Havránek, František, 29
Hay, Colin, 10 Karlsson, Gunnel, 128, 129
Heath, Debora, 8 Kennedy, James C., 57
Heinen, Jacqueline, 87 Ketting, Evert, 59, 62, 68
Heitlinger, Alena, 9 Kirejczyk, Marta, 67
Hernes, Helga, 119 Kitschelt, Herbert, 13
Hesselgren, Kerstin, 122 KLPD, 75
Hirdman, Yvonne, 126 Köbben, André J., 44
Hollanda Türkiye Kadinlar Birligi Kompagnie, Jan H., 55, 56
(HTKB – Dutch Turkish Women’s Koolstra, Hanneke, 63
League), 60–1 Koopmans, Ruud, 13
Holsteyn, Joop van, 67 Krementsov, Nikolai, 31
Horáková, Milada, 26 Kriesi, Hanspeter, 12, 13, 82
Horta, Maria Teresa, 87 Krook, Mona Lena, 10
housewife contract, 126 Kulawik, Teresa, 10
Hrádek, D., 30 Kulick, Don, 145
human trafficking, 71, 74, 76–7, Kvarnström, Lars, 118
145–7, 164, 166–9 Kvinnobulletinen (journal), 133, 137
Huntington, Samuel, 91 Kvinnor and Fundamentalism (Women
and Fundamentalism), 133
Information/Documentation
Women’s Group (IDM), 97 La Strada (feminist organisation), 43
Institute of Criminology and Social Lee, Laura van, 63
Prevention, 42 Leliveld, Ferd, 62, 68
institutionalism, 10–12 Lenderová, Milena, 25
International Abolitionist Federation, Lex Veneris 1918 (Sweden), 125–6
89, 124 Lijphart, Arend, 54, 57
International Organisation for Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF), 64
Migration, 46, 50 Lindelöf, Karin S., 123
IOM, see International Organisation Linz, Juan, 91, 93
for Migration Lister, Ruth, 3, 4
Irwin, Galen A., 54, 57 Lobo, Marina Costa, 92
Isaksson, Emma, 127 Luptáková, Marina, 41
IUSW – International Union of Sex
Workers, 111 Mackay, Fiona, 10
IVG Interrupção Voluntária de Magalhães, Maria José, 93
Gravidez (Voluntary Interruption Malinová, Hana, 46
of Pregnancy), 102, 114 Manns, Ulla, 121, 152 n.2
Månsson, Sven-Axel, 145, 146
Jaarrapportage, 68 Marshall, T. H., 2, 3, 5
Jalali, Carlos, 91 Matějček, Zdeněk, 29, 30
Index 199
Matoušek, Petr, 46 the Netherlands

Mazur, Amy G., 15, 16, 17, 172 abortion; Abortion Act (1984), 52,
McAdam, Doug, 12 60, 63–6, 68, 79, 81–2;
McBride, Dorothy E., 15, 16 Christian Democrat/Liberal
McCarthy, John D., 12 cabinet Van Agt (1977–1981),
Meijerink, Sander, 12 61; Europeanisation, impact on,
Mens, Lucy van, 73 67–9; five-day waiting period,
Mensenhandel, 71, 74 61–2, 65–6, 68; legislation, 59;
Man-Woman Society, 59 medical-psychiatric grounds,
Meyer, David S., 12, 13, 14 58; migrant women, 60–4;
Migrant Smuggling Protocol (the MVM (Man-Vrouw-Maatschappij-
Netherlands), 78 Man–Woman Society), 59;
migrant women, 60, 62–3, 65–6, 70, pacified issues, 64–7;
80, 110–11, 150, 154–5, 160, parliamentary law debates,
166–7 61–2; Wij Vrouwen Eisen (WVE –
migration We Women Demand), 59–61
abortion and, 62–4, 80, 164–6 Morality Laws, 57
ethnicity and, 46–7 policy legacy, 54–6, 79
Europeanisation, impact on, 9, 17, prostitution; Europeanisation,
53, 153–4 impact on, 77–9; legalisation,
multiculturalism, 19 69–71; licensing system, 76–7;
prostitution and, 45, 73–4, 81, 159, migration, 73–4; parliamentary
164, 166–7 debates, 71–3
refugee, 120 Neto, Octavio Amorim, 92
sex work and, 71, 75, 157 Neves, Helena, 86
trafficked women, 70, 109–11 NMB (Neo-Malthusiaanse Bond), see
Mikule, Václav, 29 Neo-Malthusian League
Ministry of Interior CR, 41 Nezkusil, Jiří, 29
Ministry of the Interior of the Czech Nilsson, Bengt, 127
Republic, 44, 46 Noordman, Jan, 55
minority women Novas, Carlos, 7
in Czech Republic, 33, 45–6 Novotný, Otakar, 29
in Portugal, 95, 101, 105, 107, 109, Nyhagen Predelli, Line, 1, 13
165
Modigliani, André, 84 O’Connor, Julia, 3
Mooney, Christopher Z., 159 ODS, see Civic Democratic Party (CR)
Motejl, Otokar, 33 Oldersma, Jantine, 66
Mueller, Carol McCluerg, 16 Oliveira, Alexandra, 89, 111
Musilová, Dana, 25 Oliveira, Rui, 87
MVM (Man-Vrouw-Maatschappij), see Olsson, Hanna, 125, 137, 139
Man-Woman-Society Opello, Walter Jr., 91
MVĈR, 44, 46 Orloff, Ann Shola, 3
Osmančík, Otakar, 38, 42, 44
National Federation of Left Women Östergren, Petra, 144
(Svenska Kvinnors Vänsterförbund, Outshoorn, Joyce, 1, 6, 15, 16, 18, 52,
SKV), 129 54, 55, 57, 58, 61, 62, 66, 68, 69,
Nečada, Václav, 41 70, 71, 72, 75, 77, 82 n.1, 83 n.8,
Neo-Malthusian League, 54 84, 153, 161, 162, 170, 171, 173
200 Index
Padilla, Beatriz, 106 tackling, 109–12; legislation,

Pais, José Machado, 88, 117 n.25 106–9
Palme, Jacob, 128 Portuguese Association for the
particularism, 3 Support of Victims, 111
Partij van de Vrijheid (PVV), see PP Partido Popular (Popular Party), 92
Freedom Party (the Netherlands) Praag, Philip van, 55
Partij voor de Dieren – PvdD, see Animal Prague Spring, 23, 31
Rights Party Prata, Ana, 1, 84, 87, 92, 93, 95, 153
Pateman, Carole, 3 Pridham, Geoffrey, 91
PCP Partido Comunista Português Pronk, Guido J., 75
(Communist Party), 95 prostitution
Peixoto, João, 106, 111 in Czech Republic (CR), 22–3, 25–6,
Pellikaan, Huib, 67, 82 37–50
Petr, J., 30 in Portugal, 84–5, 87–90, 104–15
in Sweden, 118–20, 123–6, 136–51
Pheterson, Gail, 70
in the Netherlands, 52–3, 55–58,
Phillips, Ann, 4
69–82
Pierson, Paul, 10, 11
Prostitution i Sverige: Bakgrund och
Pimentel, Irene, 86, 87, 90
åtgärder, 138
pimping, 37–8, 45–7, 53, 75, 108, 114,
Prostitutionen i Sverige (report), 138
126, 136
Protocol on Trafficking (the
Pirralha, André, 87, 98, 99, 100 Netherlands), 78
Plummer, Ken, 5, 6, 174 PSD Partido Social Democrata (Social
political citizenship, 2 Democratic Party), 92, 95, 117
Political Reformed Party (the n.11
Netherlands), 82–3 n.3
pornography, 53, 109, 127, 136–8 Rademakers, Jany, 68
Portugal Radical family politics (family
abortion; Catholic Church doctrine, programme), 127
86–7; Europeanisation, impact Radvanová, Senta, 29
on, 102–3 Rapp, Rayna, 8
feminist movement, 85–6; law Rätten till abort (Right to Abortion),
16/2007 (1996–2013), 129–30
97–102; law n.6/84 Redmond, Roline, 61
(1977–1984), 92–7; reglementering, 55–6, 73
pro-natalist movement, 86–7; rehabilitation, fallen women, 56, 60,
Salazar’s slogan, 86 164
bodily citizenship, 113–15 Řehořová, Martina, 27
political system, 90–2 reproductive rights, 5, 9, 17–18, 22,
prostitution; decriminalisation 27, 32, 84, 103, 116, 162, 166,
(1978–1983), 104–6; 172–3
Europeanisation, impact on, Research Institute of Criminology,
112–13; legislation, 106–9; 19th 51 n.7
century practice, 87–8; Research Institute of Psychiatry
regulatory system, 89; social (CR), 30
and political change, 88; Ribeiro, Fernando Bessa, 111
stigmatisation, 88–9; sex Riksförbundet för homosexuella,
trafficking Europeanisation, bisexuellas och transpersoners
impact on, 112–13; government rättigheter (RFSL), 135
Index 201
Riksförbundet för Sexuell Upplysning sexually transmitted diseases (STDs),

(RFSU), 129, 135 25, 37, 43, 46, 78, 157, 160
Riksorganisationen för kvinnojourer och Sexuella övergrepp (report), 137
tjejjourer i Sverige (ROKS), 135, Shaver, Sheila, 4, 171, 172
141–2, 146, 148–9 Šídová, Lucie, 46
Rose, Nikolas, 6, 7, 8, 21, 49, 50, 84, Sieval, Zamira, 63
155, 174, 175, 176 Siim, Birte, 4
Roseneil, Sasha, 2, 5 Silva, Helena Lopes da, 94
Rozkoš bez rizika (feminist Silva, Susana, 87, 88, 91
organisation), 43 Skocpol, Theda, 10, 11
Smith, T. Alexander, 159
Sá, Isabel dos Guimarães, 85 Snow, David A., 12, 13, 14, 29, 36
Saharso, Sawitri, 64, 82 n.3 social citizenship, 2, 3, 5, 173
Sainsbury, Diane, 127 social movement theory, 12–16
Santos, Ana Cristina, 103 Sojka, Ján, 33
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa, 110, Squires, Judith, 4
111, 112, 117 n.21 Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij
Santos, Carlos Oliveira, 87, 89 (SGP), see Political Reformed Party
Santos, Cristina, 103 (the Netherlands)
Schaapman, Karina, 75 Štêpán, Jan, 30
Scheinost, Miroslav, 38, 44 Staatsblad, 64, 65
Schmidt, Vivien, 10, 12 Statham, Paul, 13
Schmitter, Philippe C., 93 Steinmo, Sven, 10, 11
Schnabel, Paul, 62, 68 Stepan, Alfred, 91, 93
Schneck, Stephen F., 14 sterilisation, 18, 31, 33, 122, 165, 176
Schüller, Vratislav, 29, 30 Stichting Medisch Verantwoorde
second wave feminism, 1, 9, 59, 84 Zwangerschapsafbreking (Stimezo),
sex clubs, 73–4, 76, 136, 138 see Foundation for Medical
sex industry, 18, 69, 72, 74–6, 81, 106, Interruption of Pregnancy
109, 114–15, 157–8, 163, 166, Stichting tegen Vrouwenhandel (STV), see
170, 173 Foundation Against Trafficking of
Sex Purchase Act 1998, 145, 157–8, Women (STV)
169, 172 Stokes, David E., 21 n.1
sex tourism, 38, 69–70 Strasser, Sabine, 4
sex workers Streeck, Wolfgang, 12
autonomy, 18 Sümer, Sevil, 2, 5
‘decent citizens’ vs., 47–8 Support Committee for Women in
as full citizens, 39 Iran 1991–2006, 134
level of tourism, 46 Svanström, Yvonne, 120, 124, 125,
media interest, 75 126, 145
migrant, 71–4, 78–9, 110, 167 Svenska Kvinnors Vänsterförbund (SKV),
modern, 76 122, 129
registration, 77 Swärd, Stefan, 120, 128, 129
social and economic rights, 69–70, Sweden
81–2, 161, 163–4, 169, 172 abortion; 1934 Investigation
socialist state definition, 43 Committee, 122–3; 1974
street, 40 abortion law, 131–2; Abortion
trade unions, 44 Act of 1938 (1938:318), 123;
women’s movement actors, 158 Europeanisation, impact on,
202 Index
Sweden – continued Revolutionary Women), 104–5,

134–6; legalisation, 121–3, 109, 111
130–1; Poland case, 128–9; UN Convention 1949, 40
political agenda, 129, 132–3; UN Convention Against Transnational
RFSU recommendations, 129 Organized Crime, 77–8
gender equality issues, 119–20 UN International Convention for the
‘housewife contract,’ 126–7 Suppression of the Traffic in
Prostitution; Act on Discipline and Women, 169
Morality, 136; Geijer Affair, 138; UN Trafficking Protocol of 2000, 169
gendered violence, 141; UN treaties, 169
investigation, 136–9, 141–4, United Nations Convention against
146; Lex Veneris 1918, 125–6; Transnational Organized
political agenda, 140; purchase Crime, 40
of sexual service, 143–4; universalism, 2–3
reglementation system, 123,
125; risks of uncontrolled, 124; Vacková, Božena, 42
Vagrancy Law, 124, 126; Vagrancy Law (Sweden), 126
women’s organisations, 118–20, Våldtäkt och andra sexuella övergrepp
124, 129–30, 135–7, 139, 142, (report), 139
146–51 valence issues, 17, 173
Swedish Association for Sexuality Vereniging Nederlandse Gemeenten
Education (Riksförbundet för (VNG), see Association of Dutch
Sexuell Upplysning, RFSU), 129 Municipalities
Vanwesenbeeck, Ina, 70
Tarrow, Sidney, 13 Verbraken, Anniek, 70, 73, 74
Tatalovich, Raymond, 159 Vlasta (CR), 26
Taussig, Karen-Sue, 8 Vlček, Martin, 37, 38
Tavares, Manuela, 85, 86, 89, 93, 94, Vodrážka, Milan, 24
97, 101 Voet, Rian, 4
Taylor, R., 10 Vries, Petra de, 55, 56
Thelen, Kathleen, 10, 12 VÚK (Výzkumný ústav
Thomsson, Ulrika, 137 kriminologický), see Research
Thun, Cecilie, 1 Institute of Criminology
Towns, Anne, 145
Traffic in Women of Full Age (1933), Wagenaar, Henk, 74, 75
78 Waltman, Max, 136, 145
trafficking in human beings for sexual Weir, Margaret, 12
purposes (CR), 41 Wekker, Gloria, 60
Trafficking Act of 2002 (Sweden), Wijers, Marjan, 70, 78
146–7 Wijsen, Cecile, 63
Trávníčková, Ivana, 38, 39, 41, 44, 45, Wij Vrouwen Eisen (WVE, We Women
51 n.7 Demand), 59–61, 66, 82 n.1, 83
Trafficking of Persons Act, 70 n.4
Trdlicová, Karla, 41 Woman’s Equality (report), 127
Tripp, Aili, 16 Women Lawyers Association, 108
women MPs, 25, 173
Uhrová, Eva, 26 Women on Waves (feminist
UMAR União Alternativa e Resposta organisation), 66, 100, 103, 114,
(Union of Anti-Fascist and 168
Index 203
Women’s Council (CR), 26 women’s rights, 10, 23, 25, 32, 36, 45,
women’s movement organisations, 20, 53, 82, 96, 99, 101, 114–16, 136,
52–3, 67, 118, 120, 148–50, 154, 148, 153, 173
156, 162, 168, 173, 177
Women’s National Council (Ženská
Yuval-Davis, Nira, 4, 9
národní rada, CR), 25
women’s policy agency, 69, 80, 157,
170 Zald, Mayer N., 12

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European Women’s Movements and Body Politics

Citizenship, Gender and Diversity

Series Editors: Beatrice Halsaa, University of Oslo, Norway; Sasha Roseneil,

Beatrice Halsaa, Sasha Roseneil and Sevil Sümer (editors)

Citizenship, Gender and Diversity

With Radka Dudová, Ana Prata and Lenita Freidenvall

1. Feminism—Europe. 2. Women’s rights—Europe. I. Title.

List of Figures and Tables vi

1 Women’s Movements and Bodily Integrity 1

2 Constructing Bodily Citizenship in the Czech Republic 22

3 The Struggle for Bodily Integrity in the Netherlands 52

4 Contesting Portugal’s Bodily Citizenship 84

5 In Pursuit of Bodily Integrity in Sweden 118

6 Women’s Movements and Bodily Autonomy: Making the

6.1 Points of comparison of country cases on selected issues 154

3.1 Abortion rates in the Netherlands 63

This study emerged from the Feminism and Citizenship (FEMCIT)

beyond our earlier ﬁndings in three respects. Firstly, we analyse our

Applerouth, Randal Contreras, Amy Denissen and Lauren McDonald for

Radka Dudová is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the

Lenita Freidenvall is Senior Lecturer in Political Science at Stockholm

Joyce Outshoorn is Professor Emeritus of Women’s Studies at the Uni-

Ana Prata is Assistant Professor at California State University

Stimezo Stichting Medisch Verantwoorde

AD Aliança Democrática (Democratic Alliance)

PSD Partido Social Democrata (Social Democratic Party)

such as citizenship, human rights and justice, which were originally

The concept of citizenship

Marshall (1963) identiﬁed three major types of citizenship: civil, polit-

The dimension of bodily citizenship

workers’ rights, as many other feminists have argued (Outshoorn et al.,

security. In contrast to blocking, bending and destroying forces, bio-

by the institutionalisation of marriage and inheritance laws. Violence

the engagement with the EU system’ (Backe and George, 2006:57) –

Theoretical background and key concepts

in background ideas over time as actors are convinced to change old

the other on institutional evolution and development. The latter sug-

Social movement theory

opportunity structure concerns what enables or hinders the mobilisa-

and interpreted by actors (Gamson and Meyer, 1996:283; Della Porta

Research design and methodology

We developed a comparative research design to study how women’s

This selection provided a mix of both secular and religious coun-

Comparing the cases

We make two comparisons in the analysis of our empirical material.

Secondly, we shall be comparing the two issues, abortion and prostitu-

1. Outcomes: to what extent were women’s movements’ claims

Outline of the book

After this introductory chapter, we present our four country cases in

In the Central and Eastern European countries that experienced four

post-war history of the Czech Republic,1 what the outcomes of these

The Czech Republic is among the post-communist countries with an

The Czech Republic today has a multi-party system. A diverse

Historical legacy prior to the ‘new’ women’s movement

we need to look further back in history – to the period of the democratic

published in the magazine titled The Women’s Council, renamed in 1947

The ﬁrst critical juncture in the development of the legal institution

then criminalised again during the Stalinist regime in 1936 (Řehořová,

Major discourses on abortion

in order to be able to take care of her children, had to turn to an

and it was therefore in the best interest of the population to grant

They have little predisposition to become a good mother so we

In the same period, the study conducted by researchers at the Research