The Right to Abortion Being Questioned. Non-Punishable Abortion in the Argentine Press: Voices and Outlines

Resumen

This paper seeks to contribute to the knowledge of the discursive construction of representations and gendered identities around the issue of abortion in the public space during the first years of the XXI century. The aim of this work, in particular, is to present the voices, the discursive strategies and alignments on the subject of abortion permitted by the Criminal Code in Argentina, as they are constructed and displayed in Argentina’s contemporary newspapers of national circulation in order to investigate the journalistic problematization carried out regarding a legal right established in the Argentine Criminal Code. The analysis, framed within a Critical Discourse Analysis line, focuses on the different print media coverage of ??national and local circulation on three outstanding cases of non-punishable abortion, and the coverage of the ruling of the Nation’s Supreme Court on this subject (this analysis is currently in progress). The purpose of our research is to account for the discursive strategies and representations dealt with by the mass media on "abortion" as a social practice and, at the same time, the way in which the press constructs and construes a social and political debate in the discursive arena around the subject at stake.