BUENOS AIRES — It was just two years ago that the organizers of a stirring women’s movement in Argentina were handed what felt like a bitter loss, their efforts to legalize abortion rejected in the Senate after intense lobbying by the Catholic Church.

This week, after their efforts culminated in a landmark vote to make Argentina the largest Latin American country to legalize abortion, it became clear that the loss was a vital step in further changing the conversation around feminism in their country.

“We managed to break the prejudice, and the discussion became a lot less dramatic,” said Lucila Crexell, who was among the senators who voted to legalize abortion on Wednesday. She was one of two lawmakers to abstain in the 2018 vote. “Society at large started to understand the debate in more moderate, less fanatic terms.”

The shift was visible on the street: What started as a series of marches by young women had, over the past few years, started looking like a truly national movement. Older women joined the demonstrations, and men, too. Blue-collar workers joined with professionals in marching, and rural campaigners linked hands with the movement’s urban base.

They came to support a movement that formally began in 2015 in outrage over the killing of women — its name is Ni Una Menos, or not one woman less — and began focusing its message on the toll that underground abortions were taking.

But the seeds of its success were planted more than a generation ago, in the campaigns by mothers and grandmothers of the disappeared that helped usher out years of military juntas in Argentina in the 1980s. When abortion rights activists of the past few years waved their signature green handkerchiefs, they were following in the footsteps of those Argentine women, who protested the generals’ abuses by wearing white handkerchiefs.

“Argentina has a well-established tradition when it comes to popular organizing and mobilizations,” said Elizabeth Gómez Alcorta, Argentina’s minister of women, gender and diversity. “The street, as we call it, has a powerful effect in the conquest of rights.” Read more via New York Times