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Abortion Policy Reform in New Zealand: Examining the Significance of Issue Networks During the Reform Process Leading up to the Abortion Legislation Act 2020

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Abortion Policy Reform in New Zealand: Examining the Significance of Issue Networks During the Reform Process Leading up to the Abortion Legislation Act 2020 Abortion policy reform in New Zealand: Examining the significance of issue networks during the reform process leading up to the Abortion Legislation Act 2020 Emil Schröder Political Science C (Bachelor Thesis) Department of Government Uppsala University, Spring 2020 Supervisor: Markus Gossas Word count: 13437 Table of contents 1. Introduction 2 1.1 Purpose 3 2. Theoretical framework and previous research 4 2.1. Previous research on abortion policy reform 4 2.1.1. Gender policy in Latin America - Htun’s Sex and the State 4 2.1.2. Further research on issue networks, the Church, and opportunity contexts 6 2.1.3. Strategic framing 7 2.2. Theoretical framework 8 2.2.1. The distinctiveness of gender policy issues 8 2.2.2. Issue networks 9 2.2.3. State institutions 10 2.2.4. Church-state relations 10 2.2.5. The “fit” 11 3. Method 12 3.1. Case selection 12 3.2. Process-tracing 14 3.3. Material 15 3.4. Operationalisation 15 4. Analysis 17 4.1. Historical overview of the abortion debate in New Zealand 17 4.2. Issue networks 21 4.2.1. Criticism from the UN 21 4.2.2. Abortion Law Reform Association of New Zealand (ALRANZ) 22 4.3. Configuration of state institutions 24 4.3.1. New Zealand’s system of government 24 4.3.2. The reform process 25 4.4. Church-state relations 27 4.5. The fit between issue networks and state institutions 29 5. Conclusion 31 References 33 1 1. Introduction The right to safe and legal abortion is considered a human right under numerous international and regional treaties and UN experts and agencies are persistently calling for a global realisation of full reproductive and sexual rights. Yet, in many countries, abortion is still completely prohibited or legal only if it would save the life of the woman (Human Rights Watch 2018). This is particularly true in parts of the world where religious institutions with considerable social and political influence use their power to prevent any liberalisation of abortion. This type of religious influence is a central component of Mala Htun’s research in her book ​Sex and the State ​(2003), where she studies policy processes on gender issues, such as legal abortion, divorce, and family equality in Latin America. Her work cumulates in a theoretical framework that emphasise ​issue networks ​as instrumental to liberal legislative change on these types of gender policy issues. Issue networks are coalitions of professionals such as lawyers, doctors, legislators, and feminist activists that mobilise around the promotion of a specific policy issue. Htun’s framework stresses that the success or failure of issue networks is dependent on the opportunities provided by state institutions, and the current relationship status between the state and dominant religious institutions, particularly the Catholic Church. Her research demonstrated that issue networks could utilise temporal division in Church-state relations to push for liberal gender policy reform. However, the Church would turn out to be particularly resolute in their opposition to the issue of legal abortion and managed to counter attempts at abortion law liberalisation in the Latin American countries included in Htun's research (Htun 2003). In contrast to Latin America, most ‘Western’ countries provide the legal right to abortion on demand up to a certain amount of weeks into pregnancy, with only a few exceptions (Center for Reproductive Rights 2020). Up until 2020 one of those exceptions were New Zealand, where in March 2020 Parliament adopted the ​Abortion Legislation Act, ​thereby decriminalising abortion and permitting the procedure at request with a 20 week gestational limit (New Zealand Parliament 2020). The fact that abortion was ruled a criminal offense in New Zealand up until as late as 2020 seems surprising considering that New Zealand is a country with a longstanding liberal and democratic tradition, famously becoming the first self-governing country in the world to give all 2 women the right to vote in Parliamentary elections in 1893 (Ministry for Culture and Heritage 2018). New Zealand is also a rather secular country, where almost half of the population state that they have no religious affiliation and only about 10% of the total population are of Catholic faith (Stats NZ 2018). This makes New Zealand an interesting case to study, as it is unclear why abortion-rights advocates were unsuccessful in achieving liberal abortion reform at an earlier point, given the seemingly favourable circumstances. This study will therefore apply Htun’s theoretical framework to the policy process leading to the Abortion Legislation Act 2020 to find out if the reform can be explained by causal mechanisms that corresponds with those hypothesised by Htun. The intention of this is to test the analytical usefulness of the theory outside of a Catholic-majority context. 1.1 Purpose The broader purpose of this study is to make an addition to the growing field of research on gender policy reform by looking further into how action taken by issue networks influences the outcome of abortion policy processes. More specifically however, the objective is to examine if Htun’s (2003) theoretical framework on issue networks and their use of opportunity contexts within state institutions to promote liberal gender policy reform, can be used to explain why New Zealand adopted the Abortion Legislation Act 2020. The leading research question is therefore the following: To which extent were issue networks instrumental to the abortion reform process in New Zealand leading up to the Abortion Legislation Act 2020? Htun’s theoretical framework was developed in the context of Latin America and other previous studies that have used her framework have also principally focused on cases in either Latin America or other Catholic majority countries where the Catholic Church historically has had a strong influence on state institutions (Htun 2003; Reuterswärd et al. 2011; Fernandez Anderson 2016). This thesis will test the framework in a different context, with liberal abortion legislation being adopted in a country where the Catholic Church is expected to have had significantly less influence on state institutions. Conducting this study therefore provides an opportunity make an inquiry into how having a smaller (yet not fully insignificant) Catholic population affects the 3 variable of Htun’s framework pertaining to the Catholic Church’s influence on state institutions (on the issue of abortion policy). 2. Theoretical framework and previous research The following section will begin with a part covering the most relevant research in the field of gender- and specifically abortion policy reform, followed by a rendition of the theoretical framework being used in this study, as presented by Htun in ​Sex and the State ​(2003)​. The framework is then tested by applying it to the case of New Zealand’s recent abortion policy process to determine if the theory can sufficiently explain the adoption of the Abortion Legislation Act 2020. 2.1. Previous research on abortion policy reform 2.1.1. Gender policy in Latin America - Htun’s ​Sex and the State In ​Sex and the State, ​Mala Htun presents her research concerning gender- and family equality policy issues in Latin America. Her research specifically deals with the policy developments on abortion and divorce in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile during the last third of the 20th century. By comparing different examples of gender policy reform and attempts at reform taking place during both military dictatorships and under democratic rule, Htun concludes that the transition from military dictatorships to democracy in these Latin American countries not necessarily led to favorable circumstances for liberal gender policy reform, she argues instead that the success or failure of liberal gender policy reform is determined by how effectively issue networks manage to mobilise and “hook” into the structure of state institutions, and to which extent the Church is able to exercise influence over the state (Htun 2003). Her research found that both Brazil and Argentina legalised divorce, under military dictatorship and post-democratisation respectively, while in Chile divorce remained illegal. However, liberalisation of abortion did not happen in any of the countries included in the study (Htun 2003, 7). As a means of understanding why laws regulating certain gender issues were liberalised successfully, while abortion was not, Htun emphasises the need to disaggregate gender issues with respect to the nature of the issue at hand. Htun differentiates between ​technical gender issues ​such as women’s 4 property- and parental rights, for which, efforts towards liberal change was not met with significant resistance from the Catholic Church, and ​absolutist ​gender issues such as legal divorce and liberalisation of abortion, which were met with serious contention by the Church, as these issues evoke strong “gut responses” and questions of morality. Htun notes that legal abortion is an especially complicated and unique issue in this aspect, even more so than divorce (Htun 2003: 13–14, 168). Further emphasis is directed towards the concept of “elite” issue networks​, ​which are constellations of highly specialised professionals such as lawyers, feminist activists, journalists, doctors and reformist politicians, who mobilise and lobby policy makers with the goal of promoting a specific policy issue. Htun argues that the success of issue networks is dependent on how well they are able to “hook” into state institutions, meaning that varying circumstances1 within state institutions may, or may not, offer a window of opportunity for reform to take place (Htun 2003, 14–21). One exemplification of this is that the decision-making process that was established under conservative military dictatorships in Argentina, Brazil and Chile between the late 1960’s and late 1980’s, would be characterised by special commissions of legal experts that proposed legal changes to each of the countries civil, commercial, and criminal laws with little interference from the military regimes.
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