It said: “Can you look me in the eyes, my mother tried to abort me.” A few months later, she was scrolling through Facebook when a promoted video popped up in her news feed. “I thought the movement of pro-life belonged to the past,” Manolanaki says. She and a friend walked up and down the street pulling down the stickers. In the United State, that figure stands at 11.6 abortions per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44.Ĭhristina Manolanaki, a 23-year-old who recently graduated from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, was shocked last year when she saw stickers the size of bottle caps with the slogan “Let Me Live” plastered on trees and walls in her neighborhood. In 2015, Greece had 27 abortions for every 1,000 women, according to the Greek Society for Family Planning, Birth Control and Reproductive Health. Since legalization, abortion has been a common practice. The Let Me Live ad, with an image of a fetus cupped in a hand, from December 2019.
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Makri was part of a Greek feminist movement that successfully campaigned for full abortion rights in the ’80s. “It seems we have not finished.”īack in the 1950s and ’60s, Makri says, it wasn’t unusual for women to rely on abortions as a method of contraception, even though they were illegal.
Alexandra Makri, an Athens-based gynecologist. “It looked like we had finished this issue,” says Dr. Since its launch in 2017, Let Me Live has hosted seminars, conferences and marches across Greece. Lockdowns during the coronavirus pandemic have only temporarily put plans for more events on hold. Wade and frequently use language like “unborn child” and the idea that “life begins at conception” - staples of anti-abortion rhetoric in America. Online, Let Me Live shares news stories from American Christian anti-abortion groups like the Silent No More Awareness Campaign. But what’s new is the adoption of such aggressive, in-your-face tactics borrowed from the American anti-abortion movement. The Greek Orthodox Church has opposed abortion since the 1980s.
Women have to understand how precarious their rights are. In early February, similar posters were tacked all over the northern city of Thessaloniki. 29, Let Me Live, a collection of 19 far-right Orthodox Christian associations, took out a full-page ad - an image of a fetus cupped in a hand - on the cover of one of Greece’s most popular sports newspapers. Last summer, the Greek Orthodox Church declared a “day of the unborn child.” On Dec. But a growing rightward shift in Greece, where the conservative New Democracy came to power last year, is turning abortion into a hot-button political topic, with campaigns modeled on the American pro-life movement gaining growing momentum in the European nation. Sponsored by the group Let Me Live, the anti-abortion posters at 17 metro stations sparked outrage on social media: Some train riders critiqued the ads as “medieval,” while a former minister decried them as “unacceptable.”īy the end of the day, the minister of infrastructure and transportation ordered that the posters be withdrawn, stating they were “directed against an absolutely guaranteed and undeniable right of women.” Access to abortion has been a fact of life in Greece since 1986, when it became a legal right. On a Monday morning in January, metro commuters across Athens were greeted with posters of an illuminated fetus, affixed in the type of frames that usually announce concerts and plays.