Abstract
The right to abortion in Croatia has been a recurring subject of public debate since the 1990s, has created a lot of controversy, and despite its legalization, the access to abortion is limited. Since the 90s, the right to abortion has been threaten many times by the conservative Tudjman government as part of his pronatality policy, by the Catholic Church and the conservative movement. The feminist movement has each time responded to the other actors involved in the conflict. The role of religion to the conflict itself has many faces. The Catholic church is powerful institution to influence the debate around the right to abortion, the conservative movement is strongly connected to the transnational religious groups and the conservative political parties operate with the dominant Catholic identity of the Croatian society. In the present conference paper, I the local feminist movement and its position and the role within the conflict forming around the right to abortion in the region where is one dominant religious actor, Catholic church.
It is possible to trace the development and change of local as well as global culture wars and the political context within the conflict around the right to abortion by examining the position of feminist movement and the tools they use within the conflict. Through social movement theory recontextualized to post-socialist countries, the paper looks at the feminist movement as an actor responding to external influences, to the political context, to other actors involved in the conflict, and to the internal dynamics of the movement.