2. Mobilizing the Womb: Anti-Abortion Activism and the Institutionalization of the Anti-Gender Movement in Croatia

In December 1990, the Croatian Parliament adopted the new Constitution of the (no longer Socialist) Republic of Croatia (NN 56/1990). Among many monumental changes to the country’s legal order, one perhaps less visible was that—in contrast to the 1974 Constitution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) and the 1974 Constitution of the Socialist Republic of Croatia—‘the right to freely decide on childbirth’, encompassing the right to abortion, was no longer a constitutional right (Bijelić & Hodžić, 2014; Rittossa, 2005). Nonetheless, the legislation that previously guaranteed the exercise of this right—the 1978 Act on Health Measures for the Realization of the Right to Freely Decide on Childbirth (NN 18/78; henceforward Health Measures Act)—remains in effect to this day permitting abortion on demand until 10 weeks after conception.

The constitutionality of the Health Measures Act has been challenged several times, most notably in 1991 and in 2016. These constitutional complaints claimed that the Health Measures Act violated the new Article 21 of the Constitution on the right to life of every human being. Although both complaints were unsuccessful, they differed in nature, reflecting the distinctive character of anti-abortion mobilizations in Croatia during the 1990s and 2010s, when Croatia was already encountering a comprehensive anti-gender mobilization.

The 1991 constitutional complaint was lodged by a new Catholic NGO Croatian Movement for Life and Family (Hrvatski pokret za život i obitelj, HPŽO) and, like similar complaints lodged in 1995 and 2008, received no formal response. However, in 2016, a constitutional complaint was lodged by the NGO In the Name of the Family (U ime obitelji, UIO), formed a few years prior as a civil initiative to organize a constitutional referendum defining marriage as a union between a woman and a man. This time,¹ the Constitutional Court issued a formal decision several months after the UIO’s complaint, rejecting the request for a constitutional evaluation of the Health Measures Act (Ustavni sud Republike Hrvatske, 2017).

The constitutional complaints in the 1990s—and several other legal attempts to restrict abortion in that period (Bijelić & Hodžić, 2014; Rittossa, 2005)—failed despite the seemingly opportune context of gender re-traditionalization (Dobrotić et al., 2013), the governing party’s focus on ‘demographic renewal’ (Puljiz & Zrinščak, 2002), and the rise of religious and sexual nationalisms (Pavasović Trošt & Slootmaeckers, 2015). All these developments were in service of the Catholic traditional family that was—amidst the Croatian state-building in the wake of ethnic conflicts and the violent dissolution of the SFRY—supposed to serve the biological reproduction and growth of the Croatian nation (Ćeriman & Vučković Juroš, 2024). While the latter was threatened by the right to abortion, the 1990s anti-abortion activists nevertheless failed to abolish it.

In the mid-2010s, the constitutional challenge of the Health Measures Act and the right to abortion failed again. This time, however, the constitutional complaint was just one of many anti-abortion activities taking place both inside and outside the legal-institutional arena. Furthermore, these activities could no longer be characterized as campaigns ‘largely disconnected from the public’ as Hodžić and Štulhofer (2017: 64) described opposition to reproductive and sexual rights in the 1990s and early 2000s. Instead, this opposition grew in both number and apparent public appeal. The anti-abortion actors rapidly proliferated, including not only NGOs and other organizations claiming ‘life since conception’ as a human right or core value in their mission statements (e.g. Vigilare), but also those that initially emerged targeting other ‘anti-gender’ issues (Paternotte & Kuhar, 2017a), such as sex education (Voice of Parents for Children—GROZD) or same-sex marriage (UIO). Moreover, their influence or visibility in the 2010s also often seemed disproportional to their size or formal public support (Petričušić et al., 2017).

Therefore, in Croatia, whose 2000s democratizing changes to the legal-institutional framework resulted in a successful closing of the European Union (EU) Accession Chapter 23, ‘Judiciary and fundamental rights’ (encompassing gender equality measures) and the country’s subsequent EU membership (since 2013), the right to freely decide on childbirth seemed more at stake than it was when Croatia was rebuilding its statehood facing the consequences of the war devastation in the semi-authoritarian 1990s regime (Ottaway, 2003). This regime was defined in opposition to the communist legacy and around Roman Catholicism as the bedrock of national identity and values (Bellamy, 2003; Perica, 2006). Nevertheless, it also claimed a deep civilizational embedding in Europe, which made the early 2000s turn towards the EU a goal generally shared across the mainstream political spectrum (Dolenec, 2013) that then contributed to toning down of ethnic nationalist narratives during the EU negotiations (Perkovic, 2013). Still, following Croatia’s accession to the EU, disillusionment grew and ethnic nationalism resurfaced and was hijacked by what had by then become the anti-gender movement,² accompanied by the vilification of the EU during some of its later campaigns, most notably in the mobilizations against the Istanbul Convention in 2017 and 2018 (Obajdin & Golušin, 2021). This was possible because, in the mid- and late-2010s Croatia, gender and sexuality values became a new conservative-liberal cleavage, in a form that did not exist in the 1990s. Partially created by the 2013 marriage referendum campaign (Vuckovic Juros, 2023), this new conservative-liberal cleavage around gender and sexuality then provided the anti-gender actors with a more opportune context for their other campaigns, including new and better-prepared attacks on the right to abortion.

In this chapter, we show how this happened by highlighting abortion as a central thread connecting the Croatian anti-gender movement with the unsuccessful anti-abortion religious-conservative mobilizations of the 1990s. From the first mobilizations against sex education in 2006 (Hodžić & Štulhofer, 2017; Paternotte & Kuhar, 2017b) to the most recent mobilizations against transgender rights (Hodžić & Vlahović, 2023), the Croatian anti-gender movement has one of the longest histories in the region of former Yugoslavia and beyond. Many of its campaigns have already been analysed by other scholars, including mobilizations against abortion and reproductive rights (Bijelić & Hodžić, 2014; Shiffman et al., 2002; Škrabalo & Jurić, 2005). We add to this work by examining anti-abortion activism from a long-term perspective with the goal of tracing the development and the institutionalization of the Croatian anti-gender movement with abortion as the issue at its core.

We argue that the failures of the 1990s anti-abortion mobilizations contributed to a larger anti-gender turn in discursive and mobilizational strategies of the religious-conservative actors between the mid-2000s and early 2010s. The new, ‘anti-gender’ actors (Paternotte & Kuhar, 2017b) temporarily put abortion as an issue aside in favour of other, ‘easier’ targets. However, they strategically revisited abortion as an issue following mobilizations against sex education and, particularly, the 2013 mobilizations against same-sex marriage, which bolstered the Croatian anti-gender movement. Following the successes of the anti-gender turn, anti-abortion mobilizations after 2014 entered a new phase of the proliferation of protests and discourse. In this phase, in contrast to the 1990s mobilizations, anti-gender actors became more likely to use abortion as an issue to secure votes and seek political office, situated now within the institutionalized anti-gender movement which has successfully made gender and sexuality a salient political and public issue.

During its meteoric rise in societal and political influence in the 1990s, the Croatian Catholic Church was, unsurprisingly, lobbying against abortion (Perica, 2006). Nonetheless, some of today’s conservative actors apparently consider the 1990s Church’s campaigns insufficiently assertive (Hudelist, 2014). Indeed, few official actions are on the record after Cardinal Kuharić’s 1992 letter to the Parliament demanding the abolition of the ‘anti-God and anti-human’ Health Measures Act (Cerjan-Letica, 1997: 14) was met with public disapproval (Shiffman et al., 2002). Several subsequent attempts at the legal restriction of abortion were also abandoned. This includes the 1995 bill proposed by the Ministry of Health’s Special Committee that was withdrawn after feminist organizations mobilized against it, and the 1996 bill proposed by the far-right Party of Rights (Stranka prava) that the Parliament never debated (Cerjan-Letica, 1997; Rittossa, 2005).

The governing Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska demokratska zajednica, HDZ) might have been sympathetic to limiting abortion—this was certainly in line with their pro-natalist policies, privileging the role of woman as a mother, and the push for ethnic demographic renewal (Shiffman et al., 2002; Topić, 2009)—but only to a degree. While the Catholic Church in 1991 lobbied for a stronger anti-abortion framework in the new Constitution via an official delegate to the working group revising the Constitution, their efforts were met with a compromise: the removal of ‘the right to freely decide on childbirth’ and the inclusion of ‘the right to life’ (Cerjan-Letica, 1997). Additionally, the proposal by the Party of Rights was thwarted by the then Minister of Health (HDZ’s Andrija Hebrang), who characterized it as contradicting the contemporary European legislature (Cerjan-Letica, 1997; Rittossa, 2005). Cerjan-Letica (1997) and Rittossa (2005) interpreted the Party of Rights’ proposal as an unsuccessful attempt to secure votes, while Shiffman et al (2002) and Goldberger (2005) attributed the HDZ’s unwillingness to oppose abortion more explicitly to the fear of public backlash, potential mobilizations by feminist organizations, and negative international scrutiny.

However, the HDZ could signal their support for the struggle against abortion in other ways. These included the reduction and removal of subsidies for relevant health services (e.g. removing abortion and contraceptives from the list of services covered by compulsory health insurance) and providing funding to organizations advocating demographic renewal and the abortion ban (Cerjan-Letica, 1997; Goldberger, 2005; Shiffman et al., 2002). In the 1990s, this was politically less risky since the ‘supporters of the Croatian Pro-Life movement […] still have not used it [the issue of abortion] to determine their voting behaviour’ (Cerjan-Letica, 1997: 15). Indeed, while a study on a nationally representative household sample conducted in 1997/1998 found that 80.7% of the respondents fully or mostly agreed with the statement that abortion terminates a human life, 64.4% also agreed that abortion should remain a woman’s choice, with only 24.8% fully or mostly supporting a legal ban on abortion (Baloban & Črpić, 1998, for methodological details, see Črpić & Rimac, 1998). Therefore, despite possible personal reservations, the majority of the Croatian electorate in the 1990s seemed unlikely to support an outright attack on abortion rights.

The Croatian Catholic Church also remained involved in anti-abortion activism in less obvious ways. Specifically, all key anti-abortion actors in the 1990s had clear connections to the Catholic Church, with formal and informal groups writing letters to politicians and the Parliament and organizing petitions and initiatives (for a comprehensive list, see Table 2 in Cerjan-Letica, 1997). Their discourse primarily centred on morality and the US-inspired ‘pro-life’ framing (Cerjan-Letica, 1997), as illustrated by the HPŽO’s 1991 constitutional complaint (Ustavni sud Republike Hrvatske, 2017). The HPŽO defines abortion as the ‘artificial, violent termination of the life of unborn children’ and sees the claim of ‘unborn child being truly a human being […] in need of no special evidence’. Following on this core anti-abortion position, further arguments against abortion are framed as legal (e.g. violating the Constitution’s Article 21 on the right to life), scientific (it is ‘unscientific’, though no evidence is cited, to treat a newly conceived child as a part of a woman’s body rather than a separate person) and immoral/unethical (no one has a right to decide on the life and death of another human being). Excerpts from letters and petitions by other Catholic groups and organizations in the 1990s mostly share the same core position, demanding protection of every human life from conception to natural death, sometimes articulated in strongly moral terms, such as requesting to ban the ‘genocide of innocent unborn children’ (The Franciscan Monastery in Bjelovar and the believers of the St. Antun Parish in 1992, cited in Cerjan-Letica, 1997: 14). Further, only one excerpt uses the ethnonationalist framing, asserting that relinquishing the lives of unborn children is worse than relinquishing the Croatian territory (Pro Vita, Dr Antun Lisec, in 1991, cited in Cerjan-Letica, 1997: 14). This type of framing was in the 1990s publicly primarily associated with the retired priest don Anto Baković, who garnered media attention for his radical statements on abortion and extremist writings. Still, despite don Baković’s short stint as a deputy minister in the Ministry of Renewal in 1992 and the activities of the NGO Croatian Population Movement (Hrvatski populacijski pokret) he founded in 1993, he was generally considered a fringe figure. Indeed, his type of ethnonationalist framing was abandoned by the anti-abortion activists after the 1990s (Tranfić, 2024), when morality framing was also toned down and, instead, the legal frame was modified into the human rights frame and intensified.

We will return to these discursive shifts later in the text, but staying in the 1990s for now, we argue that the anti-abortion campaigns and the discourse described above were unsuccessful in swaying public opinion towards the abortion ban and failed to achieve it through legal-institutional means. This, however, does not mean that the 1990s anti-abortion activists were completely unsuccessful. Instead, they turned towards creating structural obstacles against abortion. Notable successes in this area were achieved via the mobilization of the Catholics within the medical profession, who not only allowed anti-abortion pamphlets into the waiting rooms (Bijelić & Hodžić, 2014; Škrabalo & Jurić, 2005), but also (in)formally made access to abortion more difficult in specific medical institutions and organized to lobby against abortion and for the institutionalization of conscientious objection (Cerjan-Letica, 1997; Goldberger, 2005).³ Indeed, underlined also by the HDZ’s attack on health services, structural obstacles against abortion certainly increased since the 1990s, making it less accessible, more financially restrictive, and often a stigmatizing experience (Bijelić & Hodžić, 2014; Håkansson et al., 2021).

Still, despite their efforts, the 1990s anti-abortion activists were unable to affect an institutional change in legal access to abortion, nor did they garner widespread support for abolishing or significantly restricting this right. The Party of Rights’ miscalculation in attempting to use abortion to mobilize voters highlights that, in the 1990s, gender and sexuality were not yet issues around which ideological cleavages were formed. Instead, the central issue of the conservative-liberal divide in Croatia, both during the 1990s and after, mostly revolved around the memory politics of World War Two and the legacies of the communist Partisans and the Nazi-collaborators Ustasha (Čular & Gregurić, 2007). The World War Two ideological cleavage regularly dominated the political campaigning ever since the first 1990s multiparty elections (Čular & Gregurić, 2007, see also Zakošek, 2007, Blanuša, 2013), overshadowing discussion on gender and sexuality. This, however, would change with the emergence of the anti-gender movement.

Following the HDZ’s defeat in the 2000 presidential and parliamentary elections, the country started a new democratizing period, motivated also by a new aspiration to join the EU (Jović & Lamont, 2010). During this period, even after the HDZ had regained power in 2003, there was a surge in gender equality policy-making. Several new laws were enacted in the early 2000s, including the Gender Equality Act (Zakon o ravnopravnosti spolova 2003) and the Same-Sex Civil Unions Act (Zakon o istospolnim zajednicama 2003). However, these legislative changes, while significant, were inadequate. For example, the 2003 Same-Sex Civil Unions Act granted only three rights that no same-sex couple was ever able to claim in practice (Drakulić, 2013; Kartus, 2014).⁴ Likewise, the 2003 Gender Equality Act lacked mechanisms ensuring its implementation at local levels (CESI, 2012). This was improved in the 2008 Gender Equality Act that was—together with the newly introduced 2008 Anti-discrimination Act (Zakon o suzbijanju diskriminacije)—fully harmonized with EU legislation, though implementation problems remained (Dobrotić et al., 2013). Nonetheless, these legislative changes in the early 2000s helped create an impression that ‘traditional’ gender and sexuality values were at stake, and this impression soon became articulated as a position that (traditional, heteronormative) family was under threat (Ćeriman & Vučković Juroš, 2024).

The Croatian Catholic Church played an important role in promoting this position, portraying itself as an oppositional and silenced actor, despite the widespread visibility of its views in the media in the mid-2000s (Škrabalo & Jurić, 2005). Moreover, the Church’s enduring institutional power was ensured by the treaties signed between Croatia and the Holy See in the late 1990s, which mandated significant funding for the Church and its presence in, among other things, the educational system and the state communication services (Perica, 2006; Zrinščak et al., 2014). Nonetheless, in its new guise as an imperilled voice, and following the 2002 Croatian Bishops’ guidelines for pastoral care for marriage and family, the Church actively engaged in several public gender and sexuality debates in 2004 and 2005 (abortion, medically assisted reproduction (MAR), sex education, and sexual minorities), which were then used to mobilize a wide network of ‘own institutions, the academic community, professional Catholic associations, the media, and civil society organizations’ (Škrabalo & Jurić, 2005: 185).

The abortion debate first developed after a public scandal in 2004, caused by the showing of the US anti-abortion documentary Silent Scream in a secondary school, and then again during the Christmas-time of the same year, following the joint statement of the Catholic Church and five other religious communities titled ‘Human Life Is a Gift from God’ (Škrabalo & Jurić, 2005). Although both cases attracted a lot of media attention, they resulted mainly in protests from feminist organizations and an implicit confirmation that the general public was still not ready for the right to abortion to be challenged (Škrabalo & Jurić, 2005). Nonetheless, these debates were significant because the initiatives defending the right to life primarily targeted the public (Škrabalo & Jurić, 2005), and not the Government, the Parliament, or state institutions as they had done in the 1990s (Hodžić & Štulhofer, 2017). Indeed, this development signalled a shift in strategies that would become especially pronounced with the emergence of anti-gender actors.

Further, the Silent Scream scandal reignited the sex education debate (Hodžić et al., 2012), which led to the 2006 emergence of the first proper anti-gender organization the Voice of Parents for Children (Glas roditelja za djecu—GROZD). GROZD claimed to be a parents’ initiative advocating for parents’ rights to instil their values in their children’s education and for the protection of children (Bijelić, 2008; Hodžić & Štulhofer, 2017). Despite the initial attempts to portray itself as independent, GROZD’s president, Ladislav Ilčić, and other leading figures had connections to the Croatian Catholic Church (Hodžić & Štulhofer, 2017). In addition, the implementation of GROZD’s experimental sex education programme was institutionally backed by the Church and aligned with its teachings, including presenting abortion as going against life (Bijelić, 2008).

GROZD’s appearance marks a strategic shift among religious-conservative actors that led to the emergence of the anti-gender movement in Croatia. For the first time, a civil society organization of ‘concerned citizens’ (parents, in this case) took a central stage in the gender and sexuality debate, while the Catholic Church and explicitly Catholic groups were given supporting roles—a development that would only become more pronounced with the second mobilization against sex education in 2012/13 (Hodžić & Štulhofer, 2017). But, already during this first mobilization, the religious and morality frames were strategically avoided in public and replaced with the frames of ‘parents’ rights’ and ‘protection of children’, targeting the general public rather than directly the state and legislators (Hodžić & Štulhofer, 2017).

Temporarily putting the issue of abortion in the back seat was a strategic move aimed at targeting the general public more effectively. As it had failed to engage the general public in the past, abortion was now sidelined to tackle the ‘easier’ targets first. Sex education, in particular, was used as a gateway topic since it encompasses many gender and sexuality issues and touches on the subjects that can be exploited to fuel the public’s and parents’ fears, such as LGBT+ rights. Indeed, the opposition to LGBT+ rights was both the most powerful trigger and the most common grievance for anti-gender mobilizations in most countries (Gergorić, 2024; Paternotte & Kuhar, 2017a). Therefore, while the anti-abortion stance was integral to GROZD’s programme, public attention was captured by the sections supposedly attacked by the ‘radical homosexual and feminist lobby’ (cited in Bijelić, 2008: 339).

This is particularly evident during the second, stronger mobilization against sex education in 2012/13. During this campaign, spearheaded by GROZD, parents were warned against ‘homosexual propaganda’ and ‘gender ideology’ in the new Health Education Curriculum. In fact, GROZD’s public statement opening their campaign in October 2012 contained the first Croatian public record of ‘gender ideology’, which vaguely suggested that ‘gender ideology’ had something to do with choosing gender (rod) at will, although the statement also conflated gender with sexual orientation (GROZD, 2012). This campaign also reinforced the frame of the democratic right of the majority (Catholic parents) to implement their values in the education of their children (Vuckovic Juros et al., 2020). Additionally, Vigilare, a pro-life NGO founded in 2008, joined GROZD in this campaign. Earlier in 2012, Vigilare had campaigned against the Bill on Medically Assisted Reproduction (Hodžić & Štulhofer, 2017), an issue closely related to the protection of life since conception.

The Catholic Church supported these campaigns and published a Christmas leaflet against sex education that specifically mentioned the danger of indoctrination with gender ideology (“Letak HBK o zdravstvenom odgoju: ‘Dragi roditelji, je li vam svejedno?’,” 2012). While abortion was also addressed in the Christmas leaflet, it was secondary to concerns about ‘gender ideology’, an issue further amplified in Cardinal Bozanić’s Christmas homily (Tranfić, 2022). Still, during these early years, ‘gender ideology’ was not a powerful enough frame to achieve broader mobilization. Therefore, while campaigning against sex education, anti-gender NGOs still most vocally targeted the LGBT + community. This included, for example, alluding that children were threatened by homosexual paedophiles, as suggested in the public appearances of Judith Reisman, a US conservative activist whose visit to Croatia in early 2013 was organized by another NGO involved in these campaigns, the Centre for Cultural Renewal (Centar za obnovu kulture) (Hodžić & Štulhofer, 2017). Reisman’s visit also helped introduce a new discursive strategy of citing (pseudo)scientific evidence to support attacks on sex education and LGBT + rights in the name of the protection of children (Vuckovic Juros et al., 2020).

The mobilization against sex education was successful in two ways. First, the Constitutional Court ruled in favour of GROZD-led constitutional complaint, resulting in the withdrawal of the Health Education Curriculum due to the supposedly insufficient (democratic) consultation with parents and the public (Lukunić, 2013). Second, this campaign testified to the efficacy of the new discursive focus on rights and democracy, and even science, rather than morality or religion.

Abortion was not visible as an issue during the sex education campaign in 2012/13 and the marriage referendum campaign later in 2013. Still, the preparations for mobilizing against abortion had already been underway for several years. Between 2008 and 2013, there was a notable increase in new organizations stating as their goal the protection of unborn children or human life since conception, including the first anti-gender political party, Croatian Growth—HRAST (Hrvatski rast—HRAST), led by GROZD’s Ilčić. These developments had a transnational dimension as well, coinciding with the resurgence of abortion as an issue at the EU level, that culminated in the 2013 mobilizations against the Report on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (aka the Estrela Report). Initially, it was unexpected that accepting the Estrela Report would face opposition. However, the original Report was ultimately rejected, as a result of the MEPs’ encounter with the anti-gender strategy of mass e-mails and online petitions targeting EU institutions (Hodžić & Bijelić, 2014).

Therefore, we characterize the period between 2006 and 2012/13, marked by mobilizations against sex education at both ends, as the growth phase of the Croatian anti-gender movement. In this period, anti-gender actors successfully used sex education to obtain a public platform, while avoiding directly engaging with abortion. The successes of the 2012/13 sex education campaign paved the way for the 2013 marriage referendum, which established topics of gender and sexuality as salient for the wider public. Subsequently, this initiated a new phase of the movement, with the issue of abortion re-emerging in the Croatian public arena.

The marriage referendum campaign was introduced in early 2013 by GROZD’s vice-president, Željka Markić, now representing a new citizens’ initiative In the Name of the Family (UIO). The campaign was orchestrated partly as a response to the left-wing Government’s announcement of the Life Partnership Act (Zakon o životnom partnerstvu, enacted in 2014), though it was also related to historic anti-gender campaigns opposing legislation on same-sex marriage in France and Italy (Paternotte & Kuhar, 2017b). The Croatian campaign, demanding a constitutional definition of marriage as a union between a woman and a man, successfully garnered approximately 750,000 signatures for holding the referendum in which, despite a modest voter turnout of 37.90% (1,436,835 out of 3,791,000 registered voters), a substantial 65.87% (946,433 citizens) supported the proposed constitutional amendment (Državno izborno povjerenstvo RH, 2013).

This was the third referendum ever held in Croatia; the first pertained to Croatian independence and the second to the EU accession. It was successful solely because, in the anticipation of the EU referendum amidst the decline in public support for EU membership (Grubiša, 2012), the Croatian Constitution was changed from requiring the majority of registered voters for a successful referendum to requiring only the majority of participating voters (Petričušić et al., 2017).

Nonetheless, the referendum campaign afforded the movement a key opportunity for agenda setting as the months of public fighting about LGBT + rights and the definitions of marriage and family elevated issues of gender and sexuality to the forefront of public discourse. The success of the referendum further provided a platform for the substantial mobilization of supporters and sympathizers and motivated them to strive towards more ambitious goals (Lavizzari & Siročić, 2022), including action against abortion. Indeed, the first announcements that abortion would be the next target had already been made during the referendum campaign (Ćurić, 2013; Hudelist, 2013).

The marriage referendum jumpstarted a new phase of anti-abortion mobilizations for three main reasons. First, the campaign attracted the support of more diverse political allies from the political right, ranging from the briefly oppositional centre-right HDZ to war veterans’ organizations and various nationalist and far-right political parties (Glaurdić & Vuković, 2016). This afforded anti-gender activists more political capital on which to draw after the referendum.

Second, the campaign not only enjoyed the Church’s infrastructural support, but also successfully achieved the bottom-up mobilization of Catholic believers. This is important because, as Tranfić shows (2024), the top echelons of the Croatian Catholic Church do not reliably support various anti-gender issues today, but the local clergy and Catholic laypersons do. The top echelons of the Church prioritize preserving a stable relationship with the state, particularly as they perceive the HDZ as a key actor of the current regime. As a result, the situation allows the local clergy and lay activist networks more room for political engagement (Tranfić, 2024). Indeed, it is precisely at the community level, through activities connecting local clergy and activists with sympathizers and lay Catholics, that anti-abortion activism most thrives today (Tranfić, 2024).

Finally, the marriage referendum also helped anti-gender actors consolidate the human rights and democracy frames as the main ways of talking about gender and sexuality, supported also by the science frame, i.e. citing (often discredited or spurious) scientific evidence in support of anti-gender claims (Vuckovic Juros et al., 2020). These discursive innovations are important because, while the anti-abortion discourse had not been publicly utilized since the 1990s and remained mostly limited to pro-life slogans on the protection of human life from conception, now everything was ready to join these two discursive lines in the next stage of anti-abortion mobilizations.

The next stage started between 2014 and 2016, with the movement’s primary focus shifting towards protest politics. Two core protest strategies were devised to rally a broader public against abortion. The first strategy involved anti-abortion clinic activism that, since 2014, has encompassed prayer campaigns in front of hospitals offering abortion services. Central to this effort was the 40 Days for Life initiative—first established in 2005 in the US, it has since spread to 64 countries (40 Days for Life, 2024). The 40 Days for Life initiative organizes prayer vigils in public spaces to express political opposition to abortion and to engage more religious supporters. Over the past decade, the Croatian initiative has extended to more than 30 cities and towns, holding campaigns twice a year.

The second strategy involved, since 2016, the organization of the March for Life, a protest march advocating limiting access to abortion. Also originating in the US, the March for Life has been held since 1974, but its international reach is smaller, having been held in only 12 countries in 2016 (Dbrindle, 2013; Zipperle, 2016). In Croatia, it is organized by the civil-initiative-turned-NGO the UIO and it is currently held in 10 cities with Markić as the national campaign coordinator (Danas.hr, 2023; Hod za život, 2023). To attract a wider, non-religious demographic, the March employs more secular anti-abortion frames, notably the human rights and the social welfare responsibility frames. The social welfare responsibility frame is a particularly important discursive addition, as the explicitly religious framing of the anti-abortion prayer vigils is replaced with a more widely acceptable request for measures to ‘create favourable social and economic conditions for every pregnant woman, mother, father, and family’ as an alternative to abortion (Hod za život, 2022).

Therefore, the anti-gender movement has undergone a dual shift in focus since 2014. It has pivoted towards protest mobilization as the principal strategy of action and it has also, having previously campaigned against sex education and LGBT + rights, made abortion its central issue. Indeed, since 2014, anti-abortion protest activities have constituted the majority, if not all, of anti-gender protest activities (Tranfić, 2024).⁵ This novel strategy aimed to influence public discussion on abortion, mobilize members within the movement, and draw in a broader network of supporters.

The final phase marks the movement’s shift in strategies towards the electoral arena, occurring simultaneously with the increased engagement in protest politics. This is seen in the anti-abortion activities as well, as efforts are directed towards both altering public opinion on abortion and limiting abortion through institutional means.

Between 2010 and 2015, the appearance of new political parties marked a notable shift to party politics among anti-gender actors. The first anti-gender political party, Croatian Growth—HRAST, appeared in 2010 as a movement party gathering several parties and NGOs. It was founded by the key figures of the emerging anti-gender movement, including Markić and Ilčić, then still in leadership positions in GROZD (“Hrvatski rast,” n.d.). Following an internal split, a new party with a similar leadership, Hrast—Movement for a Successful Croatia (Hrast—Pokret za uspješnu Hrvatsku), surfaced with Ilčić as president in 2012. In 2015, another movement party In the Name of the Family—Homeland Project (U ime obitelji—Projekt Domovina) was established by the eponymous NGO the UIO. Additionally, the party Bridge (Most) successfully entered national politics in 2015, initially emphasizing its technocratic discourse, but later revealing that its leading figures were supporters of the anti-gender movement. Except for Bridge, all other parties explicitly held an anti-abortion stance from their inception. The Croatian Growth—HRAST, for example, framed the anti-abortion arguments similarly to the March for Life (human rights and social welfare responsibility) in their election programme and aimed to restrict abortion, even in ‘exceptional circumstances’ (Hrvatsko kulturno vijeće, 2011). Ahead of the 2015 parliamentary election, anti-gender actors’ drive to enter the electoral arena became significantly pronounced, with several avenues of entry.

In the 2015 election, Hrast—Movement for a Successful Croatia was part of the pre-electoral Patriotic Coalition (Domoljubna koalicija) which, led by the largest mainstream right party, the HDZ, secured the largest share of the votes. Bridge, as the third most successful party of the election, joined the post-election coalition that enabled the HDZ to form the new Government. Consequently, two political allies of the anti-gender movement became part of the governing structures in 2015. Although the Patriotic Coalition government disintegrated in less than 10 months, the HDZ’s support for anti-gender actors signified the evolution of the anti-gender agenda from political fringes to mainstream recognition (Lavizzari & Siročić, 2022). For example, even during this short period in power, the actors affiliated with the anti-gender movement successfully sabotaged the Comprehensive Educational Reform (Cjelovita kurikularna reforma), taking issue with ‘gender ideology’ and promoting the heterosexual definition of marriage and the protection of human life from conception to natural death (Šikuten, 2020). The conflicts around the Comprehensive Educational Reform would continue for the next three years, ending in another failure to introduce a comprehensive sex education programme into the 2018 Health Curriculum. Likewise, the Patriotic Coalition government’s initial actions included reductions in financial support for civil society, especially those focused on feminist and LGBT + issues (Lavizzari & Siročić, 2022).

Following the collapse of the Patriotic Coalition government and the snap parliamentary election in 2016, the HDZ (under the new leadership of Andrej Plenković) and Bridge formed, with the support of a few other parties, a new post-election coalition government. Again, it was short-lived. In less than six months after the election, the relationship between the HDZ and Bridge soured, with Bridge emerging as one of the most vocal critics of the HDZ, and the HDZ having to seek new coalition partners to maintain its position in office (Špoljar, 2017). Parting of the ways happened also with Hrast—Movement for a Successful Croatia which withdrew its support for the HDZ-led government in 2018, amidst the political conflict around the HDZ going forward with the ratification of the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence, i.e., the Istanbul Convention (Lavizzari & Siročić, 2022; Obajdin & Golušin, 2021). These developments could partly be explained by the HDZ’s Plenković steering the party back to its centre-right position, which also necessitated a distancing from the anti-gender and the more far-right allies of the failed Patriotic Coalition (Lavizzari & Siročić, 2022).

Nonetheless, the relatively successful entry of the anti-gender actors into electoral politics and the rise of protest activity described in the previous section form the backdrop for the renewed institutional pushback against abortion. As the Constitutional Court never responded to earlier constitutional complaints, the UIO filed another complaint against the 1978 Health Measures Act in late 2016. The UIO’s complaint illustrates discursive changes in mobilizing against abortion in the 1990s and the mid-2010s, at the height of the attempted institutionalization of anti-gender politics. While the core anti-abortion position (‘cannot be doubted’) remains unchanged together with the main argument framed as legal (the violation of Article 21 of the Constitution, among other things), there is a much greater emphasis on the human rights frame (e.g., opposing unborn child’s rights to pregnant woman’s rights, denying the existence of the right to abortion, protesting age-based discrimination against the embryo). Furthermore, the science frame is also strengthened, though it is still not supported with evidence beyond the statement that ‘it is not scientifically disputed’ that embryo, foetus, child, adolescent, mature man, old man are all different stages of life.⁶ Finally, the UIO added the social welfare responsibility frame, present also in the March for Life mission statement, that highlights the need not only for a better protection for unborn children but also for a better care and support for pregnant women and mothers who may choose not to keep their children after giving birth, or cannot do so (Ustavni sud Republike Hrvatske, 2017).

Despite the previous successes of the anti-gender movement, the Constitutional Court in 2017 refused to evaluate the abortion provision of the Health Measures Act while recognizing women’s right to reproductive self-determination (Ustavni sud Republike Hrvatske, 2017). The Court instructed the Croatian Parliament to enact a new law regulating abortion within the following two years, although this is yet to happen. This setback prompted the anti-gender movement to devise a new strategy. Given that bottom-up pressures from anti-gender protest activities were insufficient and the strategy to bypass the legislature through the Constitutional Court had faltered, the movement reverted to the institutional and legislative strategy reminiscent of the religious-conservative actors of the 1990s, with three key attempts at pressuring and lobbying for a new law restricting abortion between 2017 and 2021.

First, in March 2017, following the Constitutional Court ruling, one of the most powerful anti-gender actors, the NGO Vigilare, started collecting signatures for the ‘I Have a Right to Live!’ petition (Nacional, 2017; Tektas & Keysan, 2021). The goal was to exert pressure on the Government and Parliament to pass a new law restricting access to abortion. Despite collecting and submitting 168,561 signatures to the Croatian Parliament (Romić, 2017), no significant developments followed. Nevertheless, Vigilare has continued active advocacy to ensure political support for an abortion ban (Tektas & Keysan, 2021).

The second attempt, in 2019, was initiated by Hrvoje Zekanović, an MP for Hrast—Movement for Successful Croatia, who proposed the Protection of Life Bill. This proposal aimed to restrict abortion to cases where a woman’s life is endangered by continuing the pregnancy (Hrvatski sabor, 2019). Zekanović offered the bill to all MPs to sign so as to be included in the urgent procedure in the Croatian Parliament but managed to collect only seven signatures (Šobak, 2021).

This third attempt followed the strengthening of the far-right and anti-gender alliances in Croatia. While the rise of this opportunistic synergy (Graff & Korolczuk, 2022) had already been in evidence with a couple of new far-right political parties with anti-gender connections emerging since 2017, it was the campaign against the Istanbul Convention in 2017 and 2018 that proved the most energizing for these alliances. Regardless of some internal division (Tranfić, 2024), the opposition against the Istanbul Convention was spearheaded by the anti-gender citizens’ initiative Truth about the Istanbul Convention (Istina o Istanbulskoj, coordinated by Kristina Pavlović who had taken over GROZD from Ilčić). This initiative actively participated in mass street protests in early 2018 (Faktograf, 2018) and later, albeit unsuccessfully, gathered signatures for the referendum against the Istanbul Convention (Tranfić, 2024). While this campaign failed to prevent the ratification of the Istanbul Convention, it notably intertwined the national sovereignty and the resistance-to-foreign-oppression frames with the opposition to ‘gender ideology’ (Obajdin & Golušin, 2021; Tranfić, 2022, 2024) in ways similar to the anti-gender frames of earlier illiberal transformations in Poland and Hungary (cf. Grzebalska & Pető, 2018; Korolczuk & Graff, 2018). Therefore, the campaign against the Istanbul Convention indicates further political distancing between the HDZ and the anti-gender movement which, instead, started to compete electorally for the far-right base of the HDZ (see also Tranfić, 2024),⁷ in light of the more right-leaning HDZ voters finding themselves disappointed with the party’s trajectory towards the political centre (Čular & Nikić Čakar, 2019).

This became even more evident in the events leading up to the 2020 parliamentary election, with even more far-right parties appearing, all with more or less visible connections to the anti-gender movement. Most notable were the Croatian Sovereigntists (Hrvatski suverenisti, founded by Zekanović) and the Homeland Movement (Domovinski pokret), which also led the eponymous pre-election coalition of far-right parties. Then, as three parties with anti-gender affiliations—Bridge, Homeland Movement and Croatian Sovereigntists—all secured parliamentary seats in the 2020 election, Zekanović attempted again to push for the Protection of Life Bill. In 2021, he introduced another parliamentary initiative to push the bill, relying on anti-abortion arguments framed as legal (every human being has a right to life) and scientific (human life begins at conception is a scientific fact). However, with only 10 signatures collected (D.B., 2021), the initiative failed again.

Though the institutional attempts to restrict abortion described above were unsuccessful, they demonstrate how, in recent years, the movement has consistently pursued a dual strategy, combining protest and party politics. Despite the brief coalition with the HDZ in mid-2010, anti-gender actors organized in political parties now predominantly oppose the HDZ and woo their more far-right voters. While this has cost them the formal support of the top echelons of the Croatian Catholic Church, which remain faithful to the HDZ (Tranfić, 2024), this is compensated by the continued anti-abortion protest activities (including prayer vigils and marches) that have been, in recent years, crucially sustained by the local communities of believers and low-level clergy (Tranfić, 2024) and that expand to more cities and towns each year. The newest addition to this repertoire is prayer protests, organized by the NGO Croatia for Life (Hrvatska za život) and exclusively attended by men, held in central squares across multiple cities and towns. The participants present themselves as Knights of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and explicitly pray ‘for the cessation of abortions and the openness of married couples to life’ (Dnevnik.hr, 2023).

Based on this chapter’s analysis, we created Table 2.1 to systematically present how anti-abortion activism connects religious-conservative mobilizations of the 1990s with the present-day anti-gender mobilizations. The progression of the movement is organized into specific phases of engagement, delineating advocated issues, identifying involved actors, outlining primary frames employed, detailing predominant strategies, and specifying the intended targets of these strategies.

As seen in Table 2.1, the only period with no visible anti-abortion activism is the period of initial anti-gender mobilizations in the mid-2000s and early 2010s. This is no coincidence, since the successful anti-gender turn crucially depended on changing discursive and mobilizational strategies (Paternotte & Kuhar, 2017a), including those that failed to work in the anti-abortion activism of the 1990s. While the anti-gender actors, emerging in the mid-2000s as part of the civil society, shared previous religious-conservative mobilizations’ goals of restricting or eliminating individual gender and sexuality rights, their successes—resulting in the growth of the Croatian anti-gender movement—have been built on a successful distraction from this fact, accomplished through the adoption of new language, strategies and, no less importantly, new issues under attack.

Once these new issues—sex education and LGBT + rights—helped achieve mass-scale mobilization and new resonance of gender and sexuality as politically and societally divisive issues in the early 2010s, then the issue of abortion could re-emerge. Consequently, several new lines of attack were launched after the success of the 2013 marriage referendum, with both previous ‘religious-conservative’ (Catholic religious morality) and new ‘anti-gender’ (human rights, science, social welfare responsibility) frames attached to various types of anti-abortion (protest) activities, as needed to attract and accommodate diverse types of (potential) audiences.

It is less easy to evaluate whether this is an effective strategy for a wider societal change. At first glance, the latest opinion survey data suggest otherwise. According to the 2017 EVS data, 39.08% of the Croatian sample considered abortion never or almost never justifiable (compared to 43.17% in 1999), and 9.75% considered it always or almost always justifiable (compared to 6.98% in 1999) (EVS, 2022). This would speak in favour of a moderately liberalizing trend in abortion attitudes. Moreover, recent national polls show more unambiguously high support for a woman’s right to choose (over 80%; Klarić, 2020) or opposition to the abortion ban (over 70%; M.G., 2022).

Still, all that we presented in this chapter testifies that the issue of abortion is one of the core, long-term projects of the anti-gender movement, uniting its various fractions and activists, regardless of any other anti-gender issues tackled at any specific time. Further, we argue that the anti-gender movement in Croatia is fundamentally rooted in the legacy of the 1990s religious-conservative anti-abortion activism, both in terms of the ‘education’ of the new generation of activists (see Hodžić & Štulhofer, 2017) and in lessons learned from its failures. Thus, anti-abortion mobilizations illustrate particularly well the innovative and adaptive nature of the anti-gender movement in Croatia. Rather than being purely reactive (which, for example, would be an implication of the ‘backlash’ conceptualization of mobilizations against gender and sexuality), the anti-gender movement in Croatia was proactive and anticipatory, identifying the windows of opportunity arising from the democratizing and Europeanizing changes in Croatia in the early 2000s to strategically reformulate their agenda, leaving their core issue of abortion temporarily aside until a more opportune moment.

Accordingly, we should not take lightly an ever-increasing number of local-level anti-abortion protest activities across Croatia or the fact that they suddenly started appearing around the marriage referendum, even though no abortion legislature or abortion public debate was on the table at the time (Tranfić, 2024). It is equally important to highlight the simultaneous upsurge of anti-abortion protest activities and the institutionalization of anti-gender politics. This further strengthens the argument that anti-gender activists created their opportune moment by successfully using campaigns against sex education and LGBT + rights to create a new social and political divide around gender and sexuality issues.

This divide was further intensified with the 2017 and 2018 mobilizations against the Istanbul Convention. These mobilizations mark the crucial point for the creation of opportunistic synergies between anti-gender parties and actors with far-right factions, thus further contributing to the rise of illiberal politics in Croatia. As we have seen from the 2019 and 2021 parliamentary initiatives, illiberal parties have absorbed the anti-abortion agenda under their political goals, with a hope that, unlike in the 1990s, this time this will prove a more fruitful strategy to woo votes away from the HDZ. So far, this has not been successful, but at this point it is worth reminding that current anti-abortion activism is fractured in several very different types of campaigns targeting very different audiences. The borders between different types of anti-abortion activism are not impermeable. As a consequence, there is a potential for a future radicalization of currently more moderate anti-abortion fractions, as well as for the mainstreaming of more radical elements of anti-abortion activism. Additionally, this illiberal push runs the risk of radicalizing the centre right, which, in the attempt to attract voters, could adhere to anti-gender positions. Therefore, in Croatia as in many other post-socialist countries, the rise of the anti-gender movement has gone hand-in-hand with the further fracturing of already fragile democracies.