On 20 August, during the 23rd edition of the Council of the Americas in Buenos Aires, Javier Milei concluded his speech to the business elite by blaming the ‘little green scarves’ and voluntary termination of pregnancy (VTP) for the declining birth rate, the slowdown in economic growth, and the crisis in the pension system. The tactic is politically effective: it reduces a global demographic trend to a local scapegoat.
For anyone reading this from outside Argentina: the ‘little green scarves’ are the scarves that have hung from the necks of millions of Argentine women for more than two decades. They are the symbol of the National Campaign for the Right to Legal, Safe, and Free Abortion, a movement that took twenty years—twenty years of marches, debates, and handkerchiefs embroidered in public squares—to secure the passage of Argentina’s Voluntary Termination of Pregnancy Act in 2020. To call that process ‘madness’ is, at the very least, a choice of words. But the choice is not naive. In Argentina, the women who took to the streets to demand justice for their missing children were also called ‘mad.’ The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo marched in circles under the dictatorship while society turned its back on them and the military treated them as delusional. Argentine history has a long and painful relationship with the word ‘mad’: it is used to discredit women who demand the unthinkable, only for time to prove them right.
Without Formal Employment, There Is No Social Security Solution
The official narrative appeals to a real concern: in a pay-as-you-go social security system, the decline in the actively employed population jeopardizes the sustainability of future pensions. However, the argument overlooks the decisive structural factor: the precarious nature of the labor market.
According to the Permanent Household Survey (EPH-INDEC), informal employment accounts for 43 percent of the total workforce, and among young people, it exceeds 65 percent. In other words, nearly seven out of every ten young people work without social security contributions, job stability, or social protection. An increase in the birth rate under the conditions of the libertarian model—which promotes labor flexibility and deregulation—does not automatically translate into new contributors to the pension system, but rather into the reproduction of informal work. In fact, the current economic model destroys the material foundations of the existing pension system.
On the other hand, demographic data show that the legalization of voluntary termination of pregnancy is not the cause of the declining birth rate. In fact, the total fertility rate in Argentina began to decline long before the passage of the Voluntary Termination of Pregnancy Act in 2020. According to the United Nations Population Fund, births in Argentina fell over the last decade to 1.2 children per woman. Moreover, this trend is far from being a local phenomenon; it spans all of Latin America and the West, including countries with strict criminalization of abortion such as El Salvador and Honduras. The common cause of this trend is not the achievement of reproductive rights, but rather the material impossibility of sustaining family plans in contexts of austerity, loss of purchasing power, and the destruction of formal employment. Pro-natalist agendas without a material basis—such as those once implemented by conservative regimes in the region or in Eastern Europe—have systematically failed to reverse the demographic decline.
The Material Conditions for Sustaining Life
The rapid decline in the birth rate is part of a complex process of long-term transformations, one that has accelerated in our region over the past decade. Women’s entry into the labor market, access to education, and increased economic autonomy are often cited as factors that have profoundly reshaped life expectations and reproductive preferences, making it possible to postpone motherhood.
However, this transition collides with persistent structural barriers for women that make it difficult to balance work and personal life, and that influence the decision to postpone or limit motherhood. These barriers are reinforced and expanded in times of job insecurity and when state social interventions are underfunded, shifting all activities specific to caring for others, providing support, and ensuring the sustainability of life onto households.
This shift directly results in an increase in unpaid reproductive labor. According to the National Time-Use Survey (INDEC), three-quarters of the invisible infrastructure that sustains the country falls on the shoulders of women who devote more than 6 hours a day to caregiving tasks. In addition to longer hours of work and caregiving, amid falling real incomes and the elimination of transportation and social service subsidies, the reproduction of daily life is sustained through household debt. Credit no longer finances social mobility or durable goods, but rather the bare necessities: food, medicine, rent, and basic services. It is primarily women who manage this daily gap between insufficient income and fixed costs.
Sustaining life in Argentina has become an exhausting, privatized, and financialized process. In a context where motherhood means adding hours of unpaid labor to an already overburdened workday while simultaneously taking on debt to cover basic necessities—with enormous costs to mental health—the decline in the birth rate seems less the result of an ideological phenomenon than a rational response to a hostile environment of suspended futures. What makes reproductive decisions more costly and inhibits them is not the achievement of rights, but an economic model that turns survival into debt and destroys the social and community infrastructure that serves as a support system.
The Freedom to Choose: Desire Versus Moral Imperative
It is paradoxical that a political program that champions freedom should seek to curtail it precisely in the realm of autonomy over one’s body and life plans. The decision to become a mother or to choose not to is neither a production input for the market nor a variable for social security calculations. It is an intimate, vital, and political choice regarding one’s own body and plans for the future.
Reducing the declining birth rate to a ‘labor supply problem’ reveals a utilitarian conception of life, in which pregnant bodies are viewed solely as reproducers of a labor force in the service of capital. The passage of the Abortion Law and the consolidation of reproductive autonomy did not undermine motherhood but rather challenged its mandatory nature. They restored the status of freedom and desire to the decision to bring new life into the world, freeing it from biological imposition and clandestine practices.
No appeal to moral duty can force people to have children when daily life is a race against adversity. True reproductive freedom requires both the right not to mother and the material conditions to do so if one so desires. An economic model that turns survival into a burden cannot demand that the will to care spring from precariousness. Society’s response is not an ideological dogma: it is the affirmation that desire and life are not managed through intimidation or guilt.
