Between the Urgent and the Emerging: Representations on Sex Education in the Debate for Abortion Legalization in Argentina

The aim of this article is to analyse, within the framework of discourse analysis, the social representations that circulated about the sex education in the parliamentary debate on the bill for the Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancy that took place in the Chamber of Deputies, on June 13, 2018, in Argentina. To do this, we review the functions attributed to sex education by both legislators who voted in favor of the bill and those who voted against. In turn, we analyze the topics that were related to this issue, as well as the social actors involved and those who were legitimized to address the problem. We aim to establish if the feminist discourse that was constituted and consolidated in Argentina from the Ni Una Menos march, in 2015, managed to impose its agenda on the political sphere. Specifically, we are interested in investigating whether the representations that were put into circulation about sex education were retaken in the parliamentary debate on the voluntary termination of pregnancy bill, a space in which sex education constituted a preponderant topic.