How green became the color of abortion rights

In the moments after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, enraged abortion rights supporters poured into the streets. Many wore green.

From Washington to New York to Los Angeles, women and men marched and chanted with green bandannas around their necks. They carried green banners and released green smoke into the air.

For women at the other end of the hemisphere, the scene was familiar. Women in Latin America have worn green for abortion rights for nearly two decades. Now they watched in awe. Their green wave had reached the United States.

The green bandanna has become a universal symbol of abortion rights — a sign of solidarity among activists across Latin America. Its journey began in Argentina.

The idea was inspired by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo — the women who began gathering outside Argentina’s presidential palace in Buenos Aires in the late 1970s to protest the disappearances of their daughters and sons by the ruling military junta during the country’s Dirty War.

On their heads, the women wore white scarves made of cloth used for children’s diapers.

Decades later, two Argentine women had an idea. Marta Alanis, the founder of Catholics for the Right to Decide in Argentina, was preparing for a national gathering of women in 2003. Abortion, illegal in the South American country, was controversial even among feminists. But that year, Alanis and other activists hoped to create consensus around abortion rights as a key issue for the movement.

Alanis planned to take bandannas to the gathering to draw attention to abortion rights while paying homage to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. But she wanted a new color — not white, which was taken by the mothers, and not purple, the traditional color of the feminist movement. She called her friend Susana Chiarotti to brainstorm. “How about green?” Chiarotti suggested. The color represented nature, growth, life. Facing off against a movement described as “pro-life,” Chiarotti thought, “The term ‘life’ should return to us.”

Alanis and Chiarotti ordered nearly 3,000 bandannas for the 2003 gathering in Rosario, Argentina. They were a hit. The bandannas appeared on the front page of the local newspaper: “For the first time, 10,000 women demanded the decriminalization of abortion, the right to contraception and to decide when and how many children to have,” Página 12 reported.

The bandannas spread across Argentina. Teenage girls began tying them to their backpacks — at times getting in trouble in their Catholic schools. Activists wore them to massive protests against femicide in 2015 and 2016. Those protests, prompted by the murder of a 14-year-old Argentine girl, grew to become a movement across Latin America known as Ni Una Menos, or Not One Less.

By 2018, Alanis said, “the green bandanna had exploded on the streets. It was everywhere.”

That year, Argentina drew closer than ever before to legalizing abortion. Thousands of abortion rights activists gathered outside the Congress in Buenos Aires to support a landmark bill that would decriminalize the procedure. They held up their bandannas in a sea of green — an image that went global. The bill was defeated, but the moment galvanized the movement.

“Abortion started being talked about everywhere, in the home, in the neighborhoods, in the bakery,” Alanis said. That year, she said, the country began running out of green fabric. “Women had to cross the border with Bolivia to get the fabric,” she said. Antiabortion protesters, meanwhile, began wearing blue bandannas.

In December 2020, Argentina’s Senate voted to legalize abortion — a stunning shift in the birthplace of Pope Francis.

By then, the green bandanna had begun to spread beyond Argentina. It appeared in Chile, in Peru, in Colombia. Whenever Argentine activists traveled to conferences or gatherings in other countries, they would take bandannas.

Activists in each country began making their own versions. In Brazil, the bandannas said “no prison, no death.” In Colombia, they were emblazoned with the name of the abortion rights coalition Causa Justa, or Just Cause.

Activists packed streets and filed lawsuits. Last September, Mexico’s Supreme Court voted to decriminalize abortion. And in February, Colombia’s constitutional court followed. Abortion is now decriminalized in three of the largest countries in Latin America — all of them majority Catholic.

Many of those activists were stunned to see the Supreme Court decision taking the United States in the opposite direction. The country is one of three in the world, with Poland and Nicaragua, to tighten access to abortion in the 21st century.

Still, the activists were moved by the videos and photos they saw on the news — women on the steps of the Supreme Court wearing green bandannas. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), speaking to abortion rights supporters, tossed one over her shoulder.

Another speaker called on activists to follow the example of the women in Mexico, Colombia and Argentina who “came into the streets, day after day, with the color green.”

Some have asked whether the use of green in the United States amounts to appropriating a Latin American tradition. But for the activists who have been at the forefront of the movement in the region, the color is a sign of unity.

“The United States has rarely looked south and asked what they can learn from us,” said Catalina Martínez Coral, regional director of the Center for Reproductive Rights, one of the groups that brought the lawsuit before Colombia’s constitutional court.

Maybe, she said, now is the time: “We’re part of the same movement.”

Days after Roe v. Wade fell, Argentine women gathered outside the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires. Waving green bandannas in the air, beneath billowing green smoke, they stood together in protest.

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