This chapter looks at Chile and Bahrain as two countries that demonstrate the surprising effects, interactions, and dependencies of our religious variables. With no official state religion and a fairly secular population, until August 2017 Chile had a total ban on abortion. The ban was so extreme that, in 2015, a pregnant, 11-year-old rape survivor was denied the procedure. Only as recently as August 2017 was legislation passed that permitted women’s access to abortion in the case of risk of death, rape, or fetal non-viability. With an 85% Muslim population and Islam as the official state religion, Bahrain on the other hand allows abortion on request. While suffrage was extended to Bahraini women only in 2002, they have had access to legal abortion on request since 1976. The analyses in this chapter use case study methodology to delve into those cases in an attempt to deepen our understanding of the effects of faith in the civil society sphere on the production of reproductive rights.

We start with the civil society sphere. Within civil society, we engage with religion as a defining feature that has long been assumed to have a fractious relationship with women’s rights and gender equality. The effects of religion in the area of gender equality have been considered substantial in academic work as well as in popular and political discourse. A common understanding is that religion depresses women’s rights in general and reproductive and abortion rights in particular. The literature on reproductive rights, however, is disproportionately focused on Western cases, and is limited in its definition of religion as a variable. What happens, though, when we switch to a more inclusive framework? To what extent do a variety of religious variables correlate with policy on reproductive rights outside of the Western context? We examine the relevance of the religion-abortion link in a broad comparative framework looking at religious sect, religiosity, religious diversity, and the relationship between religion and the state. The comparative analyses suggest that the connection between religion and women’s reproductive rights is far more nuanced than previously thought.