Gender regimes and restrictive abortion law in Central America

Abortion regulation in Central America remains highly restrictive, yet the institutional conditions sustaining this rigidity remain insufficiently understood. This article examines correlates of restrictive abortion law in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua using an exploratory ordinal regression strategyand a 2023 cross-sectional dataset of 25 countries in the Americas. Abortion-law permissiveness as an ordered outcome ranging from total prohibition to abortion on request. The analysis combines a penalized cumulative-logit model using ordinalNet and Lasso regularization with a post-selection ordinal model estimated with clm. V-Dem indicators identify five predictors: clientelism, educational equality, gender equality in civil liberties, women’s political participation, and CSO women’s participation. Higher clientelism is associated with lower permissiveness, while the remaining predictors indicate more permissive frameworks. Thresholds are treated as ordinal cut-pointsrather than measures of reform difficulty. Findings suggest that restrictive regimes persist amid institutional environments marked by democratic fragility, gendered inequalities, and constrained rights-based contestation.