Jul 18 (IPS) – CIVICUS discusses abortion rights in Brazil with Guacira Oliveira, director of the Feminist Center for Studies and Consultations (CFEMEA). CFEMEA is an anti-racist feminist organization that defends women’s rights, collective care and self-care and monitors developments in Brazil’s National Congress.
In June, thousands of women took to the streets of São Paulo and other cities to protest a bill that would classify abortion after 22 weeks as homicide, punishable by six to 20 years in prison. The protests began when the lower house of Congress fast-tracked the bill, limiting debate. Abortion is currently legal in Brazil only in cases of rape, fetal deformity or endangerment of a pregnant woman’s life. The proposed bill, promoted by evangelical leaders, would criminalize people who have abortions more severely than rapists. Public backlash has slowed the bill’s progress, and its future is now uncertain.
What impact would this new anti-abortion law have on women if passed?
Currently, abortion is legal in Brazil only in cases of rape, danger to the life of a pregnant woman, and severe fetal malformation. However, current legislation does not establish a maximum gestational age for access to legal abortion. The proposed bill would equate abortion after 22 weeks of pregnancy to murder, punishing the person requesting the abortion and the health professionals who perform it.
This would mainly affect girls, because more than 60 percent of rape victims are children under the age of 13. In more than 64 percent of these cases, the rapist is someone close to the girl’s family, making it difficult to identify the rape and the resulting pregnancy.
Another perverse aspect of the problem is racial inequality. Forty percent of rape victims are black children and adolescents, and of those under 13, more than 56 percent are black girls. Of the 20,000 girls under the age of 14 who give birth each year, 74 percent are black. In addition, black women 46 percent more likely to have an abortion than white women. The passage of this bill would make black women and girls even more vulnerable than they already are. The bill should protect these women and girls, not criminalize them.
How did civil society mobilise against the bill?
CFEMEA has been monitoring threats to legal abortion for decades and is part of the National Front against the Criminalization of Women and for the Legalization of Abortion. The threats increased with the rise of the far right was appointed president in 2018 and feminist movements took action against cases of girls who were victims of sexual violence and faced institutional barriers to obtaining legal abortion.
In 2023, in response to regressive legislation, they launched the ‘A child is not a mother‘ platform, recently reactivated when the new anti-abortion law was rushed through. More than 345,000 people signed up for the campaign and sent messages to parliamentarians. They also exerted pressure on social media through posts and hashtags such as #criançanémãe (#ChildNotMother), #PLdagravidezinfantil (#CongressForChildPregnancy) and #PLdoestupro (#CongressForRape).
We also campaigned through face-to-face actions and other collectively defined strategies, led mainly by state-level alliances against the criminalization of women and for the legalization of abortion. In May, we laid a symbolic wreath in front of the Federal Council of Medicine, which in April had published a resolution banning fetal asystole, a procedure recommended by the World Health Organization for legal abortions after 22 weeks. With this, we symbolized our sorrow for all women and girls whose lives are cut short by lack of access to legal abortion. We reenacted this outside the official residence of the President of the Chamber of Deputies, just before the fast-track request for the anti-abortion law was approved, on the evening of June 12.
The following day, the first public protests took place in several Brazilian state capitals. They continued over the following days, culminating in a nationwide action on June 27. The issue is still on the agenda in July and the demonstrations are still in full swing.
Why is Brazil resisting the regional trend towards legalization?
Brazil has seen a rise in religious fundamentalist far-right ideology since 2016, when President Dilma Rousseff was in power. removed from office through a legal-parliamentary maneuver that amounted to a political coup. The violent ethnocentric, LGBTQI+phobic, neopatriarchal and racist reaction intensified in 2018 with the victory of Jair Bolsonaro in an election marred by disinformation.
Conservatives see the rights to diverse and multiple ways of life as a threat to their existence. In this sense, their regressive proposals are a direct response to women’s struggle against patriarchy and all forms of women’s oppression.
Even after the defeat in the Presidential Election 2022The far right has gained strength in the National Congress, where extremists have gained majorities in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. This has led to the revival of a bill known as the “Statute of the Unborn Child,” aimed at granting “personhood” to the fetus in order to criminalize abortion.
Many factors explain the conservative reaction in Brazil and around the world. For fascists in power and in society, violence is justified against groups considered “enemies of the people,” which can include any dissenting opinion—women, black people, indigenous people, and LGBTQI+ people. In the case of women, they seek to re-domesticate us, to send us back home, subordinate to the command and judgment of patriarchs. Control over reproduction and our bodies is a crucial part of this strategy.
What are the pros and cons of sexual and reproductive rights in Brazil?
The main force against sexual and reproductive rights is religious fundamentalism, which positions itself as a harbinger of control over women’s bodies and gender dissent and is strongly represented in the National Congress. The defense of these rights lies in the progressive camp, represented by the political left and the feminist, women’s and LGBTQI+ movements.
But it’s worth noting that even with a Congress besieged by anti-rights groups, most people have a less punitive and more empathetic view of feminist struggles and women’s rights. questionnaire A survey we conducted in 2023 in collaboration with the Observatory of Sex and Politics and the Center for Studies and Public Opinion of the State University of Campinas found that 59 percent were against the criminalization and possible imprisonment of women who have an abortion.
What are the main demands of the Brazilian feminist movement?
The feminist movement is plural and diverse, but what it has in common is the fight to end all forms of violence against women. CFEMEA aims to transform the world through anti-racist feminism and by taking a stand against all gender inequality and oppression. This is our position when we engage in dialogue with society and make demands on governments. We demand public policies that reduce inequalities between men, women and people with different gender identities, considered in their intersectional dimensions of age, religion, ethnicity, nationality, physical ability and race, among others.
A fundamental problem is the sexual and racial division of labor, a powerful structure that maintains and exacerbates the inequalities experienced by women. The care work they do, despite being made invisible and devalued by patriarchal capitalism, is an indispensable condition for human life and the construction of collective good life. The manifesto of the Antiracist Feminist Forum for a National Care Policy, signed by dozens of movements and organizations, affirms the need for social reproduction activities to be recognized and shared by the state. This means that care work, which is currently unpaid and almost exclusively done by women at the family and community level, must be effectively taken over by the state, because care is a human need.
We demand that governments allocate public investment to combat gender inequality in areas as diverse as care, culture, education, environment, health, justice, labor, leisure and welfare. It is the state, not the market, that can and must combat such inequalities.
The public space in Brazil is shaped by the CIVICUS monitor.
Please contact CFEMEA via its website or are Facebook or Instagram page, and follow @cfemea on Twitter.
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