Analysis: Why Has Brazil Made So Little Progress in Crucial Abortion Debate?

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – In the midst of two enormous crises, the health and the economic crises, yet another national current drama has been somewhat overlooked, that of a civilizational regression. An equally urgent struggle, this obscurantist wave that has been advancing in recent years has multiple aspects, starting at the folkloric level of flat earthers and acquiring a perilous level when it helps to inflate topics such as the nostalgia of authoritarianism.

It is no different in the behavioral field. In recent days, the country has witnessed with astonishment yet another example of this disturbing phenomenon, which shows how Brazil is stuck in time in the debate on a crucial issue: the decriminalization of abortion.

To be entitled to one of the few cases in which the law allows the termination of pregnancy, a 10-year-old girl, abused at home by her uncle, faced a genuine path of suffering. As if the violent and repugnant attacks were not enough, the girl and her paternal grandmother, who escorted her, were forced to act in secrecy to circumvent the pressures of religious groups and the challenges found in their state’s public health network, which forced them to travel 1,630 kilometers in search of assistance, as if they were criminals.

In order to safely enter the hospital, the child was placed in the trunk of a car. She also left the hospital hidden. The horror of it all.

The abuser was finally arrested last Tuesday, August 18th, and a chain of solidarity has been growing stronger to help the girl overcome the trauma. However, none of this erases the fact that the case clearly shows how much Brazil is still in darkness with regard to this issue.

In fact, it is flirting with regression. While aware that the life of the 10-year-old girl was at risk, voices continued to rise to condemn the victim after the procedure. “A heinous crime,” said the president of the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops, Don Walmor Oliveira de Azevedo, when referring to the legal abortion performed at the Amaury de Medeiros Integrated Health Center in Recife.

Ethical, moral and religious issues hinder a rational and mature debate. Progress in this discussion does not imply trivializing this procedure – not even the most progressive and liberal notables, such as Federal Supreme Court (STF) Justice Luís Roberto Barroso, argue for it. “The state and society should try to prevent it [abortion] from happening,” he said in a note sent by his advisor. “But criminalization is a bad public policy that penalizes, above all, the poorest women, who are unable to use the public health system,” he added.

In other words, no one wants abortion, but it is a necessary evil to defeat a public health scourge. It is estimated that one million abortions are performed in the country every year, but only 1,700 of them through legal channels. As a result, there are almost thirty hospitalizations per hour caused by complications related to illegal abortions, such as infections. Black women, under 14 years of age and from low-income families are the majority among women who need to resort to unsafe abortions.

The absence of minimal hygiene or care conditions, very common in these circumstances, can leave permanent sequelae and even lead to death. Among the most frequent forms of trauma are bleeding, sterility, perforations in the uterus and injuries to the intestine. “The reality is that many women terminate their pregnancies every year under the worst conditions,” says gynecologist Thomaz Gollop, coordinator of the Abortion Study Group.

The drama that brought this topic back to the spotlight of national debate is the sum of a string of tragedies. Like thousands of youths in the country, the 10-year-old girl from the state of Espírito Santo is the fruit of an unstructured family – her mother, a street dweller and a drug addict, never even showed up for her birth registration. It is unknown whether she is dead or still missing. The father has been in prison since 2014, sentenced to serve sixteen years for murder. As a result, the child was raised by her grandmother – a lady who labors from Sunday to Sunday pulling her coconut- and-drinks cart on a beach in the north of Espírito Santo.

In recent months, she noticed that her granddaughter, a studious girl, was quieter than usual. She thought it might be because she missed school, closed during quarantine. When she noticed the delay in the girl’s menstruation, the grandmother tried to schedule an appointment, but the hospitals were only attending emergencies because of Covid-19. However, on August 7th, the girl began to experience severe abdominal pain and was rushed to an emergency room.

The medical team was surprised at her bulging belly, performed an examination and found that she was five months pregnant. It came as a shock to everyone. In a statement to a social worker and a psychologist she reported that she had been raped and “threatened to death” by her uncle for years. According to police investigations, he helped the girl’s grandmother at the beach hut and would always find an excuse to go to her home to reload the pushcart supplies – the abuses occurred at such times.

When notified of the fact, the police took action, but by the time they reached the suspect’s house, he was gone. Traveling by bus, the abuser traveled through Bahia and Minas Gerais. There, in Betim, just outside the capitol Belo Horizonte, with no money and fearing a lynching, he decided to turn himself in. He had already been arrested for selling marijuana in 2011. He was released in 2018. “In the case of the child’s rape, we have no doubt of his guilt,” says Detective Icaro Ruginski.

His own family helped with information to capture him, and said they were “relieved” by his arrest. His wife, with whom he has two small children and who paid the attorneys’ fees for his trafficking case, refused to do likewise for the rape case. To the police, he confessed with no remorse that he had had a relationship with the girl since 2019 – according to the abuser, in a “consensual and frequent manner”, which, even if it were true, would still be considered statutory rape.

As if the tragedy of this case were not enough, there was yet another one in parallel: the political exploitation of the case. The girl’s grandmother’s home became a pilgrimage point for religious zealots. The old lady passed out more than once. A pre-candidate for city councilor recorded himself praying inside the home as a means to produce material for his campaign. Known for being a fierce anti-abortion militant, the Minister of Women, Family and Human Rights, Damares Alves, dispatched two advisers there for the purpose of “learning the details of the investigations”.

The Minister’s ex-adviser, the notorious blogger Sara Winter, criminally disclosed the name of the girl and the hospital where she would perform the operation. Despite all the pressure, the grandmother upheld her position of supporting the termination of pregnancy. “It was also the wish of her granddaughter and the father,” says Elida Joana, her father’s attorney and close to the family. The procedure occurred in the midst of great upheaval. Some 200 people showed up on the doorstep of the Amaury de Medeiros Integrated Health Center, many with rosaries in their hands and t-shirts with anti-abortion slogans. No protests were heard against the rapist.

Religious influence is undoubtedly the greatest obstacle to decriminalizing abortion in the country. In the government of Jair Bolsonaro, who was elected President with the support of the main evangelical leaders, opposition to any form of abortion grew institutionally. In Congress, where ideological bigotry often takes precedence over reasonability, senators unearthed a Proposed Amendment to the Constitution (PEC), authored by former evangelical senator and singer Magno Malta, to specify in the Constitution that the right to life is sacrosanct from the moment of conception.

The proposal, if passed, could outlaw abortion even in cases of rape and risk to the mother’s life, which are currently authorized. Even before the PEC was debated, there was strong reaction from society, with feminist protests on the streets of some capital cities. Women have been taking significant public positions on the issue for some time, in defense of the right to their own bodies.

Published in 1997, a cover story by VEJA featured brave testimonies from more than a dozen people, both famous and anonymous, admitting that they had had abortions. One of them, actress Cissa Guimarães, now 63, regrets that nothing has changed since then. “Obviously, we’ve regressed,” she says. “The number of rapes has increased, femicide has increased… We’ve gone back to the Middle Ages.”

Contrary to the retrograde sectors of Congress, the STF has stood out as a beacon of reason in this debate, enlightening progress. In April 2012, by eight votes to two, the Court determined that abortion should also be authorized in the case of fetus anencephaly. Four years later, a five-Justice STF Panel granted a writ of habeas-corpus against the preventive detention of doctors and staff of an abortion clinic, considering that the procedure performed until the third month of pregnancy was not a crime.

This year, the STF analyzed a lawsuit asking for the right to terminate pregnancy in cases where the mother contracted the zika virus, a disease that can cause microcephaly in the fetus. The case rapporteur, Justice Cármen Lúcia, decided, on procedural grounds without reaching the merits, that there should be no trial, and dismissed the suit.

She was joined by most of her colleagues, including Justice Barroso, who agreed with reservations. “One must have deep respect for people’s religious sentiment, which fully legitimizes having a position against abortion, not practicing it and preaching against its practice. But it is perfectly possible to be both against abortion and against criminalization,” he wrote in his vote.

By including an intimate decision of each woman in the Criminal Code, Brazil is moving in the opposite direction of developed countries. In most of them, abortion is legalized. In Latin America, Uruguay released the procedure in 2012 and Argentina began to discuss a bill along these lines earlier this year, despite being a nation under strong Catholic influence and Pope Francis’ homeland.

Only a group of 26 countries in which abortion is forbidden in any circumstance, without exception, is more restrictive than Brazil. Haiti, Jamaica and Madagascar, among others, are part of this group. To draw attention to these cases and offer assistance, the Dutch NGO Women on Waves performed abortions on a boat near the coast of nations where this practice is criminalized.

As shown by the girl from Espírito Santo’s case, not even the legal guarantee to have an abortion in certain circumstances ensures respect and prompt care for women in Brazil. The Pérola Byington Hospital in São Paulo, one of the most highly regarded in the group of about sixty health institutions that do the procedure, performed 560 pregnancy interruptions last year alone. The rate is 30 percent higher in relation to the preceding year.

The Pérola accepts patients from all parts of the state and the country, many of them injured after having tried homemade solutions to terminate pregnancy, such as the use of perforating instruments. Others had faced repeated negative responses to abortion (even from doctors at authorized centers). “The situation is alarming. The first violence that these victims suffer is rape, the second is the lack of professional assistance,” says André Luiz Malavasi, coordinator of the institution’s women’s health area. “Women who have been to five, six addresses come here. There they received no assistance.”

Even with a court ruling in favor of terminating her pregnancy, the girl from Espírito Santo whose drama moved the country was rejected by the Cassiano Antonio Moraes University Hospital (HUCAM), which is connected to the Federal University of Espírito Santo. The hospital’s board of directors alleged they were not structured to perform the procedure. In Recife, legal abortion was ultimately coordinated by obstetrician Olímpio Moraes Filho. “She smiled again the day after the surgery,” says the doctor. Before being discharged, the girl received many gifts: clothes, shoes, books, toys, flowers, chocolates and tablets.

People willing to finance her studies also began to emerge. Both the girl and her grandmother are to enter a witness, victim and family support and protection program. Funded by the federal and state governments, it includes a change of identity, change of address and financial support for four years. With her big dream of becoming a soccer player, the girl has already fulfilled her first wish on the way back from the hospital to her home: to eat a Happy Meal. She has her whole life ahead of her – and Brazil, a long way to go so that other such pregnancies may not end in tragedy.

Source: Veja