São Paulo city council endorses bill encouraging teenage sexual abstinence

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The São Paulo city council is expected to vote on the bill that creates the ‘Escolhi Esperar’ (I Chose to Wait) program on Thursday, June 17, which advocates sexual abstinence as a contraceptive method for teenagers. The mayoralty issued a favorable opinion on the bill, with government leader Fabio Riva (PSDB) as rapporteur.

The bill’s author city councilor Rinaldi Digilio (PSL) says that the proposal is intended to “add primary prevention to the range of public policies” on pregnancy.

“Teenagers and adolescents will continue to have access to condoms, contraceptives, IUD and all contraceptive methods, but they will also have guidance by lectures or individually, conducted by health professionals, to alert to the risks of early pregnancy, which is a consequence of early sexual relations.”

The text will be voted in a second round, its final vote, and if passed will be forwarded for the mayor’s sanction. In the first vote last year, the text established an awareness week, not a permanent program, which led opposition city councilors to vote in favor.

However, in the second vote, Digilio submitted a substitute text, with 18 other signatures, in which awareness week becomes a perennial public policy. “The Executive itself suggested that it should no longer be a commemorative date,” he said.

The substitute determines the creation of orientation lectures for municipal employees, the sharing of explanatory material for teenagers and activities for the target audience, and also the “monitoring of potential cases for evaluation and care,” without detailing which “cases” would be monitored. The program would be implemented by the Education and Health Secretariats.

For the opposition, if passed and sanctioned by the mayor, the establishment of the program will mark the beginning of a “conservative turn” in the city under the Ricardo Nunes administration. The five opposition city councilors from the PT and PSOL benches criticize the bill.

Juliana Cardoso (PT) says that the “I Chose to Wait” program may “seem innocent,” but that it includes concepts blaming teenagers who become pregnant.

“The proposal is that, because of their relationship with God, women can wait for sexual intercourse,” the city councilor said. “But it doesn’t do what needs to be done, which is talk about the pill and other contraceptive methods. It talks about how a girl needs to ‘preserve herself.’ This is the name of a federal program run by Minister Damares Alves and the evangelical churches,” she said.

The city councilor said that the mayor “is extremely linked to the conservative Catholic Church” and that this bill “is the first of a herd” of conservative agendas that part of the governing coalition will try to pass in the coming months.

Digilio said that Nunes, like the PSL city councilor, “is a father and knows how important it is to protect teenagers.”

Opinion

The mayor’s office said that the favorable opinion to the bill is “technical”. “Therefore, it does not authorize any political-ideological inference. The report tried to access the full administrative procedure that led to the preparation of the document, but the City Hall placed it under secrecy. “The debate and deliberation on the proposal should occur within the City Council,” says the note.

“The Municipal Health Department emphasizes that the actions to prevent pregnancy in adolescence developed by the municipal network are based on the adolescent’s autonomy, recommended by the Children and Adolescents Statute, and the right to information and access to contraceptive methods, including for reducing the incidence of second pregnancy in adolescence,” says the text.