Abortion in Brazil
Cassia Roth
A protest on November 13, 2017 in Rio de Janeiro. The green sign in the center translates to “Free & safe legal abortion.”
In December 2019, the freshly-appointed director of Brazil’s National Arts Foundation (Funarte), Dante Mantovani, posted a video on his Youtube page condemning rock-and-roll music. “Rock music leads to drugs, which leads to sex, which leads to abortions,” Mantovani stated. “At the same time,” he continued, “the abortion industry feeds into something much more serious, which is Satanism.” Mantovani’s disapproval of unsanctioned sex and its consequences, not to mention his linkage of abortion and satanic worship, is part of a long tradition in the west of blaming cultural and moral decay on pop culture. Despite the recursive, strawman nature of this blame, his words are actually somewhat indicative of public opinion toward abortion in Brazil today. A 2018 poll found that 80 percent of Brazilians oppose legalizing abortion (which is currently only legal in the cases of rape, a threat to the mother’s life, or fetal anencephaly), up 2 percent from a similar 2010 poll.
This repressive backlash toward women’s reproductive rights at home and abroad requires us to rethink dominant narratives of liberal progress in relation to women’s bodily integrity – and human rights.
Brazil’s growing evangelical bloc is probably one of the reasons behind this uptick, as Mantovani’s comments on religion suggest. The tragic story of twenty-seven-year-old Jandira Magdalena dos Santos Cruz is further indicative of this trend. In 2014, Cruz died during an illegal abortion procedure in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The abortion providers burned and dismembered her body to avoid identification and then dumped her body. Cruz’s family is evangelical, and her sister opposes decriminalizing the procedure. As she told the press: “Many people have been criticizing her [Cruz] and saying she deserved to die. I’m against abortion too, but she paid the price. Now those who did this to her have to pay too.”
It’s perhaps not a surprise to readers in the U.S. that opposition to legal (and thus safe) abortion is growing in current-day Brazil. After all, with states like Alabama and Georgia passing highly restrictive bans on the procedure, it seems that our own country is moving in the same direction. This repressive backlash toward women’s reproductive rights at home and abroad requires us to rethink dominant narratives of liberal progress in relation to women’s bodily integrity – and human rights. Scholars now argue for a more nuanced history of abortion, one where progress zigs and zags, in which strong progress toward women’s bodily autonomy clashes with patriarchal law, religious dogma, and medical technologies.
My book, A Miscarriage of Justice: Women’s Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil », examines this long and contested history. It explores how women negotiated their reproductive lives, including abortion, during moments of political upheaval and consolidation in Brazil, providing an embodied history of childbirth and abortion.