Abortion in Brazil
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.
The issue of abortion was always contested in modern Brazil, but these debates changed over time. Let’s take the case of therapeutic abortions, or abortions legally allowed in certain instances. In 1890, two years after the country became the last in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, and one year after republican forces overthrew the Brazilian monarchy, the new Penal Code enshrined therapeutic abortion into law. Although the Code did not explicitly state in which cases abortion was legal, it allowed for its practice by trained medical professionals. And Brazil was not unique in allowing for therapeutic abortions. Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile also legalized therapeutic abortions in the same time period.[1]
In the decades that followed, however, civil legislation and medical technologies shifted many obstetricians’ total support for the procedure. Advances in cesarean section surgeries and the enshrining of fetal rights into civil law in the early twentieth century, for example, narrowed the indications for therapeutic procedures. And, of course, Catholicism greatly influenced medical professionals. Catholic physician Henrique Tanner de Abreu completely rejected therapeutic abortion in the 1930s. “Not even the woman, with her own life threatened,” wrote Abreu, “has the right to accept the sacrifice of the child to escape imminent death.”[2]
Most women, however, probably paid little attention to medical or legal debates over when a therapeutic abortion was legal. And their reasons perhaps contradicted those put forth as “legitimate” by the law. In 1919, thirty-year-old Maria Vieira da Silva went to an unlicensed midwife who performed an abortion by inserting a rolled-up bunch of collard greens into Silva’s vagina to induce contractions.[3] Silva’s health was not threatened by her pregnancy – but her economic well-being was. She already had a small child and her partner was unemployed. The procedure, however, killed Silva, leaving her child motherless.
In 1940, Brazil passed a new Penal Code (which is still in effect today). The articles addressing abortion clarified when a therapeutic abortion was justified: in the case of rape or if the mother’s life is in danger (in 2004, this expanded to include cases of anencephaly). But the procedure remained illegal, and for women who wanted an abortion outside of these reasons, it remained – and remains – dangerous.
When the criminal justice system in Rio de Janeiro sentenced the abortion providers who killed Jandira Magdalena dos Santos Cruz died in 2014 (under the 1940 Penal Code), her sister believed justice had been served: “Jandira [Cruz] made a mistake and paid with the death penalty. I hoped that they [the providers] would get a fair punishment. And I feel that this happened.” Her words, condemning both her sister and the providers, is a stark example of the cultural conversation around in abortion in Brazil today. That women who want or need abortions continue to die in Brazil demonstrate that women will negotiate their reproductive lives at all odds, no matter the consequences. Let’s hope that in the future, their lives will not be on the line.
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Notes
[1] Raúl Necochea López, A History of Family Planning in Twentieth-Century Peru (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 57.
[2] Henrique Tanner de Abreu, “Do aborto medico,” A Ordem 5, no. 17 (1931): 22.
[3] Arquivo Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, hereafter (AN) CS.0.PCR.3046 (1921).
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