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About The skanner. (Portland, Or.) 1975-2014 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 10, 2018)
Page 10 The Skanner Portland January 10, 2018 News Brazilian Women Break Taboo To Talk About Illegal Abortions By Renata Brito and Sarah Dilorenzo Associated Press RIO DE JANEIRO — The doctor was late. So the women sat quietly in the waiting area of a clinic in an upscale neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro until they were overcome by thoughts of what they were about to do and what might hap- pen to them. They began to talk. One woman said she was in a relationship with a drug lord and knew he would force her to have “his” baby if he found out she was preg- nant. Another was a suc- cessful businesswoman who had separated from her children’s father and become pregnant acci- dentally by another man. A third just cried. A fourth, Roberta Cardoso, had become pregnant accidentally with her boyfriend and felt she wasn’t mature enough to become a mother. “At that moment I prob- ably knew much more about their stories than their families did,” Car- doso, 26, said during a re- cent interview with The Associated Press. As in many countries, abortion is a subject of taboo in Brazil, a social- ly conservative nation with the world’s largest Roman Catholic popula- tion as well as a growing evangelical Christian community. Abortion is illegal here except when a woman’s life is at risk, when she has been raped or when the fetus has a usually fatal brain ab- normality called anen- cephaly. But amid a rising tide of conservatism in Brazil and concerns that abor- tion will become further restricted, women are coming out of the shad- ows to tell their stories in the hopes of galvanizing support for expanded ac- cess to abortion. “We have stopped thinking of this as a pri- vate subject. It’s a public subject,” said Rosange- la Talib, a coordinator for Catholics for Choice, a leading advocate in Brazil for reproductive rights. An estimated 400,000 to 800,000 women have an abortion each year in Brazil — the vast ma- jority of them illegal. According to Health Ministry statistics, more than 200 women died in 2015 after abortions. If caught, a woman can be sentenced to up to three years and the perform- er of the procedure up to four, though prosecu- tions are rare. More than 170 women, including prominent actresses, directors and AP PHOTO/LEO CORREA Women are coming out of the shadows in hopes of expanding access to the procedure Police officers drive their bicycles past a mural art by Brazilian artist Carlos Bobi in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2018. According to Bobi, the mural represents a special moment of his ex- wife’s pregnancy. As in many countries, abortion is a subject of taboo in Brazil, a socially conservative nation with the world’s largest Roman Catholic population as well as a growing evangelical Christian community. academics, have signed a manifesto declaring publicly that they had abortions. Thousands of women have also taken to the streets to protest attempts to further re- strict abortion, and more than 34,000 have signed petitions sent to Con- gress. When the Anis-Bioeth- ics Institute, an NGO that conducts research on women’s issues, put out a call on Facebook asking for women to tell their stories, 110 came forward in just 19 days. One of them was Re- beca Mendes, who was seeking an abortion. The NGO filed an ur- gent request with the Supreme Court to termi- nate Mendes’ pregnancy, drawing national atten- tion and putting a name and a face to its quest to legalize abortion. The petition was denied and Mendes eventually had the procedure legally in Colombia. The wave of public tes- timony is amplifying a heated debate in Latin America’s largest coun- try, where conservatives fear the Supreme Court could rule to legalize the procedure and women’s activists fear Congress will roll back the already limited abortion rights. In November 2016, a Supreme Court justice wrote that criminalizing first-trimester abortions violated women’s funda- mental rights, a decision that granted the habeas corpus release of two people accused of run- ning an abortion clinic. Hours after the deci- sion, Congress created a special commission to clarify the law. It has pro- posed amending Brazil’s constitution to state that protections for life begin at conception. Lawmaker Sostenes Cavalcante said it would be supported by all “who believe in life” and opposed by those “who want to kill the de- fenseless.” Cavalcante described the measure as a com- plete abortion ban, though the lawmaker who wrote it has since said it would not change current law and is meant only to hold off any at- tempt to further legalize abortion. Jefferson Drezett, who runs the abortion and sexual violence response department at Perola Byington state hospital in Sao Paulo, said abor- tion services are already insufficient for women who seek them legal- ly, for reasons ranging from poor management to pressure from pol- “ We have stopped thinking of this as a private subject. It’s a public subject iticians and religious groups. “It’s been almost 80 years that the law (that includes the exceptions) exists, and we still ha- ven’t managed to make this law valid in Brazil- ian public hospitals,” he said. Support for legal abor- tions has been rising, though most Brazilians apparently still oppose them. A Datafolha survey released Dec. 31 said 36 percent of Brazilians in- terviewed were in favor of decriminalizing abor- tion, up from 23 percent in 2016. But 57 percent were still against abor- tions. The survey inter- viewed over 2,700 people from 192 municipalities in Brazil and had a mar- gin of error of 2 percent- age points. Among those who want fewer restrictions is Raissa Arruda, a 30-year- old artist who told AP: “I’ve lost the shame around speaking out. ... I think we need to speak, so we can decriminalize it.” Arruda was 18 when she discovered she was pregnant, and her moth- er didn’t talk to her for weeks after she told her. Arruda eventually had a miscarriage after several painful weeks of feeling judged. When she got pregnant again a month later, she told almost no one. She couldn’t stand the shame. She borrowed mon- ey from a friend to buy misoprostol, a drug that can be used to cause an abortion. Since the 1990s, misoprostol, which has uses ranging from treat- ing ulcers to inducing labor, has been legally available only at hospi- tal pharmacies in Brazil. However, Arruda said everyone knows where to get it in Florianopolis, the southern city where she grew up. Djacelina dos Prazeres Chrispim also decided to share her story in an in- terview with AP. Fifteen years ago, Chrispim went to a pri- vate hospital in Sao Pau- lo to have an abortion. As a black woman who had a turbulent childhood, she said she didn’t want to bring a child into the world who she feared would face racism and exclusion.
