Unlike Argentina, Abortion Remains Blocked in Brazilian Congress

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – While the Argentine Senate on Wednesday, December 30th, passed a law validating women’s right to abortion until the 14th week of pregnancy, the issue is facing opposition from conservative and religious legislators in the Brazilian Congress.

The assessment of legislators heard by Folha newspaper is that, within the current context, there is no room for legislation similar to the neighboring country to progress in the National Congress.

Therefore, politicians who advocate the broadening of legal pregnancy termination are focused on blocking progress of proposals that they regard as setbacks, for limiting women’s reproductive rights even further.

The resistance to the issue in the Congress increases with the intervention of President Jair Bolsonaro. Over the past two years, the Bolsonaro government has implemented measures that, in practice, obstruct access to the abortion alternatives currently permitted by law and embarrass women who seek the procedure.

In Brazil, abortion is authorized only in three situations: when the pregnancy was produced by rape, in case of risk to the pregnant woman’s health and to fetuses with anencephaly.

“I could never picture a similar outcome [to Argentina’s] in the context of the Bolsonaro government and with the Congress we have,” says leftist deputy Jandira Feghali (PCdoB-RJ). “The debate [in the Brazilian legislature] is entirely intertwined between religion and the State.”

According to the platform Elas no Congresso, from AzMina Magazine, 18 bills on abortion were submitted to the Chamber and Senate in 2019, all seeking further restrictions on the procedure.

In 2020, a new wave of proposals for restrictions was submitted, among them texts based on the so-called status of the unborn child – the term used by groups opposed to abortion in an attempt to grant certain fundamental rights to embryos.

“I remained in the Social Security and Family Committee, where bills were received to try to revoke the rights we have today. Proposals were always in the sense of revoking, criminalizing or hindering access to legal abortion that currently exists in Brazil,” says progressive Deputy Fernanda Melchionna (PSOL-RS).

Although several restrictive bills have been submitted, they did not go far in 2020. The thematic commissions did not work this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Moreover, Chamber president Rodrigo Maia (DEM-RJ) said earlier this year that the House has “been holding back the most radical motions” on the issue.

The main action against legal abortion in Congress comes from the religious benches.

Sostenes Cavalcante (DEM-RJ), of the Assembly of God Victory in Christ, claims that the result in Argentina serves as a “warning”, but that the picture in Brazil is different.

“The scenario in the politics of the Brazilian Congress is different. We have a very strong evangelical bench, and the Catholic bench itself is more organized than the Argentine Catholics. I don’t see any margin for legal abortion to be passed in Congress with its current composition, which is highly conservative,” he says.

For Debora Diniz, of the Anis Bioética Institute, who works in defense of women’s rights, the current blockade in Congress for matters related to abortion is a reflection of the profile of the Brazilian legislature, with a disproportionate representation of older men and a high presence of religious politicians.

“Without a shift to more youth in politics, without a shift to more women in politics, we will have a balance towards greater criminalization of abortion in the Brazilian debate,” she says.

“Abortion faces this much resistance in Congress because of who the Brazilian politicians are. It’s not society, it’s whoever is there representing and talking about Brazilian politics,” she says.

Women’s rights advocates hope that the Federal Supreme Court (STF) will be a means to broaden the scope of cases in which abortion is allowed.

Although there is a legal proceeding for the decriminalization of abortion in Court, it has not yet been judged and there is no date set for when it will be examined.

This article was produced by The Rio Times’ automated newsroom system. How we use AI · Report an error