Brazilian women head to Argentina to get around abortion ban
RIO DE JANEIRO » With her 21st birthday fast approaching, Sara left the home she shares with her mother for her first trip on a plane. She didn’t tell her family the real reason she’d taken out a loan for 5,000 Brazilian reais ($1,000).
Two days later and several hundred miles away, a 25-year-old woman packed a backpack in her one-bedroom Sao Paulo apartment and left for the airport with her boyfriend.
Both women were bound for the Argentine capital, Buenos Aires, seeking something forbidden in Brazil: an abortion.
“Having a child that I don’t want, and have no conditions to raise, and being obliged, would be torture,” Sara told The Associated Press in Sao Paulo’s airport as she prepared to sleep on a bench near the check-in counter the night before her connecting flight.
“What has helped me since I discovered I was pregnant is that I have a chance. I still have an alternative. That leaves me feeling more secure,” said the woman, who lives in the interior Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte and asked that only her first name be used because of the stigma associated with abortion in Brazil.
Both women are part of a trend among Brazilian women without means who, to dodge risks and legal obstacles in Latin America’s most populous country, have sought abortions elsewhere in the region. They didn’t even need passports to enter Argentina, a fellow Mercosur nation.
Their trips came just two weeks before the Dec. 30 passage of landmark legislation legalizing abortion in Argentina — the largest Latin American nation to do so. It underscores not only how Argentina’s progressive social policy diverges from
Brazil’s conservative one, but also the likelihood that more Brazilian women will seek abortions in the neighboring nation.
“With the changes in legislation in Latin America, women don’t need to go to the U. S., don’t need a visa to get an abortion,” said Debora Diniz, a Latin American studies researcher at Brown University who has extensively studied abortion in the region.
“More middle- and working-class women connected to feminist groups are now having access to something that is basically the story of wealthy women for a long time.”
Sara said she couldn’t risk the possibility of buying counterfeit abortion pills or undergoing a dangerous backdoor procedure in Brazil. She feared injury, death or a failed abortion resulting in complications. Getting caught could even mean jail.
An Argentine health ministry protocol provided legal leeway for Sara’s Dec. 14 abortion as long as she signed a statement citing the “health risk” the pregnancy posed. The policy was based on the World Health Organization’s definition of health: “A state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
Still, some doctors refused abortions anyway, according to Dr. Viviana Mazur, who leads the sexual health group of the Argentine Federation of General Medicine. The new law allows abortions up to the 14th week of pregnancy.
“The law will give more autonomy and dignity to women,” Dr. Mazur said. “So they don’t have to say ‘ please,’ ask permission, nor forgiveness.”
Before last week’s vote, Argentine feminist groups had long pushed for legalized abortion in the homeland of Pope Francis, and they found common cause with President Alberto Fernández, who was elected in 2019 and introduced the bill.