Women break taboo, talk about illegal abortions
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 happen 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 pregnant. Another was a successful businesswoman who had separated from her children’s father and become pregnant accidentally by another man. A third just cried.
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. 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 abnormality called anencephaly.
But amid a rising tide of conservatism in Brazil and concerns that abortion will become further restricted, women are coming out of the shadows to tell their stories in the hopes of galvanizing support for expanded access to abortion.
“We have stopped thinking of this as a private subject. It’s a public subject,” said Rosangela 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 majority 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 performer of the procedure up to four, though prosecutions are rare.
More than 170 women, including prominent actresses, directors and 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 restrict abortion, and more than 34,000 have signed petitions sent to Congress.
The wave of public testimony is amplifying a heated debate in Latin America’s largest country, 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.
Support for legal abortions has been rising, though most Brazilians apparently still oppose them.
A Datafolha survey released Dec. 31 said 36 percent of Brazilians interviewed were in favor of decriminalizing abortion, up from 23 percent in 2016. But 57 percent were still against abortions.