BUENOS AIRES — Bucking a regional trend toward more liberal abortion laws, conservative lawmakers in Brazil are one step away from enacting a constitutional ban on ending pregnancies — even if they result from rape or could endanger the mother’s health.
A special committee of Brazil’s lower house voted Nov. 8 to enshrine “the inviolability of the right to life from conception” in the country’s Carta Magna, as the federal constitution is known, setting off at times raucous protests from pro-choice activists in more than 30 cities. For final approval, the amendment still needs a two-thirds majority in the full Chamber of Deputies, as well as in the Senate.
Abortion opponents cite a need to rein in “judicial activism,” which they say has hollowed out Brazil’s ban on the procedure — nominally among the strictest in South America — ever since the Supreme Court allowed abortion of fetuses with anencephaly, a birth defect linked to the Zika virus that has skyrocketed since the 2015-2016 epidemic.
Critics denounce the amendment as a “Trojan horse” devised by conservative lawmakers, many of whom have close ties to Brazil’s increasingly influential evangelical churches, and point to the proposal’s unusual legislative history.
First introduced in 2015, Proposal 181 merely sought to extend maternity leave for mothers of premature babies. But in a surprise move this year, a group of evangelical and Catholic lawmakers added the pro-life provisions and voted down proposals to separate the issues.
“The place to discuss [abortion] indisputably is the legislature and not the Supreme Court,” sponsor Jorge Tadeu Mudalen, who maintains close ties to the Pentecostal International Grace of God Church, wrote for the group.
“The court lacks jurisdiction and constitutional legitimacy to decide a matter of such importance,” Mr. Mudalen said. “The judiciary seeks a supremacy that directly disrespects one of the pillars of our democracy.”
Abortion is illegal in Brazil, home to the world’s largest Catholic community, except when pregnancy is a result of rape, if it endangers the mother’s life or if the fetus has anencephaly, in which a baby is missing parts of the brain and skull. The government estimates that more than 1 million abortions are performed in unregistered clinics each year.
Ultimately, the amendment passed by an 18-1 vote. The no vote came from the sole female commission member present. The final tally was telling, said prominent pro-choice activist Debora Diniz, and showed how little the lawmakers knew about the lives of half of their constituents.
“Who are the guys in Congress? Of course they’re all men, and they’re all religious men,” Ms. Diniz said. “One in five women in Brazil has had an abortion by age 40. The women are evangelical, the women are Catholic; they are the women of everyday life in Brazil.”
Erika Kokay, a congresswoman who opposes the stricter abortion rules, told the Reuters news service the measure amounted to “intentional fraud from fundamentalist congressmen who think that their religious dogmas have greater weight than the democratic state.”
Echoes of U.S. debate
It’s no coincidence that the battle lines being drawn in Brasilia look similar to long-running debates up north, she said.
“The evangelicals’ messages about abortion in Brazil come from the United States, from the culture and the ways in which we talk about the topic here,” said Ms. Diniz, a visiting fellow at Yale Law School. “It’s not a Brazilian narrative [but] an import of a religious and moral narrative.”
But commission member Diego Garcia countered that it was the amendment’s opponents — backed by their own international “lobby” — who were hiding behind arguments about drafting and legislative process when, in truth, their basic dilemma is that they don’t support restrictions on abortion that multiple polls show are backed by a majority of Brazilians.
“The text was not forged in the shadows and dungeons of the Chamber of Deputies, as many would have you believe,” said Mr. Garcia, a member of the Humanist Party of Solidarity, whose platform draws on “Christian morals” and of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement.
“The problem simply seems to be that the approaching final result diverges from what a small, noisy group would like to see,” he told The Washington Times. “Apparently, the respect for dissent only applies when what’s different represents their point of view.”
Pro-life activists, meanwhile, complained that their pro-choice opponents were trying to neutralize their beliefs by casting them as fundamentalists unfit to set policy.
“The separation of church and state is one thing, and [infringing on] religious freedom is another,” said Hermes Rodrigues Nery, who leads the National Pro-Life and Pro-Family Association. “In a democratic society, in a pluralistic society, don’t I have the right to [follow] my religious conviction? Must I be deprived of my religious conviction and my freedom of expression?”
But even within the pro-life camp, some worry evangelical forces might be overplaying their hand, while others doubt the wisdom of simply rolling back the rape and health exceptions to Brazil’s abortion ban without providing women with viable health alternatives.
The measure’s “only repercussion was the criminalization of those circumstances in which an abortion is currently permitted,” said the University of Sao Paulo’s Dalton Luiz de Paula Ramos, a member of Brazil’s National Commission of Ethics in Research and the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life.
“What care needs to be taken with respect to protecting the [affected] individuals hasn’t been addressed, so in that sense, it’s been a very superficial discussion,” Mr. Ramos said. “By failing to widen the topic to work on public policy and the like, the understanding [of how] people can build a more supportive, more humane society is lost.”
Both backers and detractors, meanwhile, expect the project to soon clear the remaining institutional hurdles, which would make Brazil one of only a handful of countries with a total abortion ban — and the only one in South America.
Abortion was legalized in the United States and much of Europe in the 1970s, but the traditionally Catholic region long resisted the idea of a “right” to the procedure. In recent years, the tide has been turning.
Uruguay in 2012 became the first South American country to allow all abortions until the 12th week of pregnancy, while socially conservative Chile this year decriminalized the practice in cases of rape, lack of fetal viability or risk to the mother’s life.
Short-lived victory?
Even in Brazil, despite the growing clout of socially conservative evangelicals, a pro-life victory could well be short-lived.
“At this moment, Brazil is moving in a different direction than the entire region,” Ms. Diniz said. “But if this passes in Congress, we’re ready to go to the Supreme Court.”
For all their differences, both pro-choice and pro-life activists agree that the amendment is finally forcing Brazilians to have an uncomfortable — but overdue — debate on reproductive rights and the limitations the state can require.
“This debate in Congress will contribute to forcing civil society to, in some way, take a more forceful stance,” Ms. Diniz predicted, “because until now, [the ban] was a threat but it wasn’t concrete.”
The nationwide protests that followed the Nov. 8 vote showed that her side, too, is now heeding the call to action.
“There are women in the streets, which is something that hadn’t happened,” she said. “So there is a side to it that’s not that terrible, which is a strengthening of civil society.”
Mr. Ramos concurred that he had high hopes for a productive national dialogue.
“Was what happened last week bad?” he wondered. “No, it wasn’t bad. It opens the possibility of great discussions. And hopefully these discussions will be marked not by ideological polarization, but by a frank debate about what matters to each one of us in society.”
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