At Least Two Hundred Women Die from Unsafe Abortions Every Year in Brazil
Have you ever been forbidden to choose what to do with your own body? This is what happens to Brazilian women every day.
In Brazil, since 1940, abortion has been considered a crime, but nowadays, according to the law, women should be able to have a legal abortion if they have been raped, if the baby is ancephalus, or if the pregnancy is risky for the woman’s life, but even with the law, women are often forbbiden to have a legal abortion. One event that proves that having a legal abortion in Brazil is very complicated is that according to Human Rights Watch, in August 2020, a 10-year-old girl got pregnant after her uncle had been raping her for 4 years, and the hospital that she stayed in didn’t want to do an abortion, even though this hospital wasn’t allowed to make this decision, but the current president of Brazil, Bolsonaro, didn’t do anything about it. Because she was only ten years old and wasn’t prepared to have a baby, after many protests, a judge intervened, and she had the permission to abort. On the day that she was going to have the abortion, people that were against it went to the hospital, blocked the entrace, and started to call the girl a killer, while her rapist uncle wasn’t in jail yet because he was a fugitive. The girl had to enter the hospital through a secret entrance, and she finally had the abortion, after being raped, called a killer, and having suffered mentally and physically.
Women not being able to have a safe and legal abortion leads to 200 women dying per year and a lot of expensive debts to the country from hospital stays after unsuccessful abortions at unsafe clinics. Just those two facts should be enough to explain why abortion should be legalized, but there are many other reasons, as aborting could be a trauma for the woman, and if it’s not legalized, she won’t have any support, and that can cause many psychological problems for her. Another reson is that if abortion were legal, the government would be able to control the situation, so for example, if a woman was in doubt if she should abort or not, the government could give her support and could try to make her to think that it is better to keep the baby, and then she would be able to choose what she wanted to do.
The topic of abortion is often discussed, and many women protest for it to be legalized as soon as possible, but unfortunately, they are not heard as much as they would like to be, and one of the reasons that explains why this happens is because Bolsonaro, the current president of Brazil, is against abortion, “As far as it depends on me and my government, abortion will never be approved on our country.”, he said. Another thing that makes abortion continue to be illegal is because Brazil is a sexist coutry, so people often ignore what women have to say and prefer to listen to a man, and usually Brazilian men are against abortion, but it doesn’t make any sense for a man to decide what a woman should do with her own body, because it is going to be her that will have to deal with the consequences, so they should at least be able to choose what is better for themselves, and not the country or a man.
Usually conservative people, that are traditional and follow the religions of Spiritism, Hinduism, or Christianity are against legalizing abortion, and most of their arguments include their religions or what the fetus would feel while being aborted, but Brazil is a secular country, so their beliefs shouldn’t be able to tell other people what they can or can’t do with their own bodies. And according to Kate Connors, a representative for ACOG (American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists), the fetus only feels pain after 26 weeks of pregnancy. “The science shows that based on gestational age, the fetus is not capable of feeling pain until the third trimester,” she says. And feminists or men who support feminism are in favor of legalizing abortion, saying that is better for the country and for women, and it will not change anything in men’s lives, so it makes more sense to legalize abortion in Brazil.
Legalizing abortion is also a topic that influences social inequity, because according to Politize.com , black, indigenous, and poor women are those who suffer the most while aborting, because those women usually don’t have money to go to a clinic where the doctors are better and the process is safer. And sometimes they don’t have enough study to know the dangers of aborting, so they end up aborting at home, and that can bring many health and mental problems to her and to her baby.
You can see in the graph that unfortunately black, indigenous, and poor women are also the people that abort more, because they usually are not mentally or physically prepared, or they don’t have time and money to raise a child that is very expensive and it takes a lot of responsibility and maturity, or to even be pregnant, which is a hard job as well, because they would have to stop working, to eat more, and to rest, without any support. How are they going to do this? Would you be able to be pregnant and work hard at the same time?
For abortion be legalized, Brazilian people that support abortion should start organizing bigger protests, by inviting more people to them; that will call more attention from the govenment. People from other countries could help too by talking about it to their friends and family, in order to make more people to know about the abortion injustice in Brazil. If many people start doing this, hopefully, someday we will be able to change the law by legalizing abortion in all cases.
