Abortion’s a crime in Brazil, but at the same time abortion is an ordinary event of women’s lives. Only to give you an idea, at the age of 40, one in five had had at least one abortion. I mean, illegal abortion.
It’s five million women. It’s 10 times the prison population of Brazil. We have at this moment a national debate forbidding to discuss gender at public schools, only to give you an idea of how difficult any topic related to women’s equality and rights are difficult to be faced by politics.
So it’s not a good moment to discuss women’s rights and women’s needs, but we have to because we’re facing an epidemic. We do have public health system, but in fact what we have is that women have a lot of barriers to access contraception information. Facing the situation that we have in Brazil right now related to the Zika virus epidemic, we decided to move to the Supreme Court to guarantee women’s rights, because we have no possibility to have any good answer from the national congress.
In a situation of an epidemic like the Zika virus epidemic, what we are first of all demanding is access to information and access to health care services. When we talk about access to information, what does it mean to these everyday women? They need to access contraception.
They need to be protected against a mosquito. They need basic sanitation. And of course, they need to access legal and safe abortion, not to put their life in risk.
But also, they are demanding social protection for their future children who might be affected by the epidemics. Since we announced that we are planning to propose a new case, a new constitutional case to the Brazilian Supreme Court, the first reaction of the national congress is to announce a new bill to criminalize more abortion in Brazil. Nowadays it’s a crime with 10 years of sentence, and we have a national deputy who is proposing to have 20 years of jail.
We have a strong, young feminist movement in Brazil, so they are a new generation going to the streets and speaking loudly about women’s rights. And of course, we have a kind of hope that something will come from this new generation. But we have at the same time a very conservative political scenario, an economic crisis, an impeachment in process, and a national congress that is much more church than a congress.
