Religiously inspired political leaders in Brazil have fast-tracked a regressive anti-abortion law in the South American country’s conservative controlled congress.
The law seeks to further criminalize abortions in Brazil, equating abortions after twenty-two weeks with homicide. This would apply in cases where the pregnant person was a victim of rape as well and could result in prison sentences of six to twenty years in prison. The proposed law is a rollback of decades-old protections in Brazil and would result in longer prison sentences than are currently given to people convicted of rape.
The law seeks to further criminalize abortions in Brazil, equating abortions after twenty-two weeks with homicide.
“A woman [convicted of having an abortion] could receive up to twenty years in prison, which is more than a rapist would receive,” Michelle Fernandez, a researcher at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Brasilia, tells The Progressive. “In Brazil, a rapist receives a sentence up to ten years in prison, and with this law the victim in question would have more jail time than the rapist himself.”
Fernandez also points out that in many cases, pregnancies are detected only after twenty-two weeks, especially in the case of young girls. If the legislation were to become law, those who will be most impacted in Brazil will be young girls between the ages of ten to fourteen.
Brazil continues to see a crisis in childhood pregnancies as the result of rape, with 14,265 girls between ten and fourteen registered as having given birth in 2022 alone, according to Brazil’s Health Ministry. While the Brazilian legal code currently permits abortion in the case of rape, the proposed law would change this.
“The vast majority of legal abortions in Brazil are done for girls,” Fernandez says. “If this law passes, then girls will not be able to have access to abortions and they will have to carry out a pregnancy resulting from rape.”
The legislation was proposed by lawmaker and Evangelical pastor Sóstenes Cavalcante, who is one of the leaders of the evangelical caucus in Brazil and a member of former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party.
The fast-tracking of the new anti-abortion legislation has led to massive protests across Brazil. On June 15, tens of thousands of women took to the street with the slogan “a child is not a mother.”
This widespread condemnation of the legislation is likely to slow its advancement. But President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva could also reject the bill if it makes it through both chambers of Brazil’s legislative branch. According to Fernandez, that would send it back to the Senate.
Across Latin America (and the United States) there has been an increase of religiously inspired regressive legislation. These initiatives and laws are part of the growing influence of the global Christian supremacy movement.
Brazil is one of the hotbeds of this politicization of religion.
This process has been building since the late 1980s, but it wasn’t until the election of Bolsonaro to the presidency in 2018 that the religious right was able to obtain political influence. The religiously inspired policies pursued by the Bolsonaro administration sought to roll back legislation that sought to revoke progressive policies from previous administrations, according to Ivo Coser, who teaches at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
“Neo-Pentecostal churches were grouped around the agenda and values of the Bolsonaro government,” Coser, who has researched the far right Christian movements, says. “Not only did [the Neo-Pentecostal churches] deal with issues related to values and rights, but they also expanded their influence, for example to the field of education.”
The overarching goal of the religious right in Brazil echoes the global movement seeking to put in place religiously inspired governments, commonly known as the dominionist movement.
Jeff Abbott
A church in Guatemala City.
Other countries in the hemisphere, including Guatemala, Peru, El Salvador, and Argentina, have seen an increase in attention from promoters of Chrisitan dominionism, especially the acolytes of the New Apostolic Reformation and other Christian supremacist movements. These far-right Evangelical and Catholic networks have helped spread religiously inspired legislation across the hemisphere.
In Guatemala in 2017, a law similar to the one currently being discussed in Brazil, known as the Law for the Protection of Life and Family, was first proposed by congress member Aníbal Rojas—who at the time was with the rightwing Evangelical VIVA party—with support from the evangelical alliance in the country. The law was approved in March 2022, before it was repealed due to being declared unconstitutional.
While the law increased prison sentences for women who received the procedure, it also imposed new criminal charges against doctors who performed abortions. But the Guatemalan law also went a step further, outlawing marriage equality and labeling people in the LGBTQ+ community as “abnormal.”
U.S.-based far-right religious groups have voiced support for such legislation, with representatives from the Family Research Council joining Guatemala in 2022—the day after the country’s congress approved the family law—to celebrate the declaration by President Alejandro Giammattei of Guatemala as the “Pro-Life capital of Ibero-America.”
It isn’t clear if these U.S.-based evangelical groups have had a hand in the promotion of the reform in Brazil. But their growing influence and promotion of dominionist ideologies across the hemisphere are likely to inspire other initiatives that seek to further divide the country.
“We have a quite polarized country,” Fernandez says.