Phillie Casablanca
The famed 'Christ the Redeemer' statue in Rio de Janiero, Brazil.
“What is sadness for your daughter today will be happiness for a couple,” a Brazilian judge told a mother from Santa Catarina in June. The eleven-year-old girl had been sentenced to keep a pregnancy resulting from a rape; the court, denying her right to an abortion, encouraged her instead to give the baby up for adoption.
This case shocked Latin America’s largest country, a place where multiple rape-related abortion cases are reported almost weekly in the news. Official records show that a woman is raped in Brazil every ten minutes; 70 percent of the victims are under the age of eighteen. According to the Public Security Yearbook, every hour four girls under the age of thirteen are raped in the country.
At the same time, access to abortion for women and girls has diminished. In Brazil, abortion has been illegal since 1890, although exceptions were made begining in 1940 for cases of rape and life-threatening conditions. More recently, the right to have an abortion has been granted to women who are carrying a fetus with anencephaly, a condition in which parts of the brain are missing and longterm survival outside the womb is rare.
In the Santa Catarina case, the ten-year-old rape survivor’s mother took her to the hospital for an abortion.
The hospital refused to perform the procedure, arguing that it could only legally do so up to the twentieth week of pregnancy, and the girl was already past her twenty-second week.
However, abortion cutoff dates for those who qualify (including those who become pregnant via rape) do not exist in Brazilian law.
Anthropologist Debora Diniz, coordinator of the Brazilian Abortion Survey (PNA), explained via Twitter how these limits serve to further traumatize survivors of assault, leaving them with few to no options: “When sexual violence and, consequently, pregnancy are discovered late, there is secrecy, fear, lack of knowledge,” she told the Metrópoles. “So, a gestational limit is an unfair additional barrier, in which the original scene of violence against girls is ignored.”
The case ended up in court, where judge Joana Ribeiro Zimmer compelled the child to give up on seeking an abortion, suggesting that she instead should keep the pregnancy for “one or two more weeks” before inducing an early labor to give the fetus a chance of survival.
“Would you endure a little longer?” Zimmer asked the girl at the hearing. The prosecutor stressed that the fetus was “already a baby, a child” and asked if the girl would consider adoption, “instead of letting him die in agony?”
However, these arguments are neither factual nor ethical. Studies show that the chances of a fetus surviving from a pregnancy generated by girls with immature bodies are small. By contrast, induced labor under these circumstances yields a high risk of death and other long term health complications for these girls, not to mention the immense psychological harm it may cause them.
Three of the largest countries in Latin America—all Catholic-majority nations—have decriminalized abortion. But not Brazil, where the Ministry of Health recently emphasized that “every abortion is a crime.”
“It is a fanaticism that tortures girls and women,” Diniz said of the arguments behind the decision. “An eleven-year-old girl, pregnant from a rape, must be cared for. Never cornered, judged, or intimidated,” she added.
At another point in the hearing, the judge tried to convince the mother and daughter to continue with the pregnancy and pursue adoption for the child. “We have 30,000 couples who want this baby,” she added.
Dissatisfied with their refusal and against the mother's wishes, Zimmer chose to put the girl in a children’s shelter, with the excuse that she would be removed from her rapist, despite the fact that he no longer lived with her family. While the girl was in the shelter, the mother and daughter were separated for a month, which further delayed the abortion.
After the widespread outrage over the case and the intervention of other judges, the girl was released and allowed to undergo the procedure.
While Brazil’s decriminalization movement has stalled for a decade, the right to terminate a pregnancy is now guaranteed by law in other Latin American countries, including Argentina, Uruguay, Cuba, Guyana, French Guiana, Colombia, and some parts of Mexico.
Uruguay, a pioneer of abortion rights in South America, will celebrate the ten year anniversary of the Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancy Law this October. The legislation allows access to a safe and free abortion, for any reason, up to the twelfth week of pregnancy. For cases of rape with a judicial complaint, abortion is legal up to the fourteenth week.
Unlike many nations, where the abortion debate arises in the legislative or judicial spheres, in Argentina, abortion protections were originated by President Alberto Fernández in the introduction and passing of the law. With immense support from women organizing demonstrations on the streets dressed in green or wearing green bandanas, the law was approved by the Argentinian congress at the end of 2020.
Green bandanas have become the symbol of Latin America’s abortion rights struggle. The symbol has its seeds in 1970s Buenos Aires, when women wearing white diaper cloth scarves on their heads rallied in front of the presidential palace to protest the disappearance of their children during the last military dictatorship in Argentina. Members of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo still march weekly today.
Decades later, Argentinian women had a similar idea, but this time they decided to use green, Marta Alanis, founder of the group Católicas por el Derecho a Decidir (Catholics for the Right to Decide) has explained. In discussions with her friend Susana Chiarotti, they landed on green as a color of hope, nature, growth, and life—appropriate for a grassroots resistance to the “pro-life” movement.
“The term ‘life’ should come back to to us,” Chiarotti had said.
In this Catholic-majority country, conversations about legalizing abortion nevertheless spread everywhere over the following years—“in homes, neighborhoods, bakeries,” recalled Alanis.
The green bandana symbol caught on outside of Argentina as well, in Chile, Peru, and Colombia, with activists from each country creating their own versions. In September 2021, Mexico’s supreme court voted to decriminalize abortion, and this action was followed by a similar ruling in the Colombian courts in February 2022.
Three of the largest countries in Latin America—all Catholic-majority nations—have decriminalized abortion. But not Brazil, where the Ministry of Health recently emphasized that “every abortion is a crime.”
“As Christianity approaches and, later, appropriates itself from the State, we realize that the Christian vision that was once marginal starts to make the vision contrary to abortion prevail,” historian, philosopher, and theologian Gerson Leite de Moraes told the BBC. He is concerned that “the conservative wave that we see in the United States” has “reflections here, since Brazil is a poorly made copy of what happens there.”
“From the moment we have a State with its own laws, allowing or not [allowing] abortion is a sign of democratic stability and protection of fundamental rights,” Diniz told the Veja. “What is happening in the United States looks like a historic counter-process of fundamental rights, because there was a weakening of democracy in the period of the Donald Trump Administration.”
Moraes has pointed out that the anti-abortion movement originated from the Catholic church, but that it ended up being copied by evangelical Christianity. “Certain groups have found in abortion a catalytic theme, which brings [them] together, making it become a flag. They are more conservative, more radical, fundamentalist groups,” he explained.
Despite recent events, there remains some hope. “The setback in the United States will have the opposite effects for the contagion of conservative waves,” Diniz said. “The force of the green tide that left Latin America and spread, returns to ordinary Brazilian women who start to talk about violence, misogyny, and patriarchy.”