Speaking the A word in the Brazilian Presidential Elections
Mariana Prandini Assis
Almost every day since the beginning of the presidential campaign, my cousin, a chronic Bolsonarista, sends a message on the family’s WhatsApp group where he explains why he will vote Jair Bolsonaro for the presidency once again. Among the reasons are being against the legalization of drugs, gender ideology, and abortion. Sometimes opposing the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) or being in favor of the privatization of public companies also show up in that list. But no matter what, abortion is always there.
While I strongly disagree with the reasons why abortion features in my cousin’s voting priorities, we agree on one thing: abortion should be a matter for discussion in presidential elections, particularly in Brazil, where we have some of the most restrictive laws in the world. In our legal history, abortion features as a crime since the first penal code issued after independence in 1830. In this first version of abortion criminalization, the person who performed the procedure was punished but not the pregnant one. The 1890 penal code extended punishment to the pregnant person, and the 1940 code, which remains in effect to this day, maintained the general criminalization of abortion except in two situations: in case of rape or danger to the pregnant person’s life. And yet, one in every five women, at the age of 40, has already disobeyed this law and rightly so, because it is a deeply unjust one.
Abortion criminalization is unjust for several reasons. It denies people autonomy and dignity by taking from us the ability of making choices about our reproductive lives. It breeds fear and stigma, thus creating barriers to access relevant information about our health, body, and life plans. And it disproportionately affects people from marginalized communities, who often cannot afford clandestine but safe abortion and are the only ones who suffer criminal persecution.
Despite being a matter of justice, abortion has not been treated as such in Brazilian presidential electoral cycles. Since the first democratic elections after the dictatorship in 1989, abortion has been, on the one hand, used as a tool for creating scandals and attacking candidates who have dared to speak about it as a health issue, as happened with former President Dilma Rousseff in 2010 and 2014. On both occasions, Dilma’s candidacy was tainted with the stigma of abortion and to overcome its electoral impact, she had to promise that no change would be made in our abortion law. On the other hand, abortion has been ignored as a political issue, branded as a religious or moral matter, thus liberating candidates to have their personal opinion without committing themselves to it as a matter of public policy and indeed, justice.
In the current electoral cycle, incumbent Jair Bolsonaro has done something innovative: he has branded abortion as a religious and moral issue not to eschew from public debate but rather to justify his “no abortion rights” policy. Indeed, it is because the idea of abortion rights opposes a specific conservative religious worldview upheld by his supporters that Bolsonaro pledges to make Brazil an abortion-free land. During her three years in office, Damares Alves, Bolsonaro’s former Minister of Family, Women and Human Rights, had already set in motion such policy by actively working to dismantle the institutional support that exists for victims of rape to access abortion services.
Former president and now candidate Lula has, however, signaled that we could lead the debate around abortion towards a different path. In April this year, answering a question about abortion in a debate, Lula framed the issue along the lines that Brazilian feminist movements have done now for decades. By exposing that only poor and racialized women die due to unsafe abortion, Lula committed to treating the issue as a matter of public health and social justice.
We hope that at the end of this electoral cycle, Lula can make good on his promise and perhaps even go beyond it. It is about time that we treat the liberalization of abortion not as a siloed moral issue, but rather as part of a comprehensive program of dignified reproductive care. We must shift to a new framework that disrupts the systems of economic, racial, political and religious marginalization that punishes people who have an abortion. It is a framework that fosters structures of care, within and outside the state, placing people with diverse needs and desires regarding their reproductive lives at their center. This is the only way to speak about the A word with justice.
Mariana Prandini Assis is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Federal University of Goiás, and a co-founder of the Margarida Alves Collective for People’s Legal Aid. Her research areas include feminist political and legal theory, human rights, social movements, public policy, and informality in economies, institutions, and practices. Her writing has been featured in The Guardian, Ms. Magazine, Al Jazeera and Project Syndicate.
