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Brazilians Re-examining Abortion Laws |
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Albert
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Posted: February 03 2016 at 12:08pm |
Surge of Zika Virus Has Brazilians Re-examining Strict Abortion LawsBy SIMON ROMERO At least 10 percent of babies with microcephaly have no mental deficits. Indeed, these children end up “intellectually and developmentally normal,” said Dr. Constantine A. Stratakis, a pediatric geneticist and a scientific director at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda, Md. But any child whose head measures “three or four standard deviations below the mean, then it’s very unlikely that you will be dealing with normal intelligence.” In Brazil, abortions are allowed only in cases of rape, anencephaly or when the mother’s life is in danger. Until recently, conservative lawmakers had been seeking to make legal abortions harder to get, reflecting the influence of Roman Catholic leaders and the increasingly powerful preachers at the helm of a growing evangelical Christian movement. Led by Eduardo Cunha, the conservative speaker of Brazil’s lower house, an influential bloc of evangelical Christian lawmakers introduced legislation in 2015 to make it harder for rape victims to get abortions by requiring them to undergo a police report and forensic medical exam. Another part of the bill seeks to make it a crime for people to assist in an abortion or encourage a pregnant woman to have one. But now some activists here are drawing comparisons between the Zika epidemic and the debate over abortion in the United States in the 1960s, when an outbreak of rubella, a virus that can also cause microcephaly, resulted in thousands of babies born with birth defects. The concerns over rubella, also called German measles, paved the way for states like California to allow abortion when a fetus is substantially damaged. “Pregnant women across Brazil are now in a panic,” said Silvia Camurça, a director of SOS Corpo, a feminist group in Recife. “The fears over the Zika virus are giving us a rare opening to challenge the religious fundamentalists who put the lives of thousands of women at risk in Brazil each year to maintain laws belonging in the dark ages.” As in the United States before the Supreme Court’s legalization of abortion in 1973, a clandestine abortion industry thrives throughout Brazil. Some illegal providers charge thousands of dollars to do the procedures, risking arrest and the closing of their clinics. Estimates on the number of illegal abortions in Brazil vary widely. Drawing on hospital records showing that about 150,000 women seek medical attention each year for complications from illegal abortions, Brazilian scholars estimate that as many as 850,000 abortions are performed illegally in the country on an annual basis. While Brazil’s abortion laws are less stringent than those in some other Latin American countries — in El Salvador, for instance, abortion is not allowed under any circumstances — illegal procedures are not treated lightly. One Brazilian woman was handcuffed to a hospital bed and arrested after she sought medical attention for a botched abortion. A judge sentenced other women in the city of Campo Grande who had undergone illegal abortions to do community service in day care centers, arguing that it would teach them to love children. A 9-year-old girl who said she had been raped by her stepfather was allowed to have an abortion in Recife, but only after a heated national battle in which officials overcame objections from religious leaders. Debora Diniz, an anthropologist and researcher at Anis, an abortion rights group planning to file a lawsuit seeking to legalize abortion in cases of microcephaly, likened the Zika crisis to the long struggle to allow abortion in cases of anencephaly, which lasted about a decade. “We have an epidemic, an emergency, and the public health sector is not properly caring for women’s rights,” she said. “We have constitutional rights at risk, the right to health care and human dignity.” Religious leaders are vowing to resist any effort to ease Brazil’s abortion laws because of Zika. “Nothing justifies an abortion,” the Rev. Luciano Brito, a spokesman for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Olinda and Recife, told reporters. “Just because a fetus has microcephaly won’t make us favorable” to changing the law. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/04/world/americas/zika-virus-brazil-abortion-laws.html?_r=0
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