Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – In 2019, Mariana Leal de Souza, a 39-year-old Black woman living outside Brazil’s largest city, Sao Paulo, was struggling to come to terms with her teenage son’s suicide when she was faced with even more difficult news: she was pregnant .
“I couldn’t believe it,” the social worker told Al Jazeera in a recent video call. “Mentally and financially, I was not ready for another pregnancy after the loss of my son.”
She decided to have an abortion, but there was a problem: Brazil’s penal code only allows abortion if the pregnancy was the result of rape, the mother’s health is at risk, or doctors diagnose severe malformations in the fetus. None of this applied to Leal de Souza.
So she enlisted the help of three close friends, one of whom had ties to an underground supplier of Cytotec, a drug originally intended for ulcers but used by low-income women in Latin America as a way to terminate unwanted pregnancies. They pooled their resources and came up with $150 to purchase the drugs.
But the experience was excruciating. Leal de Souza recalled: “It felt like my body was expelling everything. I had chills, severe abdominal pain and bleeding.” She assumed these were standard complications and tried to push through it, but the weeks that followed brought her no peace.
“The bleeding didn’t stop, but I couldn’t seek treatment at the hospital for fear of legal repercussions,” she said.
Two months later, as her stomach began to swell, Leal de Souza began to fear for her life. She decided to seek help at a nearby public hospital, where she endured long waits and a barrage of requests before medical staff finally examined her.
Doctors made a surprising discovery: a fetus remained in Leal de Souza’s uterus. She had given birth to twins and only one fetus had been expelled.
The hospital concluded that this was the result of a miscarriage and spared de Souza criminal charges.
“I felt a sense of relief, but a simmering resentment remained because I knew if I were… white or [a] As a wealthy woman, I would have been able to access safe clinical care without endangering my life,” she said.
“All women have abortions, but… only the poor go to prison.”
In Brazil, Latin America’s most populous country, up to 4 million abortions are performed annually. Of these, only 2,000 or 5 percent are carried out legally.
Women who perform illegal abortions face up to three years in prison if convicted, and the doctors who perform them can spend up to four years in prison. Part of Leal de Souza’s ordeal, she said, was that she was aware of cases in which poor women were imprisoned for terminating their pregnancies.
Her story illuminates a glaring reality in Brazil, a country home to more people of African descent than any other country in the world except Nigeria: Black and marginalized women bear the brunt of legislation that criminalizes abortion.
A study conducted by anthropologist Debora Diniz found that black women were 46 percent more likely than white women to resort to unsafe abortion practices.
A federal lawmaker representing Rio de Janeiro, Luciana Boiteux, led a legislative initiative before the Supreme Court in 2017 that proposed enshrining abortion as a constitutional right.
“Decriminalizing abortion is inherently a racial justice issue,” she told Al Jazeera.
Brazil’s abortion laws have remained largely unchanged since the 1950s. What has changed is the emergence in recent years of a vibrant feminist movement, inspired at least in part by the legalization of abortion in neighboring Argentina in 2020 and the inauguration a year earlier of President Jair Bolsonaro, whose conservative government was widely seen as conservative was viewed as hostile to blacks and women.
Bolsonaro’s policies sparked a reaction in the form of campaigns such as Nem Presa Nem Morta (Neither Imprisoned Nor Dead), which fights for the decriminalization of abortion, and the women-led anti-Bolsonaro campaign Ele Nao (Not Him). Rallies have also taken place, such as a demonstration on March 8 in which thousands of protesters took to the streets in Rio de Janeiro to demand racial justice and safe, legal access to abortion.
At the march, a woman carried a placard that read: “All women get abortions, but while the rich travel to get an abortion, we poor people go to prison.”
The women’s movement in Brazil is growing, but its efforts to improve women’s reproductive health face resistance from the evangelical movement.
The influence of evangelicals on the abortion discourse in Brazil
With the Christ the Redeemer statue high above Rio de Janeiro, Brazil is typically associated with the Catholicism of its former colonizer, Portugal. But the influence of evangelical Christianity began to grow here 30 years ago, and today one in three Brazilians identifies as evangelical. By some estimates, evangelicals will make up the majority of the country’s religious adherents by 2032.
The rise of evangelicals in Brazil has helped discourage low-income women like Leal de Souza from having an abortion.
“We have seen cases where evangelical nurses exposed women and then reported them to the authorities,” Boiteux, the federal lawmaker, told Al Jazeera in an interview at her office in downtown Rio.
Jacqueline Moraes Teixeira, a sociologist and researcher at the University of Brasilia, attributed the evangelical growth to social and economic deficits in Brazil, one of the most unequal countries in the world.
“These churches fill gaps left by the state by providing education, healthcare and livelihoods, and play an indispensable role.” [lifelines] for these communities,” she told Al Jazeera.
For Leal de Souza, however, evangelicals have paralyzed the communication that is the bulwark of democracy.
“We used to have an open dialogue within my family and with neighbors who are now evangelicals. Today, dissenting opinions are met with condemnation. This silence prevented me from communicating my decision to terminate my pregnancy,” she said.
Evangelicals have also flexed their muscles on the political level. For example, of the 594 members of the National Congress, 228 deputies from 15 parties belong to the Evangelical Parliamentary Front – 202 deputies and 26 senators.
“Evangelicals in Congress have significant influence and are considered an essential ethical bastion for religious activism in politics,” said Moraes Teixeira. “Consequently, their alliances and conservative stance carry significant social weight.”
However, the final arbiter in overturning abortion restrictions is the Supreme Court.
In a meeting in September, Chief Justice Rosa Weber voted in favor of a measure to decriminalize abortions up to the 12th week of pregnancy. However, the trial was halted by another Supreme Court justice, Luis Roberto Barroso, who has since replaced the retired Weber as chief justice.
An investigation by Brazilian news agency Agencia Publica found that conservative politicians spread anti-abortion campaigns on popular social media platforms in the weeks leading up to the court hearings.
For his part, Barroso said he supported decriminalization but wanted more consideration. In an interview with Al Jazeera last month, he said: “It is a challenge for the court to go against the sentiment of 80 percent of the population. “We need to change public perception.”
“It is crucial to engage society in dialogue and address the real problem: the unjust criminalization that disproportionately affects marginalized women,” he continued. “With greater awareness, I believe attitudes can evolve.”