Abortion in Brazil

Modern Brazil has always criminalized abortion to varying degrees. After independence in 1822, the country’s successive penal codes of 1830, 1890, and 1940 all explicitly criminalized the procedure. Since the 1890 code, legislation has also included exceptions for therapeutic procedures. The 1940 code, still in effect today, addresses abortion in five different articles, criminalizing both the pregnant woman and the person who performs the procedure, with increased penalties if the latter causes injuries or death, if the woman is younger than fourteen, or if she is unable to give informed consent. The code also specifically allows physicians to perform therapeutic abortion if a woman’s life is in danger or if the pregnancy resulted from rape (Roth Reference Roth2020). Consequently, medical guidelines, updated periodically since the 1920s, have regulated the provision of procedures permitted by law (Roth Reference Roth2023). Since 2012, Brazilian jurisprudence also permits abortion in cases of fetal anencephaly, a fatal congenital condition that causes a fetus to develop without large portions of the brain and skull (Diniz Reference Diniz2014).

As the social scientist Maria Isabel Baltar da Rocha (Reference Rocha1994) has demonstrated, there were few efforts to modify abortion legislation at the federal level before the late twentieth century. The first proposal, presented in 1949 by Monsenhor Alfredo de Arruda Câmara, attempted to remove the provisions for therapeutic abortions in the Penal Code, illustrating the central role of the Catholic Church in modern abortion politics. After 1971, congressional proposals to both decriminalize and further criminalize abortion became more commonplace, although the tendency favored criminalization. There were, however, some notable attempts at legalization. In 1975, federal deputy João Menezes of the Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (MDB, Brazilian Democratic Movement), the country’s sole opposition party from 1966 to 1979, sponsored Law 177, which would have allowed for abortion for any reason until the twelfth week of gestation.Footnote ¹ Most feminist groups discreetly supported the bill, although the Conselho Nacional de Mulheres do Brasil (CNMB, National Council of Brazilian Women), led by Fonseca, was more public in its support. While Mala Htun (Reference Htun2003) has demonstrated that Brazil’s military regime was amenable to the liberalization of legislation on certain social issues, such as family property and divorce, Menezes’s bill proved too controversial among Catholic interest groups to gain traction. Nonetheless, it is significant that Menezes succeeded in drafting such polemical legislation, reflecting growing awareness of the urgency of the matter as well as increasing space for opposition politics after 1974.

As in other Latin American nations during the Cold War, debates over both the decriminalization and the legalization of abortion occurred against a backdrop of authoritarian governments’ pronatalist efforts to foment population growth as essential to economic development and national security (Monteiro and Momesso Reference Monteiro and Regina Momesso2022; Weinberg Reference Weinberg2023). Yet these regimes also worried about the alleged connection between overpopulation and communism, and some supported coercive family planning programs as a means of population control (Buckley Reference Buckley2018; Felitti Reference Felitti2010; López Reference López2014; Marcus-Delgado Reference Marcus-Delgado2020). Regardless, right-wing governments tended to oppose abortion rights, as they challenged traditional notions of gender roles and violated Catholic doctrine. In Brazil, the military dictatorship initially supported population growth as a form of economic development, and the military and its allies in the church were staunchly pronatalist in the first decade after the 1964 coup (Monteiro and Momesso Reference Monteiro and Regina Momesso2022; Weinberg Reference Weinberg2023). Yet by the mid- to late 1970s, military rulers had come to support a limited slate of women’s rights, such as legalizing divorce and providing access to the pill, in the belief that the modernization of social and labor relations would contribute to national progress (Dias et al. Reference Dias, Bonan, Nakano, Maksud and Antônio Teixeira2018; Htun Reference Htun2003). Moreover, Brazil approved the 1974 World Population Plan, which advocated state provision of family planning information and services for all citizens (Fonseca Reference Fonseca1976). In 1979, the federal government decriminalized the advertising of contraception and other family planning methods (Figueiredo Reference Figueiredo1979), which had been banned since 1941 (Vargas Reference Vargas1941), although the accompanying ban on abortion advertising remained (Rocha Reference Rocha1994). In short, by the early 1980s, the government’s public policy concerning family planning sought to modernize Brazilian society without significantly disrupting the social order.Footnote ² It was in this environment, one in which politicians were overwhelmingly opposed to decriminalizing abortion but beginning to favor family planning, that feminists began publicly advocating for reproductive rights.

The origins of abortion rights activism in authoritarian Brazil

In the mid- to late 1970s, Brazilian feminists began organizing around women’s rights, specifically regarding sexual and reproductive health, against the backdrop of redemocratization (Barsted Reference Barsted1992). As in most of Latin America, a demand for abortion rights was largely absent from organized feminist movements in Brazil before this moment. ^{Footnote 3} Older feminists such as Fonseca viewed the need to decriminalize abortion through the lens of public health, because criminalization caused higher rates of maternal mortality and morbidity due to unsafe clandestine procedures. Her prodictatorship sympathies aside, Fonseca’s establishment connections were advantageous in efforts to decriminalize abortion. ^{Footnote 4} Fonseca “opened windows and created bridges” to traditionally conservative spaces, prominent feminist Jacqueline Pitanguy recalled.Footnote ⁵ Fonseca connected married women’s lack of full civil rights to the issue of abortion: “Even with a woman’s right to decide to have an abortion, which is the right over her own body, he [the husband] can interfere.”Footnote ⁶

In 1972, Fonseca, as president of the CNMB, organized a national feminist conference titled “Women’s Participation in National Development,” where she publicly centered sexual and reproductive rights.Footnote ⁷ For Fonseca, abortion was a question of public health, one exacerbated by Brazil’s stark socioeconomic divisions. Because the poorest classes “are those that suffer most from the consequences of illegal abortion,” argued Fonseca in 1976, Congress should not continue to ignore this “grave social problem.”Footnote ⁸ In a 1977 interview, Fonseca put it in even starker terms: “I support [abortion] because I support life. Those who are dying are poor women without the financial resources to pay for good clinics and receive appropriate care.” Moreover, the criminalization of abortion did not reduce its numbers: “You can’t block the sun with a sieve,” Fonseca mused.Footnote ⁹

Younger feminists, in contrast, began conceiving of abortion as a fundamental women’s right and a matter of sexual and reproductive self-determination, in addition to a pressing issue of health and safety. In the early 1970s, groups of middle-class women started gathering in the country’s major cities to discuss gender-related issues as more Brazilian women pursued university studies and entered the white-collar workforce. According to Alves and Pitanguy (Reference Alves and Pitanguy2022), in Rio de Janeiro in 1973, they began meeting with other like-minded women, such as Sandra Azeredo, Eunice Gutman, and Leila Linhares Barsted. Whereas Fonseca tended to discuss abortion in terms of public health, this younger generation, steeped in the discourse of what is often called feminism’s “second wave” and the global sexual revolution, emphasized women’s bodily autonomy, sexual self-determination, and motherhood as a choice. Simultaneously, homemakers and working-class women across the country began forming mothers’ clubs, assuming leadership roles in neighborhood associations, and bringing their gendered concerns to the organized labor movement. Although these two parallel movements had some overlapping demands, including in the realm of reproductive rights, working-class groups did not always view abortion with the same urgency that their middle-class counterparts did, prioritizing calls for improved public services like day care and health care instead (Alvarez Reference Alvarez1990).

Testimonies from domestic worker activists, the majority of whom were Black women, reveal agnosticism or even resistance to the mainstream feminist agenda of expanding abortion rights. According to domestic-worker movement leader Nair Jane de Castro Lima, active in Rio during the 1970s and 1980s: “The feminists were around, and they often supported us, but they were very concerned with the issue of abortion. That was uncomfortable for many domestic workers because of the origins of the [domestic workers’] movement in Catholic ministries. We listened to the feminists’ opinions, but we didn’t always follow their advice.”Footnote ¹⁰ Moreover, a survey conducted by feminists at a women metalworkers’ conference in 1977 revealed that of the thirty women questioned, twenty-six disapproved of abortion, and only four viewed it as the right option when faced with an unwanted pregnancy, albeit with some moral caveats: “Yes, you should abort [if the pregnancy is unwanted]. I know it is wrong, we should always avoid getting pregnant, but we should also prevent someone coming into this world only to suffer,” responded one.Footnote ¹¹

Even when working-class women did not overtly disapprove of abortion, many felt uncomfortable and distrustful in middle-class feminist spaces. For example, a Black activist interviewed in 1983 who had gotten her start in politics via a neighborhood association and later the PT, recalled an exchange in a majority-white women’s group in the early 1980s: “They’d begun to talk about this abortion business, abortion this, abortion that, proletarian women, who knows what else … I said, ‘Fine, but where’s the favelada here? Where’s the Black woman? Why are you speaking for us?’” (Patai Reference Patai1988, 94).

Besides the federal deputy Benedita da Silva, an advocate for domestic workers and later an outspoken opponent of forced sterilization, there were few Black women in the leadership of the mainstream feminist movement in this period (Caldwell Reference Caldwell2022; Rodrigues and Freitas Reference Rodrigues and Gonçalves Freitas2021). Starting in the 1980s, Afro-Brazilian feminists articulated a vision of reproductive justice that challenged pronatalist tendencies from within the mostly male-led Black movement while affirming the right to bear and raise children with safety and dignity (Caldwell Reference Caldwell2007). Black feminists continued, however, to be underrepresented in activism aimed specifically at decriminalizing abortion. After experiencing frustration at a lack of attention paid to sterilization abuse within the mainstream feminist movement, they began organizing their own collectives, focusing on both comprehensive reproductive health and domestic violence, while explicitly rejecting the white feminist emphasis on abortion, which they felt failed to capture their intersectional experiences (Rodrigues and Freitas Reference Rodrigues and Gonçalves Freitas2021; Caldwell Reference Caldwell2007; Damasco et al. Reference Damasco, Maio and Monteiro2012). In fact, several scholars have shown that denouncing sterilization abuse in particular was a primary catalyst for Black feminists like Sueli Carneiro and Edna Roland to form groups such as Geledés, which were autonomous from both the broader Black movement and mainstream feminism (Biroli Reference Biroli, Miguel and Puzone2019; Roland Reference Roland1995, Reference Roland2009; Damasco et al. Reference Damasco, Maio and Monteiro2012; Santos Reference Santos2012).

Thus, the abortion rights movement’s rank and file comprised overwhelmingly middle- and upper-middle-class white women who tended to move in institutional and social spaces predominated by those of their same socioeconomic milieu—a product of Brazil’s social and racial segregation due to inequality and a long history of racial discrimination stemming from chattel slavery. Despite the movement’s efforts to appeal to working-class women, this early failure to create a multiclass and multiracial coalition ultimately hampered its ability to establish reproductive rights as a priority of the democratic transition and, as Zaremberg and Almeida (Reference Zaremberg and Rezende de Almeida2022) argue, later precluded the sort of ideologically diverse, multiparty alliances necessary to bring about decisive change in abortion legislation. Blofield (Reference Blofield2008) has argued that this dynamic was consistent across much of Latin America, where pronounced socioeconomic disparities made large-scale feminist mobilization difficult when confronting powerful adversaries.

Despite the challenges of organizing such a diverse field, the 1970s were fruitful for Brazilian feminists. In 1975, several loosely affiliated feminist groups sponsored an event to commemorate the UN’s International Women’s Year. For Alves and Pitanguy (Reference Alves and Pitanguy2022), this event marked the official beginning of Brazil’s fledgling feminist movement, leading to the articulation of a nascent vision for women’s rights. In 1976, middle-class feminists founded the Centro da Mulher Brasileira (CMB, Brazilian Women’s Center), Brazil’s “first explicitly [modern] feminist organization,” which served as a space for “reflection groups” to discuss what Comba Marques remembers as “the new agenda,” including sexuality and abortion (Alves and Pitanguy Reference Alves and Pitanguy2022, 121). By the end of the decade, CMB members, many of whom had cut their political teeth in clandestine leftist organizations after the coup, encountered resistance from the new heterogeneous left on issues of reproductive rights, not only because of left’s proximity to the progressive wing of the Catholic Church but also due to suspicion from orthodox leftists that so-called women’s issues evinced a bourgeois, liberal feminism imported from abroad (Alvarez Reference Alvarez1990; Alves and Pitanguy Reference Alves and Pitanguy2022; Barsted Reference Barsted1992; Machado and Maciel Reference Machado and Aves Maciel2017). To some extent, the latter critique had elements of truth, as the return of exiled feminists from Europe after 1979 appears to have helped consolidate feminists’ demands for abortion rights. For example, the group SOS Corpo, in the northeastern city of Recife, included formerly exiled feminists who brought leftist feminist ideas from France to Brazil (Ávila Reference Ávila2009).

As part of their organizing efforts, activists discussed abortion as one of the primary issues of concern in looking forward to a postdictatorship political landscape (Alvarez Reference Alvarez1990). In 1975 and 1976, São Paulo-based activists founded two important feminist periodicals, Brasil Mulher and Nós Mulheres, which cultivated a readership of feminists invested in the potential for social change embedded in the political opening while aiming to reach working-class women by emphasizing themes like day care and women’s labor organizing (Alvarez Reference Alvarez1990; Leite Reference Leite2003).Footnote ¹² Both ran several articles that bemoaned the prevalence of clandestine abortions and called for more comprehensive reproductive health care and better, more reliable birth control.Footnote ¹³ “The nonexistence of effective and safe contraceptives, the prohibition of abortion, and the lack of concern for sexual education and health care are factors that contribute to the denial of women’s sexuality,” wrote the editors of Brasil Mulher in 1977.Footnote ¹⁴

In 1980, Pitanguy published a guest editorial in Jornal do Brasil titled “Abortion: The Right to Choose,” in which she lamented its ongoing illegality. The recent arrest of an abortion provider and two of his patients in Rio had prompted her to pen the essay, which addressed abortion in the cerebral language of academic, middle-class feminism.Footnote ¹⁵ She rejected the stigma attached to women who sought out non-procreative sex and avoided traditional notions of femininity and motherhood. Pitanguy (Reference Romaní1980) also referred to the “dictatorship” of the body that prevented women from deciding matters concerning their own reproductive lives. In doing so, she expanded the definition of tyranny beyond an orthodox political one and suggested that a return to democracy would not necessarily bring about reproductive freedom. While leftist feminists such as Pitanguy zealously demanded an end to the dictatorship, they remained doubtful that a nominally democratic state would guarantee justice for Brazilian women.

Pitanguy’s column mentioned class and race, noting, as did Fonseca, the difficulties that poor women faced in a country offering little in the way of quality public services. She indicted the social conditions that rendered raising a child a challenging, isolating project, the burdens of which tended to fall disproportionately upon impoverished mothers. Crucially, she foregrounded the language of choice, articulating a defense of a woman’s fundamental right to bodily self-determination as a political and ethical obligation of contemporary societies: “What is being debated is a historic new right: the right to a conscious sexuality, the right to optional motherhood… We oppose totalitarian laws with the democratic freedom of the right to choose” (Romaní Reference Romaní1980, 11). Her essay reflected the political context of the day; with a transition to democracy on the horizon, civil society activists were anticipating that a new democratic state would serve as a guarantor of individual and collective rights. In a 2022 interview, Pitanguy told us that her editorial marked, for her, an inflection point in the struggle to decriminalize abortion, as it was the first moment that a representative of the increasingly coherent Brazilian feminist movement publicly and explicitly expressed support for abortion rights. ^{Footnote 16} The column further galvanized feminists to organize events designed to, according to Alves and Pitanguy (Reference Alves and Pitanguy2022, 139), “break the wall of silence that surrounded the topic of abortion.”

In the following years, activists founded the newspaper O sexo finalmente explícito, whose title cleverly referenced disclaimers appearing at the beginning of popular films that depicted sex but, according to the periodical’s founders, did so from a male perspective.Footnote ¹⁷ The publication articulated a vision of reproductive rights that was more in line with what Black feminists in the US would later call reproductive justice (Luna and Luker Reference Luna and Luker2013). O sexo’s view of reproductive freedom was as committed to opposing forced sterilizations as it was to repealing abortion prohibitions, conceiving of abortion within a broader slate of reproductive rights, including the right to have and raise a child in safe and dignified conditions. The newspaper’s organizers, who included Marques, Eunice Gutman, Hildete Melo, Pitanguy, Alves, and Barsted wrote in its inaugural issue that “obtaining the necessary conditions for a woman to control her own fertility is a distant goal and the path toward it will be exhausting because it is not a goal to be achieved in isolation, but rather needs to be in concert with an agenda that brings about profound changes in society.”Footnote ¹⁸ They believed that reproductive rights could be guaranteed only through the realization of a comprehensive agenda of social uplift, a platform indicative of the movement’s origins both in the homegrown political left and in socialist feminist circles cultivated in exile.

In 1980, the year of Pitanguy’s editorial, the rape and impregnation of a twelve-year-old girl by her stepfather on the impoverished outskirts of Rio de Janeiro gave feminists an opportunity to expand their abortion activism to the realm of therapeutic procedures (Alves and Pitanguy Reference Alves and Pitanguy2022). Despite the 1940 Penal Code’s allowance for abortions in cases of rape, access remained unregulated. With reluctant medical practitioners and widespread misinformation, most Brazilians believed that abortion was criminalized in all situations. Pitanguy told us that feminists, faced with an unfavorable political climate for full decriminalization in the early 1980s due to reticence from the left, decided to expand their efforts beyond lobbying for decriminalization to focus equally on more viable campaigns to increase access to legal abortion.Footnote ¹⁹ In this case, the girl’s mother petitioned a judge for an abortion for her daughter, whose pregnancy was in its second trimester. Despite the Penal Code’s clear authorization in cases of rape, the presiding judge abstained from authorizing the procedure. Upon learning of the judge’s abstention and local physicians’ subsequent decision not to provide care, feminists from the CMB and other groups, including Fonseca, mobilized to aid the girl and her family, offering to pay for the procedure at a private clinic, as women of means had long done. According to an interview with a local newspaper, the CMB intended to “give a sign of life of our existence and show that we are concerned with helping to find a solution to this problem.”Footnote ²⁰ But the girl’s mother, a migrant factory worker named Cícera, feared that a clandestine abortion would place her daughter’s life at risk, and the family opted to carry the pregnancy to term (Oliveira and Prado Reference Oliveira and Prado1981).

The “case of Cícera,” as the episode came to be known, proved an important moment for Brazilian feminists. Alves and Pitanguy (Reference Alves and Pitanguy2022) report that it sparked press coverage on both legal and clandestine abortion in Brazil, prompting feminists to take advantage of the upsurge in interest. They gave interviews, published articles, handed out pamphlets, and conducted a public opinion survey that revealed that the majority of respondents did not think women should be arrested for having illegal abortions (Alves and Pitanguy Reference Alves and Pitanguy2022; Barsted Reference Barsted1992). CMB member Eunice Gutman (Reference Gutman1983) even produced a short documentary advocating decriminalization; it follows Cícera’s teenage daughter as she works in a factory to support her toddler. Several years later, the girl told a magazine, “Having children young is very damaging. You are obligated to upend your entire life.”Footnote ²¹ The case led federal deputy João Menezes, who had sponsored the failed bill to decriminalize abortion in 1975, to author another piece of legislation proposing the expansion of therapeutic abortion provisions to include fetal abnormalities and pregnancies of women in situations of social and/or economic vulnerability. Although Menezes’s colleagues promptly rejected the bill, Barsted (Reference Barsted1992) argues that it inspired certain feminists to adopt a “gradualist” position of pressuring the federal government to expand access to legal abortion while another contingent continued to push for full decriminalization.

Complicating matters further was the country’s political opposition, which had been bolstered by amnesty in 1979, and the gradual resumption of elections for all offices except the presidency in the early 1980s. In 1982, when Fonseca gave a lecture titled “Social Justice and Abortion” at the national conference of the Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil (OAB, Order of Brazilian Lawyers), the Brazilian bar association, she faced this problem head-on.Footnote ²² In the speech, Fonseca argued that restrictive abortion laws were problems “of health, of social justice, and a woman’s right to control her own body.”Footnote ²³ As she remembered later, even left-wing lawyers associated with the OAB rejected her defense of decriminalization: In a roundtable event with other feminists a year after her presentation, Fonseca recalled how the more progressive OAB members accused her of division: “Did you come here to divide the people’s fight?” she remembered hearing. “What? Women aren’t the people?” she responded. At stake was the newly reconfigured left’s alliance with the Catholic Church, evidenced especially by the PT’s alliance between sectors of the church opposed to dictatorship and the working-class and progressive intellectuals. “We need to be good with the church,” opposition politicians informed Fonseca.Footnote ²⁴

Advances and setbacks as Brazil’s democratic transition accelerates

As redemocratization accelerated in the early 1980s, feminists successfully centered the decriminalization of abortion within their movement. Yet they were less successful in convincing their allies on the left. This disconnect between support for decriminalization from several politically influential feminists and a broader opposition movement largely not interested in supporting abortion rights continued to complicate any advances. Yet there was perhaps hope on the horizon: By 1982, the military regime had authorized the resumption of gubernatorial elections, and new opposition parties had emerged. For the feminist movement, these elections provided a crucial opportunity to elect feminist candidates, many of whom openly discussed abortion.Footnote ²⁵

Taking advantage of electoral reinvigoration, three hundred feminists from all over Brazil gathered in Rio in 1983 for a meeting, where they determined the movement’s reproductive rights agenda (Barsted Reference Barsted1992). There, the former communist party member Zuleika Alambert delivered a manifesto, in which she again articulated a vision of reproductive freedom that, in addition to advocating for the creation of “material conditions so that those women who want to have children can have them and raise them with dignity,” defended the right to terminate unwanted pregnancies and condemned the state’s efforts to curb poor women’s birth rates. Identifying reproductive policies across the political spectrum as “patriarchal and sexist,” Alambert admonished the democratic opposition’s critique of the dictatorship’s attempts to control birth rates without also defending a woman’s right to voluntary motherhood: “Being against family planning is nothing but political leftism, childish radicalism, and a complete underestimation of the weight of unwanted motherhood.” ^{Footnote 26} Her manifesto signed off with what had become the slogan of the abortion rights movement: “Our bodies belong to us!”

Perhaps the most important feminist victory in 1982 was the election of Lúcia Arruda (PT) to the Legislative Assembly of the state of Rio de Janeiro. For the first time, a self-described feminist with an explicitly feminist agenda had been elected to a legislative body in Brazil. In a 2022 interview, Alves recalled with nostalgia that Arruda’s tenure in the state legislature reflected the nonhierarchical dynamics of the feminist movement at the time: “How I miss that moment; decisions were made collectively, and Lucia surrounded herself with people from the feminist community.”Footnote ²⁷ Once in office, Arruda created a commission on reproductive rights, sponsored a series of meetings and seminars with activists, and eventually proposed a bill obligating the state’s public health apparatus to provide therapeutic abortions. The bill underscored the need to create better protocols for legal abortion access, even more pressing as the country began expanding health-care access through the Instituto Nacional de Assistência Médica da Previdência Social (INAMPS, National Social Security Institute for Medical Assistance), created in 1977. According to Arruda and her feminist colleagues, without regulatory mechanisms, the right to a therapeutic procedure remained a nominal one, especially for poor women.Footnote ²⁸ Arruda’s bill, which became Law 832 when the Legislative Assembly passed it in 1985, represented a major gain for the feminist movement, yet it was short-lived. Despite initially signing the bill into law, Governor Lionel Brizola of the leftist Democratic Labor Party revoked it several months later under pressure from Cardinal Eugênio Sales, the former archbishop of Rio de Janeiro and a prominent abortion opponent. In what seems in retrospect like a preview of the tactics later employed by the antiabortion movement and the left’s capitulation during the Constituent Assembly, Sales launched a full-frontal attack on the new legislation, distributing statements opposing the bill to be read at mass in all churches in the diocese and on the radio (Barsted Reference Barsted1992).Footnote ²⁹ Sales also operationalized his close connections with state politicians, meeting with legislators and sending a condemnatory letter to the legislature in the lead-up to Brizola’s overturning of the law.Footnote ³⁰ The state deputy Zeir Porto, for example, defended Sales’s antiabortion politicking: “The prelate acted correctly,” Porto argued, as the law “leaves room for the practice of abortion to be institutionalized in Rio de Janeiro.”Footnote ³¹ Arruda, in response, denounced the church’s strong-arming. The kowtowing to Sales “disrespected the independence of the legislature and [constituted] a type of return to the Middle Ages when the church directly interfered in questions of state.”Footnote ³²

As Barsted (Reference Barsted1992) points out, and as this episode makes clear, the relationship between church and state remained strong in Brazil, despite official separation. Although Brizola’s about-face was a disappointing setback for the movement, as he was a heavyweight of the Brazilian left, feminists had become used to the fickleness of all politicians regarding abortion rights.Footnote ³³ Even the newly formed PT was reluctant to express support for abortion, a dynamic that persists to this day. The PT’s ties to the church became cemented in the period after the election of Pope John Paul II in 1979, when the Vatican more forcibly opposed any advances in sexual and reproductive rights (Correa Reference Correa2010). Moreover, the PT’s emphasis on material concerns further directed its attention away from abortion, as the party did not view it as a priority for the working class. Yet despite the defeat, feminists were buoyed by the public interest the bill had generated: “If we lost institutionally, then we have won socially: Our initiative served to make evident the elitism of our legislation, that recognizes rights in theory, but does not provide materially for their realization,” wrote the editors of O sexo. Footnote ³⁴

Meanwhile, federal deputy Cristina Tavares of the Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, PMDB) sponsored a bill to expand the situations in which abortion was permitted by law, indicative of the direction feminists would pursue after the Constituent Assembly. Tavares’s bill, which her colleagues promptly rejected, would have legalized abortion in cases of confirmed or suspected fetal deformities or if a woman did not have the financial conditions to raise a child, in addition to expanding the preexisting exceptions to include risks to mental as well as physical health.Footnote ³⁵ Although several abortion rights advocates, including Fonseca, supported Tavares’s bill, it was not universally popular among feminists.Footnote ³⁶ The proposed legislation stipulated that in cases of fetal deformity and social and/or economic vulnerability, married women must obtain consent from their husbands, a clause that many feminists fiercely opposed.Footnote ³⁷

In 1985, the advent of formal democracy offered unprecedented opportunities for feminist institution building, and prominent feminists, including Ruth Escobar and Jacqueline Pitanguy, successfully lobbied president-elect Tancredo Neves to found the CNDM (Sarney Reference Sarney1985), a state organ tasked with articulating women’s rights. The CNDM, which Escobar headed in its first year with a budget of six billion cruzeiros (around US$600,000 at the time), was composed of women lawmakers, civil society leaders, and academics. The council, which its founders imagined would reconcile partisan divisions among feminists, immediately attempted to expand legal abortion services and sponsored events to discuss decriminalization (Alvarez Reference Alvarez1990).

The CNDM also worked closely with the Ministry of Health, which in 1983 had founded the Programa de Assistência Integral à Saúde da Mulher (PAISM, Integral Assistance Program for Women’s Health), a federal program intended to provide health care for women of all ages and to increase the availability of contraceptive methods to reduce unwanted pregnancies and illegal abortions (Osis Reference Osis1998). PAISM, part of INAMPS, was designed with significant input from feminists, and it reinforced the importance of preventive and primary care in the provision of health services, a practice that the 1988 Constitution enshrined into law with the declaration of health care as a constitutional right, and which the creation of the Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS, Unified Health System) in 1990 would make a reality (Senado Federal 1988, articles 196–200). The creation of PAISM meant that the Brazilian government “officially and explicitly” included family planning services in a public health program for the first time (Osis Reference Osis1998, 26).

Despite momentum in favor of increasing women’s access to sexual and reproductive health care in both the feminist movement and sectors of the federal government, full decriminalization remained a distant reality, and Brazilian feminists had yet to secure a solid legislative victory in the years surrounding the return to civilian rule in 1985. Regarding visibility, however, feminists considered the early 1980s as crucial in shifting public opinion, as they sought to dismantle the persistent taboo surrounding abortion and challenge the left to prioritize reproductive rights. ^{Footnote 38} Both claims, as we and others (Scavone Reference Scavone2008) have demonstrated, reflect a more sanguine assessment of the popular and political landscape than the historical record supports.

“The decisive moment”: Abortion at the National Constituent Assembly

With the Constituent Assembly slated for 1987–1988, nonelite Brazilians clamored for popular participation in the drafting of a new Constitution, ultimately securing the right to public audiences—in which people could petition Congress directly—and popular amendments, which could be presented for a vote after securing a certain number of signatures (McDonald Reference McDonald2022; Neves Reference Neves2019).Footnote ³⁹ As both autonomous feminists and those associated with the CNDM planned their participation, the movement faced both external and internal tumult. Feminists’ experiences with conservative religious and leftist opposition to full decriminalization had shown that political compromise on abortion was necessary. At the same time, feminists continued to pursue legal avenues to expand the cases in which abortion was permissible. Starting in 1987, important allies in the medical field, including surgeon and medical professor José Aristodemo Pinotti and University of São Paulo geneticist Dr. Thomaz Rafael Gollop, the latter of whom launched a national campaign to expand therapeutic abortion provisions for fetal abnormalities, supported these efforts.Footnote ⁴⁰

Within feminist ranks, divergences arose as to the best strategies vis-à-vis abortion’s place in Brazil’s new constitution. Some feminists insisted on the importance of fully decriminalizing abortion. “If we don’t confront the issue of abortion at this time, when will we do it? … We should guarantee that the Constitution decriminalizes it,” poet and professor Rachel Gutiérrez wrote in the mid-1980s.Footnote ⁴¹ Others, including attorneys Florisa Verucci and Leonor Nunes de Paiva, cautioned against bringing the issue to the floor of Congress.Footnote ⁴² “It is the case that in Brazil we don’t have the conditions in place to legalize abortion. This is a long-term struggle,” Verucci wrote in 1986.Footnote ⁴³

Faced with substantial opposition from Catholic and evangelical elements with outsized influence in the legislative branch and ties to parties across the political spectrum, the more cautious contingent feared a reactionary campaign to overturn the exemptions laid out in the 1940 Penal Code in pursuit of a comprehensive ban. “We know that the church wants to put a prohibition in the Constitution. We can’t be the ones to give them that motive,” Verucci wrote.Footnote ⁴⁴ According to the lawyer, who encouraged a “realistic vision” of the new constitution’s potential, a constitutional ban would be much more difficult to overturn than simply removing articles from the Penal Code.Footnote ⁴⁵

With the assembly on the horizon, CNDM-affiliated feminists set in motion a campaign to consult Brazilian women about their desires called Constituinte Pra Valer, Tem que Ter Palavra da Mulher (For the Constitution to count, it must have the input of women). This multiyear project, which organized a series of meetings with more than 1,500 women from all over Brazil, resulted in the drafting of a collectively authored letter in which “the guarantee of the right to terminate a pregnancy without damaging a woman’s health” was listed as one of numerous demands for the new constitution (Alves and Pitanguy Reference Alves and Pitanguy2022).Footnote ⁴⁶ Additionally, autonomous feminist groups drafted and gained over thirty-three thousand signatures for a popular amendment proposing the legalization of abortion for any reason in the first trimester and requiring the state to include abortion services in its universal health-care program (Alvarez Reference Alvarez1990; Machado and Cook Reference Machado and Cook2018). The independent activist Raquel Moreno remembered that “we framed abortion in terms of health, because most of the groups from São Paulo work on the outskirts where women are very close to the church and a more abstract framing might not be well understood.”Footnote ⁴⁷

In a 2022 interview, Barsted told us that at first, she and others in the movement were confident that the women assembly members (26 out of 559; known as the bancada feminina), together with their allies, could push through a decriminalization amendment, but they soon realized that they had underestimated their adversaries.Footnote ⁴⁸ Encouraged by feminists, José Genuíno of the PT and Cristina Tavares of the PMDB even introduced such an amendment, which immediately prompted a strong and organized response from the antiabortion religious lobby (Alvarez Reference Alvarez1990). Rocha (Reference Rocha2006) writes that Catholic activists acting on behalf of the Conferência Nacional dos Bispos do Brasil (CNBB, Brazilian National Bishops Conference), which had maintained ties to the PT since its founding, considered the assembly an ideal setting to push for full criminalization, a proposal that evangelical members of Congress strongly supported. Alvarez (Reference Alvarez1990, 254) similarly notes that the well-organized Christian social conservatives who packed public audiences contended that feminist reforms “threatened the Brazilian family,” an eerie echo of the military’s justification for seizing power in 1964. In defending a position to remove the rape exception from the Penal Code, one evangelical lawmaker ventured, “If a woman doesn’t want it, a man will not be able to rape her.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Faced with the imminent possibility of the passage of constitutional measures that would criminalize abortion in all circumstances by enshrining “the dignity of life” from conception, members of the bancada feminina, encouraged by Pitanguy and the CNDM to pursue the “middle path,” withdrew their proposed decriminalization amendment with the understanding that their opponents would do the same (Alvarez Reference Alvarez1990; Alves and Pitanguy Reference Alves and Pitanguy2022; Barsted Reference Barsted1992). According to feminist Comba Marques, the CNDM’s decision to omit the abortion demand from its platform was regrettable: “We stuck our heads in the sand… We were naive.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Ultimately, the assembly decided that the Constitution would neither enshrine abortion as a right nor prohibit it entirely through a conception clause.Footnote ⁵¹ According to Alves and Pitanguy (Reference Alves and Pitanguy2022, 278), members of Congress were relieved to avoid debating such a controversial topic, as abortion was “the hot potato that no one wanted to hold.” And thus, the Citizens’ Constitution passed without mentioning abortion, leaving unaltered the 1940 Penal Code’s articles pertaining to the termination of pregnancy. Alves remembers that she and her colleagues experienced both disappointment and relief in the wake of the standoff: “It was a strategic move, to not even try to push decriminalization through, and not what we wanted ultimately, but as a strategy it was successful,” she told us.Footnote ⁵² Barsted (Reference Barsted1992, 123) writes that feminists also managed to stonewall the addition of the text “since conception” to a provision guaranteeing the “inviolability of the right to life” in article 5, which ensures that all Brazilians enjoy rights to liberty, safety, equality, and property. “We were able to stop the avalanche of conservatism, which was no small feat,” she told us in an interview, and Zaremberg and Almeida (Reference Zaremberg and Rezende de Almeida2022) affirm that Brazilian feminists have indeed been successful at blocking conservative backlashes since redemocratization.Footnote ⁵³ Leonor Nunes de Paiva recalled a frantic push to persuade lawmakers to reject the total ban proposed by religious lobbyists: “We all went to the voting session. We spoke with many constituent assembly members, leaders, vice-presidents, whoever else was relevant. At that moment, we had nothing to lose. It was clear that decriminalization was a lost cause” (quoted in Moreira Alves and Pitanguy Reference Alves and Pitanguy2022, 279). Pressure tactics also included a CNDM-coordinated sit-in that greeted lawmakers at the entrance to congressional chambers.

While relieved that they had avoided the worst possible outcome and pleased that the Constitution incorporated several other feminist demands, activists were sobered by their opposition’s formidable strength and organization. Once they realized both their lack of support for decriminalization from the left and the political clout of their adversaries on the Christian right, their project became less urgent, more focused on long-term strategy, and increasingly concerned with maintaining ground rather than securing major legislative breakthroughs.Footnote ⁵⁴ As Blofield and Ewig (Reference Blofield and Ewig2017) argue about the region more broadly in the 1980s and 1990s, the conservative and religious vestiges of authoritarianism loomed large in these fragile new democracies.

Disagreements among feminists on strategy further complicated efforts to determine clear priorities for the movement in the years to come. While autonomous feminists expressed skepticism about the movement’s accomplishments in the Constitution, others were more buoyant. Reflecting on the assembly, the feminist periodical Nexo reported that, even though the Constitution brought about no changes in abortion legislation, “the account balance of this long period of work surrounding the Constituent Assembly is … still in the black.”Footnote ⁵⁵ In their reflections, both Barsted and Pitanguy echoed this sentiment and presented a picture of solidarity among various feminist actors. Rather than comprising two distinct strategies within the feminist movement, campaigns to expand access to legal abortion stood alongside steadfast support for decriminalization, they told us.Footnote ⁵⁶ “These two strategies did not lead to tensions in the movement,” Barsted recalled, “but rather we tried to accommodate them within a broader reproductive rights agenda that also included demands for an end to forced sterilization from the Black feminist movement.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Other activists, however, feared that the CNDM’s establishment of firm ties to the federal government resulted in a defanged agenda—which critics pejoratively branded “state feminism” or even “well-behaved feminism”—one that saw greater potential in efforts to expand legal abortion than ones to comprehensively decriminalize it (Alvarez Reference Alvarez1990; Alves and Pitanguy Reference Alves and Pitanguy2022).Footnote ⁵⁸ Alvarez (Reference Alvarez1990, 243) writes that toward the end of the 1980s, many feminists began expressing “widespread disillusionment” rather than the heady aspirations of earlier in the decade, becoming increasingly frustrated by the strongly partisan (particularly the PMDB, the successor of the MDB) and technocratic nature of the CNDM and the state-level women’s councils.

In this context of waning possibilities for radical action, the implementation of institutionalized therapeutic abortion services in public hospitals in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro demonstrates that expanding legal abortion was more politically successful (Htun Reference Htun2002; Scavone Reference Scavone2008).Footnote ⁵⁹ Yet amid this momentum for expanded access to therapeutic abortion, in 1989 the federal government abruptly nominated several conservative women to the council and slashed its budget, determining that it had achieved 80 percent of its agenda with the passage of progressive constitutional amendments pertaining to women’s rights (Alvarez Reference Alvarez1990).Footnote ⁶⁰ This action effectively disbanded the council as a substantive political body, causing many of its original members to resign and leaving the movement without a central organ to coordinate national policies, including comprehensive abortion legislation. Pitanguy told us that after the decline of the CNDM, “there was no longer a space in which abortion could be addressed through formal institutions.”Footnote ⁶¹

After the assembly: Legal abortion in the 1990s and beyond

How have feminists, antiabortion activists, and politicians approached abortion since redemocratization? Htun (Reference Htun2003) argues that the lack of explicit opposition to abortion on the part of Brazilian presidents since redemocratization (with the recent exception of Bolsonaro, elected after Htun conducted her research) partly explains the maintenance of the status quo. Machado and Maciel (Reference Machado and Aves Maciel2017, 121) have demonstrated that even though Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995–2003) and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003–11) did not openly support decriminalization, their administrations were “permeable to the national and international pro-choice agenda.” In the Ministry of Health, sustained regulatory support for legal abortion has allowed for continued efforts to expand access to authorized procedures, although acces is inconsistent across the country and certain barriers persist. Faced with substantial and politically well-situated opposition to full decriminalization that consolidated during the Constituent Assembly and expanded after 1988, feminists continued pursuing moderate reforms in the 1990s and 2000s (Machado and Maciel Reference Machado and Aves Maciel2017). Their success in legalizing therapeutic abortions for anencephalic fetuses in 2012, for which they allied with nonfeminist legal actors and carefully crafted their language, demonstrates the possibility of lobbying constitutional courts to effect change, which has proved successful in Mexico and Colombia (González-Vélez and Jaramillo-Sierra Reference González-Vélez and Cristina Jaramillo-Sierra2023; Ruibal Reference Ruibal2015, Reference Ruibal2021).

This story is incomplete without considering the rapid growth of the antiabortion movement, present most prominently in right-wing Christian organizations, both Catholic—and increasingly and more zealously since the 1990s—evangelical (Dehesa and Lionço Reference Dehesa and Lionço2024; Luna Reference Luna2014; Zaremberg and Almeida Reference Zaremberg and Rezende de Almeida2022). Already formidable in the late 1980s, antiabortion Christian organizations continued to grow in the 1990s, with the Catholic Church firmly rejecting the liberation theology of previous decades in favor of a renewed hard-line stance toward social issues and US-based Protestant missionaries and organizations exporting antiabortion politics through a sophisticated funding and institutional infrastructure (Dehesa and Lionço Reference Dehesa and Lionço2024; Marcus-Delgado Reference Marcus-Delgado2020; Machado and Maciel Reference Machado and Aves Maciel2017). In the past decade, conservative religious politicians have introduced repressive legislation, although none has yet passed. Some propose increasing the severity of punishments for both providers and pregnant people who seek abortions, and others continue to seek the legal recognition of fetal personhood and the sanctity of life “from conception” that its proponents failed to secure in the Constitution (Dehesa and Lionço Reference Dehesa and Lionço2024). Barsted told us that, over the course of the past three decades, churches have “evolved from pressuring the state from the outside to being part of the state itself.”Footnote ⁶² With the consolidation of antiabortion activism on the Christian right, Alves finds it difficult to remain optimistic about the future of reproductive rights in Brazil. ^{Footnote 63} The growing population of evangelicals in the country, jumping from 9 percent in 1991 to nearly a third in 2020, and their vocal connections to the national and international antiabortion movements, further contribute to this pessimism (Dehesa and Lionço Reference Dehesa and Lionço2024; Queiroz Reference Queiroz2019).

Htun’s argument about inaction from the executive branch cuts both ways, of course: a failure to robustly support abortion rights, even from the otherwise socially progressive PT, has also stalled momentum for decriminalization, and even for the more feasible project of liberalizing the country’s restrictive laws. What does the return of the PT, by now a fully institutionalized center-left party, and its flag bearer Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to the presidency in 2023 mean? Lula’s ongoing reluctance to wholeheartedly support abortion rights, discussing it as a question of public health rather than one of bodily autonomy, has many onlookers resigned to more inaction.Footnote ⁶⁴ Yet the judiciary provides a glimmer of hope, as abortion rights activists currently await the Supremo Tribunal Federal’s (STF, Federal Supreme Court) ongoing deliberations on a 2017 legal action (known as ADPF 442) that would decriminalize first-trimester abortions for any reason. If successful, ADPF 442 would move Brazil in line with its fellow Latin American nations Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, and Colombia, which have all decriminalized the procedure. Feminists in these countries successfully reframed abortion as an issue of gender violence, and thus a ban on abortion constituted a violation of women’s human rights, a powerful argument in postauthoritarian societies that suffered massive human rights abuses in the second half of the twentieth century (Daby and Moseley Reference Daby and Moseley2022; Encarnación Reference Encarnación2022; Roth Reference Roth2023). In Brazil, which also experienced state terror during its military regime, ADPF 442 draws on this tradition by invoking the Constitution’s definition of rights.

Since the mid-2010s, Brazil’s strengthened evangelical movement, which also deploys the Constitution in support of fetal rights, presents the most formidable challenge (Luna Reference Luna2014). And thus the question remains: Will Brazil remain in the dwindling ranks of countries in the Americas where abortion is largely prohibited, such as Chile, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, as well as, since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, many states in the US? Or will it join several of its neighbors at the vanguard, countries where feminists are successfully reimagining abortion rights in the twenty-first century?