The Covid-19 health emergency has placed special demands on legal scholars, particularly on those based in the Global South. Brazil has been one of the epicenters of the pandemic, with over 680,000 deaths as of August 2022. Our narrative emerges from the duality of our positions amid a national tragedy—we are at the same time survivors of the collective threat of a would-be autocrat and a Covid-19-denialist government, and witnesses to how our preexisting privileges put us in a position of readiness “to speak truth to power.” Speaking truth to power means not only to exercise an independent spirit of analysis and judgment with respect to power, but also to interpellate power openly about its wrongdoings. We understand that our responsibility as legal scholars is to embrace the urgency of the moment—to expand our research agendas beyond our previous academic trajectories and work to mitigate situations of rights violations. It also means that our work as legal scholars has had to transcend the traditional academic spaces. We have positioned ourselves as advocates and litigators for those most affected by the pandemic, in particular vulnerable women. In this article, we share one of our key initiatives during the pandemic—a constitutional lawsuit to demand the right of pregnant and postpartum people to access Covid-19 vaccines.
In Brazil, abortion is only allowed in cases of rape, serious risk to a woman's life or fetal anecephaly. Legal abortion services cover less than 4% of the Brazilian territory and only 1,800 procedures are performed, in average, per year. During the COVID-19 pandemic, almost half of the already few Brazilian abortion clinics shut down and women had to travel even longer distances, reaching abortion services at later gestational ages. In this paper, we describe three bottom-up advocacy strategies that emerged from difficulties deepened during the COVID-19 pandemic at a single abortion service in Brazil, amidst anti-gender policies from the federal government. Telemedicine abortion, outpatient surgical abortion and the provision of abortion after 20 weeks' gestation are important strategies that may reduce inequalities that impact the most vulnerable populations, such as black and indigenous women, children, adolescents and women experiencing domestic violence.legal abortion, outpatient surgical abortion, second and third trimester abortion, South America, telemedicine | BACKGROUNDIn Brazil, access to legal and safe abortion has been difficult even before the COVID-19 pandemic. Brazil has one of the most restrictive laws on induced abortion in the world. According to the Brazilian Penal Code, abortion is only allowed in cases of rape or serious risk to a woman's life. In 2012, fetal anencephaly was included as a third legal ground to abortion. 1 Although the Brazilian Penal Code is dated from 1940, it was only in 1999 that the Ministry of Health published its first regulations in an attempt to increase the number of legal abortion services throughout the country. 2 Despite such effort, there is still a scarcity of clinics providing access to lawful abortion. In 2019, there were 251 services with at least one abortion performed, covering less than 4% of the Brazilian territory. 3 In these few services, a regimen of suspicion of the sexual violence survivors' narratives is common, and health professionals tend to question the victim's subjectivity in order to decide whether she legitimally holds the right to an abortion. For example, in Brazil, it is common practice to require authorization from three health professionals for the legal ground
Resumo -Neste artigo, nos propomos analisar as estratégias antigênero utilizadas pelos movimentos reacionários e teocráticos de bases cristãs brasileiras para instrumentalizar sua permanência na esfera pública em um regime neoliberal. Em contraposição às teorias do backlash, argumentamos que tais estratégias não podem ser compreendidas apenas como respostas ao avanço dos movimentos feministas e LGBT, uma vez que são constitutivos da resistência inercial e justificadores de uma ordem política patriarcal, racista e desigual. Para tanto, discutimos em maior profundidade dois episódios: o caso da menina de 10 anos, que quase teve seu direito ao aborto legal negado no Espírito Santo em 2020, e a tentativa de ocupar o Supremo Tribunal Federal com ministros antigênero. Palavras-chave: Ideologia de gênero; backlash; aborto; antigênero; democracia.
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