English Version | My body my choice – or not

11 Oct 2022
By Pureza Fleming

In the same year in which Portugal celebrates 15 years since the referendum that legalized the voluntary interruption of pregnancy, the United States withdraws the right to abortion. And at what price? Or better yet: at whose expense? When the law decrees that a woman does not have the right to decide what to do with her body, can we talk about women's reproductive rights?

In the same year in which Portugal celebrates 15 years since the referendum that legalized the voluntary interruption of pregnancy, the United States withdraws the right to abortion. And at what price? Or better yet: at whose expense? When the law decrees that a woman does not have the right to decide what to do with her body, can we talk about women's reproductive rights?

In June 2022, a year that already was not being easy, between the COVID-19 "withdrawal" and the war in Ukraine, part of the world was once again stunned by the final verdict of the US Supreme Court justices: the overturning of the Roe v Wade case - which put a woman identified as Jane Roe against Henry Wade, a Dallas County prosecutor - that, in 1973, legalized the voluntary interruption of pregnancy. The decision was favored by six conservative justices (half of whom were appointed under Donald Trump’s mandate) against three liberals. Arkansas, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Alabama, and Missouri were the states where abortion would be banned less than a week after the Supreme Court's decision, taking away the right to abortion guaranteed since the historic victory in the aforementioned case. In the same year in which Portugal celebrates the 15th anniversary of the referendum that decriminalized the voluntary interruption of pregnancy (VIP) up to ten weeks by choice of the woman, the United States of America hands over to each federal state the power to authorize abortion or not - and thus placing each woman at the mercy of the state in which she lives. It is certain and known that, as far as women's rights are concerned, these are rarely guaranteed - at any moment they can be, or are really, revoked, either by the political or justice systems. And the decision in the United States ("land of the free" sounds a bit ironic at times like this) turned out to be just another tremendous setback for women's rights. The magazine The Economist claimed that the impact of abolishing abortion rights in the various US states will be "fast and furious" - we shall see. 

In Novas Cartas Portuguesas (1972), a literary work published jointly by the Portuguese writers Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta and Maria Velho da Costa, later to become internationally known as "the three Marias", there is the following passage: "And she died from having an abortion with a parsley stalk, she died of sepsis, the woman who cleaned the office where I work, and I learned later, from her colleague, that it was her twenty-third abortion. And a friend of mine, a doctor, told me, years ago, that on the hospital benches, women were treated with disdain when they arrived with their uteruses pierced, ruptured, bloodied from attempted home abortions, with knitting needles, sticks, cabbage sticks, anything sharp and forceful that was at hand, and that they had their uteruses shaved cold, without anesthesia, and with sadistic relish, 'so they could learn'. To learn what, damn?! Learn that upon them falls, disguised as the fatality of fate, the contradiction that society has created between the fecundity-required-of the woman's womb and the place-negated-for children?" The first demands in relation to free abortion appear after 1974 towards its decriminalization, when there would be between 100,000 and 200,000 clandestine abortions per year, of which 2% ended in death. According to the study Lei do Aborto em Portugal: Barreiras Atuais e Desafios Futuro, published in the journal Sociologia, Problemas e Práticas, "on the political level, at the beginning of the 1980s, the action of the organizations responsible for women's rights, namely the action of the Commission for Citizenship and Gender Equality - at the time the Commission on the Female Condition - was limited by the convergence of a Catholic moralism with the conservatism of the Democratic Alliance government, so that, at that time, the effects of the feminist movements did not produce tangible changes. It was only in 1984 that, in the social context described above, but with a Socialist Party government and a parliament with a majority of left-wing members, the exclusion of illegality was approved in cases of danger to the physical and psychological life of the woman, rape, and malformation of the fetus."

Since the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century there has been a trend towards the liberalization of abortion all over the world, with contributions from women's rights movements and the World Health Organization (WHO), which in 1967 considered clandestine abortions a serious public health problem. However, between 39 and 41% of women around the world live in countries with restrictive legislation regarding the voluntary interruption of pregnancy, especially in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and the percentage of countries that criminalize the practice has increased, which seems to indicate a reversal of the trend seen at the beginning of the century. In Portugal, since 2007, the accessibility of voluntary interruption of pregnancy, by choice of the woman, is duly grounded in the legislation and normative framework that governs the National Health Service. The Portuguese Contraception Society website points out some of the advantages of this decision: since 2007, abortion-related mortality and complications have decreased exponentially; after 2007, the number of abortions never reached the numbers estimated before 2007 (20,000 abortions/year); the number of abortions has thus been decreasing - in 2016, there were 15,416 interruptions (variation of -14% between 2008 and 2016), placing Portugal below the European average. That website notes a progressive decrease in abortions performed by teenagers and also points out that 80% of women who have an abortion are doing it for the first time. According to the United Nations, "reproductive health is a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing, not merely the absence of disease or infirmity, in all matters relating to the reproductive system and to its functions and processes. Reproductive health therefore implies that people are able to have a satisfying and safe sex life and that they have the capacity to reproduce and the freedom to decide if, when and how often to do so. Implicit in this last condition are: the rights of men and women to be informed, have access to safe, effective, affordable and acceptable methods of family planning." Amnesty International, a global community of activists and human rights defenders who aim for " a world in which every person enjoys all of the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights instruments," launched a manifesto in 2015 in which governments around the world are urged to end attempts to control and criminalize the sexuality and choices of girls and women. The My Body, My Rights campaign launched by Amnesty International urges states to remove persisting obstacles in sexual and reproductive health services, education, and information provision, and to put an end to laws and practices that are discriminatory. Published on March 8, International Women's Day, the manifesto "spells out the rights that all women and girls have over their own bodies."

Despite the progress made since a landmark global agreement on gender equality was signed in Beijing two decades ago, there is currently a step back that has resulted in women and girls around the world being deprived of their sexual and reproductive rights. Jessie Macneil-Brown, an expert with the human rights organization, stresses that the "serious violations of women’s and girl’s sexual and reproductive rights are a major problem. In some countries abortion is still completely banned and women are jailed for even being suspected of having had an abortion or for having a miscarriage." And she adds: “States and others must end attempts to control the choices of women and girls. The right to make informed decisions about our sexual and reproductive health is a human right, and must be guaranteed rather than undermined and criminalized (…) This manifesto calls on all people to stand in solidarity and to demand that these rights are protected,” she concludes. For an issue to constitute a problem, a series of indicators and events must be verifiable, and there must be a social response to them. In the case of abortion in Portugal, both the number of clandestine procedures - about 17,000 clandestine abortions (in the year 2005), sometimes leading to deaths - and the criminalization of women, as exemplified by the media trial of 17 women in Maia, have contributed to the elevation of abortion to a political problem. The institutional conditions exist, at least on a formal level, so that all women who choose to terminate a pregnancy up to ten weeks can do so safely. At the same time, it has been demonstrated that the decriminalization of abortion has led to a drastic decrease in clandestine abortions, with all that they imply.

However, some concerns remain: access to health care for termination of pregnancy has been organized within the National Health Service without the reinforcement of human resources; accessibility to abortion is not equal for the Portuguese population - most women living in the Alentejo do not have an answer in the health units in their area of residence; 5 out of 20 services are not able to perform the consultation for termination of pregnancy within the 5 days foreseen by Law; 8 out of 18 services are not able to ensure access to surgical interruption; 8 out of 20 services consider that the response in access to health care in the area of abortion has worsened over time; 11 out of 20 services consider that the future response will tend to worsen being the reasons most pointed out, the lack of human resources and the fact that it is not considered a priority area; 75% of health professionals working in the abortion area consider that there is stigma against women who request this health care; 55% of health professionals working in the abortion area consider that they suffer some type of peer stigma, according to data reported by the site of the Portuguese Contraception Society. The abortion narrative still seems to have a lot of headlines to make. These are the not always straight lines of human rights, and especially women's rights, whose struggle seems like a constant dance: you walk ten steps forward only to take twenty steps backwards. When the female body, and what each woman wants to do with it, becomes a subject discussed by a battalion of men in suits in an assembly, what kind of rights do we have left?

Translated from the original on The Butterfly Effect issue from Vogue Portugal, published October 2022.Full story and credits on the print issue.

Pureza Fleming By Pureza Fleming

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