[RIO DE JANEIRO] A Brazilian bill that treats abortion after 22 weeks on a par with homicide has been widely condemned by sexual and reproductive health specialists who say it punishes vulnerable young rape victims.

Brazilian conservative lawmakers hastily agreed on 12 June to fast track a bill that establishes a limit of 22 weeks’ gestation for a woman who wants to terminate a pregnancy.

After that point, she could face a sentence of between six and 20 years in prison — equivalent to the crime of homicide.

The text will go directly to a vote in the plenary session of the Chamber, without going through committees. If passed, it would be subject to approval by the president, who has described the bill as “madness”, but his decision could be overruled.

The existing law, which dates back to 1940, allows women to have an abortion only if their pregnancy resulted from rape, if their life is at risk, or in the case of the birth defect anencephaly, which causes babies to be born without part of the brain and skull.

However, the law currently sets no gestational limits for any of these circumstances.

In many other countries, such as across Europe, late-term abortion is unlawful, except under certain circumstances such as serious foetal anomalies or risk to life.

The proposed changes particularly affect the right to abortion by rape victims, as difficulties in accessing legal abortion services may mean the procedure is performed at later stages of pregnancy, say rights advocates.

The project sparked public protests in a country where 80 per cent of victims of sexual violence are underage girls.

According to the Brazilian Public Security Yearbook, almost 75,000 rapes of girls aged between ten and 13 years old were recorded in 2022 alone — the highest number in its history.

For anthropologist Debora Diniz, establishing a gestational limit worsens an already tragic situation.

“These girls arrive late to services because they are raped at home, which makes it difficult to identify these cases,” Diniz told SciDev.Net.

Diniz is a professor at the University of Brasilia and a researcher at the Anis Institute of Bioethics, one of the organisations responsible for the initiative that allowed pregnancy to be terminated in the case of anencephaly, in 2012.

Many girls end up having the children of attackers, usually men close to them, such as fathers, stepfathers and uncles.

According to a publication by the Ministry of Health, about a fifth of the almost 50,000 rapes recorded between 2011 and 2016 resulted in the birth of one or more children.

Fátima Marinho, coordinator of this study and a former departmental director at the health ministry, believes that care after rape is failing.

“The state does not fully serve girls,” she told SciDev.Net.

“They are having children through the Unified Health System, but that means that adequate measures are not being taken after the rape complaint.”

Human rights lawyer Beatriz Galli, a policy and advocacy advisor for the Ipas network for reproductive justice, told SciDev.Net: “It is a country with girls who are raped and forced to be mothers.

“This project does not propose to improve care, it is only concerned with punishing the victim.”

Abortions after 20 weeks are not common, but are sometimes carried out in circumstances such as severe malformations, or where the pregnant woman or girl is seriously ill or has been raped.

“They don’t even know what pregnancy is,” says gynaecologist Olímpio Moraes, referring to young girls who have been raped.

Moraes is a medical director of the hospital linked to the University of Pernambuco, where in 2020 he was attacked by religious extremists for terminating the pregnancy of a ten-year-old girl, raped by her uncle.

“They only notice it when the belly becomes visible, at four or five months. In addition, they are afraid of threats and guilt.”

For obstetrician Susana Chávez, executive-director of Promsex, the Center for the Promotion and Defense of Sexual and Reproductive Rights, in Peru, and executive-secretary of the Latin American Consortium Against Unsafe Abortion (CLACAI), the Brazilian bill goes against the advances observed in other Latin American countries such as Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Mexico and Ecuador.

“Many of the countries in the region incorporated abortion due to rape in their comprehensive health approach,” Chávez tells SciDev.Net, adding: “By criminalising the measure, this project sets Brazil back.”

If the bill becomes law, victims will face a greater penalty than their abusers. Up to 20 years is the maximum sentence for simple homicide while rape carries a penalty of up to ten years.

“Whoever kills a human being commits homicide, hence the equalisation of the penalty,” federal deputy Sóstenes Cavalcante of Brazil’s Liberal Party, and one of the authors of the project, tells SciDev.Net .

The deputy admitted that the project is a reaction against the Supreme Federal Court, for having suspended a resolution of the Federal Council of Medicine that prohibited the use of a clinical technique for the interruption of longer pregnancies.

He said there was an agreement with the president of the chamber to bring the bill to the chamber plenary at the end of this year.

Federal deputy Maria do Rosário, of the Workers’ Party, a parliamentarian who voted against the move to fast track the bill, believes the chamber lacks the expertise to decide on such a medical procedures.

“We will use all regulatory instruments so that the matter does not reach the plenary session and be archived,” she told SciDev.Net.

At the closing of the G7 Summit in Italy on 15 June, Brazil’s President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva stated that “it is necessary to treat abortion as a public health problem” and that punishing women with “a greater penalty than the criminal is madness”.

If Lula vetoes the bill, deputies can reject his decision but they would need an absolute majority and the vetoed bill must be modified and put to another vote.

Several institutions have spoken out against the project, including the National Health Council and the Brazilian Society for the Progress of Science.

Health Minister Nísia Trindade wrote on social networks that “it is necessary to guarantee care in the Unified Health System for girls and women who are victims of rape and whose lives are at risk”.

This article was produced by SciDev.Net’s Latin America and Caribbean desk.