Child Sex Abuse - Laws > Abortion legal in Brazil, but still hard to get

 

‘I was terrified I was going to die.’ 

Rape victims in Brazil struggle to access

legal abortions

By Eléonore Hughes, The Associated Press

Posted Jun 20, 2025 02:35:18 AM.

 

Last Updated Jun 20, 2025 11:31:30 AM.

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — A 27-year-old Brazilian woman, who said she became pregnant after being raped in March during Carnival in Brasilia, should have been granted access to a legal abortion. But when she sought to terminate the pregnancy at a hospital around a month later, she was told she needed a police report to access the service, despite it not being a legal requirement.

She decided to abort at home with medication she bought on the black market, with only a few friends on site to help.

“I fainted several times because of the pain. I was terrified I was going to die,” she said.

The Associated Press does not identify people without their permission if they say they have been sexually assaulted.

In Brazil, abortion is legally restricted to cases of rape, life-threatening risks to the pregnant woman or if the fetus has no functioning brain. Theoretically, when a pregnancy results from sexual violence, the victim’s word should suffice for access to the procedure.

“The law doesn’t require judicial authorization or anything like that,” explained Ivanilda Figueiredo, a professor of law at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. “A woman seeking an abortion recounts the situation to a multi-disciplinary team at the healthcare clinic and, in theory, that should be enough.”

In practice, however, advocates, activists and health experts say women encounter significant barriers to ending a pregnancy even under the limited conditions provided for by the law. This is due to factors including lack of facilities, disparities between clinic protocols and even resistance from medical personnel.

“Healthcare professionals, citing religious or moral convictions, often refuse to provide legal abortions, even when working in clinics authorized to perform them,” said Carla de Castro Gomes, a sociologist who studies abortion and associate researcher at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Women in Brazil also face geographical barriers to legal abortions. Only 290 facilities in a mere 3.6% of municipalities around the country of approximately 213 million people provide the service, according to a 2021 study from scientific journal Reports in Public Health.

In June 2022, four nonprofits filed a legal challenge with the Supreme Court, arguing that restrictions on abortion access violate women’s constitutional rights. The case is currently under review.

‘Still a taboo’

A 35-year-old cashier from a small city in the interior of Rio de Janeiro state also said she became pregnant as a result of a rape. But, unlike the woman in Brasilia, she chose to pursue an abortion through legal means, fearing the risks that come with a clandestine procedure.

Although Brazil’s Health Ministry mandates that, in the case of a pregnancy resulting from rape, healthcare professionals must present women with their rights and support them in their decision, the woman said a hospital committee refused to terminate the pregnancy. They claimed she was too far along, despite Brazilian law not stipulating a time limit for such procedures.

She eventually found help through the Sao Paulo-based Women Alive Project, a nonprofit specializing in helping victims of sexual violence access legal abortions. The organization helped her locate a hospital in another state, an 18-hour drive, willing to carry out the procedure.

Thanks to a fundraising campaign, the woman was able to travel and undergo the operation at 30 weeks of pregnancy in late April.

“We are already victims of violence and are forced to suffer even more,” she said in a phone interview. “It’s a right guaranteed by law, but unfortunately still seen as taboo.”

It's taboo to those who believe that all life is created by God. It is only the godless to whom it is not taboo, in my humble opinion.

Legal uncertainty

Brazil’s abortion laws are among the most constrictive in Latin America, where several countries — including Mexico, Argentina and Colombia — have enacted sweeping reforms to legalize or broadly decriminalize abortion.

This legislative environment is exacerbated by a political landscape in which far-right politicians, supported by Catholic and Evangelical voters who make up a majority in the country, regularly seek to further restrict the limited provisions within the country’s penal code.

In 2020, the government of far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro issued an ordinance requiring doctors to report rape victims seeking abortions to the police. Current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva revoked the measure in his first month in office in 2023.

But the measure left lasting effects.

“These changes end up generating a lot of legal uncertainty among health professionals, who fear prosecution for performing legal abortions,” Castro Gomes said.

Last year, conservative lawmaker Sóstenes Cavalcante proposed a bill to equate the termination of a pregnancy after 22 weeks with homicide, sparking widespread protests by feminist groups across Brazil. The protests ultimately led to the proposal being shelved.

But in November, a committee of the Chamber of Deputies approved a proposed constitutional amendment that would effectively outlaw all abortions by determining the “inviolability of the right to life from conception.” The bill is currently on hold, awaiting the formation of a commission.

Earlier this month, Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes, a Lula ally, came under fire after sanctioning a bill mandating anti-abortion messages on posters in municipal hospitals and other health establishments.

‘Doctors don’t tell you’

Advocates say access to abortion highlights significant disparities: women with financial means dodge legal restrictions by traveling abroad for the procedure, while children, poor women and Black women face greater obstacles.

According to the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety, 61.6% of the 83,988 rape victims in 2023 were under the age of 14. A statistical analysis that year by investigative outlet The Intercept estimated less than 4% of girls aged 10 to 14 who became pregnant as a result of rape accessed a legal abortion between 2015 and 2020.

In Rio de Janeiro’s Mare favela, one of the city’s largest low-income communities, the nonprofit Networks of Mare’s House of Women provides women with information regarding their reproductive rights, including legal provisions for abortions.

It was there, during a recent workshop, that Karina Braga de Souza, a 41-year-old mother of five, found out abortion is legal in certain cases in Brazil.

“We don’t have access (to information). Doctors don’t tell you,” she said.

Cross-border connections

Feminist groups in Brazil are campaigning at a federal level for enhanced access to legal abortion services.

Last year, “A Child Is Not a Mother,” a campaign by feminist groups, successfully advocated for the National Council for the Rights of Children and Adolescents to adopt a resolution detailing how to handle cases of pregnant child rape victims. The body, jointly made up of government ministries and civil society organizations, approved the resolution by a slim majority in December.

Brazilian activists also are seeking to improve access to abortion by forging links with organizations abroad.

In May, members of feminist groups in Brazil including Neither in Prison, Nor Dead and Criola met with a delegation of mostly Black U.S. state legislators. The meeting, organized by the Washington, D.C.-based Women’s Equality Center, aimed to foster collaboration on strategies to defend reproductive rights, especially in light of the U.S. Supreme Court 2022 decision to strip away the constitutional right to abortion.

In the meantime, the consequences for women who struggle to access their rights run deep.

The woman in Brasilia who underwent an abortion at home said she is coping thanks to therapy and the support of other women, but has been traumatized by recent events.

By being denied access to a legal abortion, “our bodies feel much more pain than they should,” she said. “Whenever I remember, I feel very angry.”

___

Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america.

Military Madness > Nothing yet remotely resembling closure in China over Japanese army's comfort women abuse

 

In China, rare voices seek to break taboo over 'comfort women' raped by Japanese army

Asia / Pacific

REVISITED © FRANCE 24

Issued on: 17/01/2025 - 19:49

14:50 min

During World War II, the Japanese imperial authorities abducted, coerced, tricked and sometimes recruited hundreds of thousands of women from Japan's colonial empire to become sexual slaves for soldiers. Sometimes minors, these women were called "comfort women" and were raped repeatedly in brothels near the front lines. With only a handful of survivors still alive in China, our reporters met one of them: 95-year-old Peng Zhuying. She is determined to share her story in a country where the subject remains taboo.

Being a "comfort woman" was long considered shameful. As a result, the exact number of victims remains unknown. Between 1932 and 1945, hundreds of thousands of women – around 200,000, according to historians – were abducted from the four corners of Japan's colonial empire. These Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, Filipino and Indonesian women, some of them minors, were made available to Japanese soldiers in brothels near the front lines. 

Back in 1991, a 67-year-old Korean woman named Kim Hak-soon publicly shared her story of being forced to live in a military brothel as a teenager. Soldiers raped her multiple times a day. Her trailblazing testimony led to many others speaking up and eventually a civil society movement was born, focused on bringing justice to "comfort women". Decades of campaigning in South Korea means that there is now widespread awareness of what happened to the "comfort women".

Only eight known Chinese victims still alive

But in China, the issue remains taboo. Most of the victims were from rural and traditional regions, where rape has long been a shameful topic. The Chinese Communist Party also considers history to be extremely sensitive and decides top-down on how to remember the past. In state media, different facets of wartime atrocities are highlighted according to Beijing's relations with Tokyo at a given time. School textbooks barely mention the crimes. With little to no feminist activism to help approach the topic with sensitivity, the issue has often been cast aside.

The real shame is that the hundreds of thousands of women who were abused never received any support or even acknowledgment of their extraordinary suffering. Communists are such idiots to think that by rewriting history they can erase the horrors from society. Truth can never be erased.

Despite these difficulties, a handful of Chinese scholars and volunteers want the wider public to care. They have devoted their careers, and sometimes their lives, to this cause. But time is running out to collect the testimonies of rape and exploitation of these women, who are now very elderly. In June of last year, one of the last surviving victims passed away. Only eight publicly known Chinese victims are still alive.

Our reporters met one of them: 95-year-old Peng Zhuying. She was a visually impaired teenager when soldiers dragged her to a brothel and raped her repeatedly. The former "comfort woman" told FRANCE 24 about the trauma she endured. She would now like younger generations to know what happened during this painful chapter of China's history. 

Japan ordered to compensate wartime 'comfort women'

23 November 2023 - Korea

By September 2002, the Asian Women’s Fund had completed projects in the Netherlands, the Philippines, the Republic of Korea, and Taiwan, offering the atonement of the Japanese Government to victims who had been forced to become comfort women. The women also received a letter from the Japanese Prime Minister, expressing feelings of apology and remorse and the determination to ensure that such a tragedy would never occur again. 

====================================================================================

Group Breaks Silence About Sex for Tsleil-Waututh Youth

Passing the Feather trains youth to facilitate conversations about sex and sexual exploitation

By Rohit Joseph, Megan Devlin, for CBC News 
Cheyenne Hood started a program called Passing the Feather at Tsleil-Waututh Nation. It’s a series of workshops that train youth to offer guidance to peers about sexual exploitation (Megan Devlin)

"I've never really asked them questions about 'the birds and the bees,'" he said.

The 19-year-old thinks his parents could have been uncomfortable because of the history of residential schooling in his family. He doesn't pry.


Lexus George thinks his parents could have been uncomfortable talking about sex because of the history of residential schooling in his family. (Megan Devlin)

As a result, the young member of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation got his first introduction to sex in high school, when a teacher entered the room wearing condom on her head to demonstrate its durability. Now, he says he doesn't want to stay silent when he has kids of his own.

"I'll try to tell them everything I know, how to stay safe and protect themselves. I want to make it fun too… so maybe I'll try putting the condom on my head," he chuckles.

But silence between parents and kids around sex is common at Tsleil-Waututh — a tight-knit community of just over 500 people in North Vancouver. Many suggest the hush stems from grandparents sexually abused at residential schools.


Residential school legacy

Hundreds of Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish Nation children were boarded at St. Paul's Indian Residential School until it closed in 1958.

"Everybody in my parents' generation from Tsleil-Waututh went to residential school," says Luke Thomas, 50, Tsleil-Waututh's Family Programs Coordinator.

Luke Thomas, 50, says he grew up receiving negative messaging around sex and sexuality from his parents, who were both residential school survivors. (Megan Devlin)

Thomas says when he was growing up, his parents — devout Catholics — only spoke of sex in terms of sin.

"If you had sex before you got married, you were going to hell. If you had sex for anything other than conceiving a baby, even after you were married, it was still a sin," he says.

Residential schools did more than cast a shadow on consensual sex. Sexual abuse at the hands of priests and nuns inflicted intergenerational trauma.

Indigenous people are still disproportionately affected by sexual exploitation — 60 per cent of sexually exploited youth in Vancouver are indigenous, and sexual violence is a recurring theme in Canada's missing and murdered indigenous women cases.

But, one woman at Tsleil-Waututh is determined to change that.


'I didn't need to be a 34-year-old grandmother'

Cheyenne Hood calls herself an outlier at Tsleil-Waututh. The 41-year-old mother of three says she's atypical in the community because she made a point to talk to her kids about sex.

"Knowing what I know about statistics about teen pregnancy, I felt like I didn't want my kids to go through trial and error," she says. "I didn't need to be a 34-year-old grandmother."

'I think that the vulnerability level is extremely high

in First Nations communities for exploitation.'

- Cheyenne Hood, Tsleil-Waututh Nation

Hood is the Nation's housing manager, and found she has a knack for writing proposals. This year, she helped secure funding for a new program called Passing the Feather that trains youth workers to talk to youth about sexual exploitation.

"I think that the vulnerability level is extremely high in First Nations communities for exploitation," Hood says. "The layers are so deep and there's so much to dissect."


Focus on sexual exploitation

Passing the Feather's name comes from the idea of a sharing circle, says iris yong-pearson (who prefers not to capitalize her name), a youth worker with Peernet BC, who serves as the group's facilitator.

"In many indigenous cultures, they use the talking stick or passing the feather to give each other space to share our stories," she says. "This project is about sharing our stories and holding space so that we're able to talk about a really tough topic."


Passing the Feather members discuss a presentation on sexual exploitation in the Tsleil-Waututh elders’ lounge. (Megan Devlin)

Spotting CSA predators

But Passing the Feather is more than just talk. It's a series of workshops that gives youth the tools to spot predatory behaviour and offer guidance to peers about sexual exploitation. 

yong-pearson gets kids in the door by selling them on the concrete facilitation skills they'll learn for future careers as youth workers. She motivates them to open up about sexuality by framing the conversation with a purpose — helping potential victims of sexual exploitation.

She uses conversation cue cards to train them to open up conversation about tough topics. Listening exercises help them handle disclosures from peers. Guest presentations give youth background knowledge of the risk of sexual exploitation in Vancouver.

The group is building toward a multimedia workshop about sexual exploitation for the Tsleil-Waututh community. They're hoping to have it ready by June.


Let's talk about sex

Hood isn't sure youth heading into the workshops will understand what "sexual exploitation" even means. But by the time they're done, she hopes, they'll recognize what she calls "a long colonial history of sexual exploitation"


Cheyenne Hood's deep roots in the community have drawn youth from all over the North Shore to the program. (Megan Devlin)

"Being taught from generation to generation not to talk about sexual abuse and to be ashamed of it… that's where some of  the [hesitation] stems from," she says.

She doesn't expect grandiose changes immediately—but hopes to spur a gradual cultural shift.

"For the first time kids in this community are going to have the opportunity to say the word 'sex,'" she says. "Being realistic, my greatest hope is just to initiate the beginning of the conversation."

You are doing a great thing, Cheyenne. I hope all First Nations pick up on your example, it is so desperately needed. You are my hero today; God bless you!