In Brazil It's Reproductive Roulette, Not Reproductive Choice

The real 'women' of Brazil the Church's policies are directly effecting.

The Catholic Church Vs. The Women of Brazil (Contribution)

Originally posted on Clerical Whispers, July 19, 2009

Abortion might be illegal in Brazil, but that doesn't mean you can't get one -- a million people do every year.The rich pick up the phone and go into a fancy clinic. The poor go to the drugstore and buy an ulcer pill. (So much for the effectiveness of making abortion illegal.)

The pill is called Cytotec and costs about two dollars a dose in the States.
In Brazil, though, it's a whole month's minimum salary these days [about $100], which is precisely where the Catholic Church comes into the story. It was direct pressure from the Church that pushed the pill, an effective abortifacient, from over-the-counter to prescription-only, with the accompanying price rise that sort of thing entails.

Not that this stops people from needing Cytotec. The poor who don't want to be pregnant have few other options -- just the usual gamut of back-alley procedures. Nor can they afford the kind of doctor who gives prescriptions, so they buy the pills under the table, which costs them a full month's pay, subsistence money, by the way, that would have clothed and fed their children -- because they all have children. And they know in ways the Bishops working against them seem not to fathom exactly what another one would cost them, and it's a price they cannot pay.

So they go hungry and take their chances with a pill the Catholic Church has driven to the black market. And the problem with that isn't only the price. The fingers-to-the-bone money they're paying might be for a two-cent coated aspirin. It may be strychnine. They cross themselves as they swallow, and wait a few days. If the bleeding doesn't stop, it still isn't a crime to go to the hospital.

Although it will be, if the bill the Church has managed to get in front of the Brazilian Congress that would criminalize the buying and selling of Cytotec becomes law. If it does, then the choices of the poor who have problems with the pill will be prison or bleeding to death.

The bill has opposition and is unlikely to pass. But it's hard to recognize the Church in Brazil as the same one that in the Eighties was home to the great liberation theologists, whose conception of crime entailed less people desperate to escape pregnancy than capitalist systems that by their very nature sinned against the poor.

Those priests worked in the streets, lived in the slums, knew the unwanted children, knew their mothers; but there have been four popes since the Vatican II of Pope John XXIII, and they have squelched, silenced and driven from their ranks those dreamers who actually sought significant social transformation.

Now the Church in Brazil is manned by the likes of the Archbishop of Recife, whose latest idea of social activism [March, 2009] was to ex-communicate the mother of a nine-year-old rape victim, who got the child an abortion.

The doctors, too -- even though the child weighed seventy pounds, stood not four feet tall, and was carrying twins that would have killed her.

But all involved in the whole affair were mortal sinners -- except for the serial rapist himself, the child's stepfather, who alone among them was not ex-communicated. The laws he broke were "man's, not God's," said the Archbishop. (Rape is a violation of the sixth commandment. I thought the ten commandments were also God's laws.)

This last got people into the streets. The Catholics for the Right to Decide passed out signs that read: "Catholics have sex for pleasure, use condoms, support sexual diversity, and have abortions!"

No news, of course, for anyone who's visited Brazil.
But "When will the Church hierarchy change?" the signs continued, and that is the question.
Certainly not soon enough for the 20,000 children between the ages of ten and fourteen who did have babies in Brazil last year. All of whom were the result of rape, much of it incestuous; and all, pretty much, born prematurely. Even the ones who lived are unlikely to become rocket scientists. The girls among them will be lucky to escape their child-mothers' fate.

But about them, the Church is strangely silent. The born, with their scabs and their hunger, their diapers and crying, are perhaps less appealing than the unborn, who are quiet, perfect, "sin-free," as the priests tell the people from the pulpit. Not unlike the perfect teddy bear.

"And the tragedy of that," says Beatriz Galli of Inaps, an advocacy group for reproductive rights, "is that now what we are seeing is very young rape victims 'volunteering' to carry the babies. The priests cheer, but what happens a year later to a destitute twelve-year-old with a child?"
The streets are full of them, but the Church isn't in the street these days.

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I frequently wonder if the Church actually cares about the fruits of their anti abortion/anti contraception campaign. Who benefits from a ten year old child having a child who is most likely the result of incestuous rape and always the result of legally defined rape. It's certainly not the two children involved.

I posted in an earlier thread that the Recife rape victim, which precipitated this entire discussion, was not an isolated case. It was all too common. I've also written that enforcement without compassion is tyranny. It seems to me our Catholic hierarchy is practicing a form of tyranny, and they are not content with practicing this form of pastoral tyranny from the pulpit, they are demanding it become secular law. Women and girls must carry their pregnancies to term, while the men who are equally responsible for these pregnancies are ignored.

This particular conflict between abortion absolutism and real life situations scream for the addition of common sense and compassion. The only way that can ever happen is for the Church to return to an understanding of life which doesn't place the unborn on a level higher than the born. There is no justifiable reason I can see for making unborn life more important than the life of an innocent child mother. It's this notion of escalating the absolute worth of the unborn over that of the born that I can not agree with in conscience. Catholic moral teaching has never done this traditionally. It used to know that absolutism can cause harm in an imperfect world. Not any more. Not when it comes to sexual issues. Especially not when it comes to women.

It's hard to see how a twelve year old girl can make a reasoned assessment about being a good parent---especially in view of the fact she will most likely be committing to being a good single parent. No first time parent, no matter how old, has a clue about what parenthood really entails until they become a parent. Up until that magic moment, notions of parenting are mostly fantasy. But then maybe that's the whole problem with the hierarchy, they don't seem to have any imagination about what exactly they are demanding from girl mothers. For them the whole moral question ends at birth, but for the mother, the whole moral question is really just beginning. How moral is it to raise a child, born prematurely, on the streets or in an already poor and dysfunctional family? According to the Cardinal Levada and the CDF, Catholics aren't supposed to ask those kinds of questions.

As long as the unborn have an exalted absolute status above any of the born, those sticky moral questions about life after birth will never be taken into the moral equation. That's not just wrong, it borders on heresy. Abortion is however, a powerful political tool, and in Brazil the abortion issue certainly seems to be far more about exercising power than exercising compassion.

For child mothers the issue is not reproductive choice, but enforced, choice less reproductive roulette. The real loser in this moral equation is the unborn child who suddenly finds him or herself born. That's the issue the Church in all it's righteous wisdom refuses to address and why the Recife rape story is not going to go away.