.%20Inglês_arquivos/image003.jpg)
Sexual
and Reproductive Rights: policy and budget under the Temer and Bolsonaro
governments
Direitos sexuais e reprodutivos: políticas e
orçamentos nos governos Temer e Bolsonaro
Valdenízia Bento PEIXOTO*
.%20Inglês_arquivos/image005.png){kind=small}
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6983-6549
Evilasio SALVADOR**
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9474-374X
Ana Luiza Rosenbaum BIANCHETTI***
.%20Inglês_arquivos/image006.png){kind=small}
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3956-1724
Abstract: This article analyses social policies regarding Sexual and Reproductive
Rights (SRRs) under the Temer and Bolsonaro governments. It investigates
programmes and actions related to the budget for SRRs, in the Pluriannual Plan
(PAP) for 2016 to 2019. Bibliographic research was conducted on the overlap between
capitalist and patriarchal domination/exploitation systems, the contextualisation
of SRRs and analysis of the data collected on the respective governments. It concludes
that these social policies were not a priority, with some programmes being
officially proposed but barely or never implemented, and an increase in
measures counter to previously gained rights. The budget data expresses in
financial terms, the setbacks caused by governmental measures that interdict
the guarantee of rights and the sexual and reproductive health of women.
Keywords: Sexual and Reproductive Rights. Social Policy. Budget.
Palavras-Chaves: Direitos Sexuais e
Reprodutivos. Política Social. Orçamento.
Submitted on: 31/8/2022. Revised on: 4/11/2022. Accepted
on: 14/2/2023.
Introduction
|
T |
his article analyses social policies regarding Sexual
and Reproductive Rights (SRRs) under the Michel Temer government and during the
first two years of the Jair Bolsonaro government. The text investigates programmes
and actions funded by the budget for SRRs in the period 2016 to 2019, as set
out in the Pluriannual Plan (PAP) and forecast in the Brazilian budget cycle[1].
The current political scene in Brazil is one of
advancing conservatism, of government measures that interdict the guarantee of
rights that have historically been on the agenda of women’s struggles, for
example, the self-determination of their bodies. Acting
against this pressure, there is a growing demand for social policies
that ensure women’s rights and sexual and reproductive health, aimed at their
social and political emancipation. Furthermore, it is essential to understand how
public funds allocated to these policies have been invested, as the government’s
commitment to a given social policy can be measured by the budgetary resources
allocated to its programmes and actions.
To understand the context in which SRRs are inserted
into the full scope of social policies, a literature review was carried out
covering the following points: the overlap between capitalist, racist and
patriarchal domination/exploitation systems; the contextualisation of SRRs;
social policies and public funds; and analysis of the data collected on these governments.
During the bibliographical research, attention was
paid to authors who assist in the theoretical understanding of categories that underpin
this research and that depart from black feminism and Marxist feminism to
confront the social relationship of sex with the moral, economic, political,
and social attacks on women[2] by the capitalist system.
The data analysed was taken from the PAP commencing in
2016 and continuing into the first year of the Bolsonaro government. Budgetary
information was taken from the Siga Brasil[3], database, through the filter of the Annual Budget Laws (ABLs), for the
period 2016 to 2019, and the analysis considers the expenses incurred in delivering
the ‘Citizenship Rights’ function and the ‘Programme: 2016 - Policies for
Women: Promoting Equality and Combating Violence’.
Regarding methodology, a comparison between the expended
and authorised budget was adopted to analyse the budgetary data,
following the steps recommended by the Institute of Socioeconomic Studies (Instituto de Estudos
Socioeconômicos (INESC)) (2017), as this allows the monitoring of the
budget actually executed with ABL resources for any
given year[4].
Social Policies
and Sexual and Reproductive Rights in the light of materialist feminism
The patriarchal structure, appropriated by capitalism,
centralises its domination in the control of the body and sexualities, favouring
a system that perpetuates the existing relations of the production and
reproduction of life. As Maria Betânia Ávila[5] (2003) points out regarding SRRs, it is important to
emphasise the different existing approaches, which depend on the
theoretical-political view adopted.
In the feminist perspective adopted here, reproductive rights concern
equality and freedom in the sphere of reproductive life. Sexual rights concern
equality and freedom in the exercise of sexuality. What does it mean to treat
sexuality and reproduction as dimensions of citizenship and, consequently, of
democratic life? (ÁVILA, 2003, p. 466).
The incorporation of SRRs into the field of Human
Rights represents a way of consolidating these rights as guarantors of
citizenship. Despite the dispute around which movement or movements coined the
term and its meanings, the broad importance of feminist movements and lesbian,
gay, bisexual, transvestite, transsexual, intersex and other sexual orientation
and gender identity (LGBTI+)[6] groups is undeniable in
consolidating these rights, so much so that these themes are now on the
political agenda at national and international level. Ávila (2003) highlights
the importance of understanding the fields of reproductive rights and sexual
rights separately, as a way of ensuring their autonomy.
However, it is also necessary to recognise that:
Reproductive rights and sexual rights are inseparable, as they guarantee
the free exercise of sexuality and the autonomy of people’s decisions regarding
sexual life and reproduction, as well as them assuming responsibility for these
decisions. When talking about the free exercise of sexuality, it means that
people must have information and conditions of rights to make decisions and assume
their responsibilities, based on personal and social ethics, which ensure their
integrity and health (DÍAZ; CABRAL; SANTOS, 2004, p. 9-10).
So, SRRs deal, primarily, with: the basic right of
every individual to freely decide whether or not to have children, as well as
their number and spacing, in addition to having the information and means to do
so; the right to enjoy a high standard of sexual and reproductive health; the
right to a sexual life with pleasure and free from discrimination; and the right
to make decisions about reproduction free of discrimination, coercion or
violence.
To understand these elements and relate them to SRRs,
an intersectional analysis of gender, race, and class is essential. Claimed by
black feminism, the intersectional approach points to the need to identify
oppression based on race, class, and gender, but not in a hierarchical or
separate way, as they are often experienced simultaneously. According to Carla Akotirene (2020):
Intersectionality aims to give theoretical and methodological
instrumentality to the structural inseparability of racism, capitalism, and cis-hetero-patriarchy
– producers of identity pathways in which black women are repeatedly affected
by the crossing and overlapping of gender, race and class, modern colonial
apparatuses (AKOTIRENE, 2020, p 19).
Using intersectionality as a prism, is to analyse
structural oppressions as a whole. The application of intersectionality
as a concept and methodology allows the structuring of ideas and actions based
on the notion of integrality, fundamental for understanding the issues that
permeate SRRs within a capitalist, racist, and patriarchal society. The current
absence of the integrality perspective in the area of
rights and health, reveals the political project on which the logic of imposing
a lack of budgetary resources is based. This, and the epistemicide of the
theory of black feminism.
Black feminism founded the concept of reproductive
justice on this perspective, a key term for an expanded and critical
concept of reproductive rights, which jointly addresses human rights and social
justice as fundamental for the full exercise of reproductive health. Recognising
the importance of this concept is recognising that social inequalities do not
affect individuals equally and that they fulfil a purpose within a capitalist,
racist and patriarchal society. For Colette Guillaumin (2014), patriarchy is a
system for the appropriation of women that implies maintaining the subjugation
of their bodies and their behaviours, reducing everything related to the ‘feminine’
to something naturally to be dominated, domesticated
and diminished before the supremacy of the masculine, which, in turn, is the
rational and social element of establishing power.
Issues related to sexuality and reproduction,
especially in the West, in the context of colonisation, are central to the creation
of a hegemony of power. Although the historical struggle for these rights is
much older and ancestral, SRRs now have their legal basis in the 1948 Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, which allowed several other extremely important
guidelines to be incorporated into the field of Human Rights, such as the
rights of women, and black and LGBTI+ populations.
Internationally, their consolidation occurred at the 1994
United Nations International Conference on Population and Development, known as
the Cairo Conference. Other milestone moments for the debate on women’s rights
and the possibility of realising these rights worldwide were the Conferences in
Mexico (1975), Copenhagen (1980), Nairobi (1985) and Beijing (1995).
Silvana Santos (2017) points out that racism and
patriarchy are functional in social relations in the capitalist mode of
production. For her, it is essential to consider the particularities of
peripheral capitalism, which has “[...] in its socio-historical formation the link
between capitalism, racism, and patriarchy, which makes individuals, through
the profound development of productive forces, increasingly separated,
depowered, and stripped of their humanity and diversity” (SANTOS, 2017, p. 10).
When dealing more specifically with the Brazilian trajectory,
during the colonial period, issues related to reproduction and sexuality had a
prohibitionist and punitive bias, strongly influenced
and dominated by the Catholic Church. With the development of cities and the
expansion of capitalism, entities of controlling interest began to emerge, which
were often international, which financed mass sterilisations and the
distribution of contraceptives in Brazil from the 1960s onwards.
With the re-democratisation
movement, the second half of the 1980s was a fundamental period in Brazil for
the forming and implementing of public policies regarding gender, race and sexuality. In 1983, the Programme of Integrated Care
for Women's Health (Programa de Assistência Integral à Saúde da
Mulher (PAISM)) was created, followed
two years later by the National Council for Women's Rights (Conselho Nacional dos Direitos da
Mulher (CNDM)). Of the milestones of
the 1980s, the 1st National Conference on Women’s Health in 1987 deserves
highlighting, as does the 1986 Charter of Brazilian Women to the Constituents (Carta
das Mulheres Brasileiras aos Constituintes), which, under the motto of ‘constituents, to
have value, must have woman's word’, enabled the inclusion of answers to some
of its demands within the 1988 Federal Constitution (SOUTO; MOREIRA, 2021).
In the 1980s, the feminist movement also managed to add
the issue of voluntary abortion to the national political agenda and, in the
1990s, the agenda of forced sterilisations gained greater visibility through
the formation of the Joint Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (Comissão
Parlamentar Mista de Inquérito (CPMI)), which was responsible for investigating
and examining the incidence of mass sterilisation of women in Brazil,
especially among black and poor women. The data exposed by the CPMI made explicit
the old reality of disregard for women’s rights and exposed alarming data, such
as the fact that 45% of Brazilian women of reproductive age had been sterilised.
The highest percentage of sterilisation was found in states with a majority
black population, marked by squalor and poverty, where most women had no access
to information regarding the reproductive process, and sterilisation was seen
as the only possible, or often forced, alternative. Furthermore
it was being financed by countries like the United States, marking the eugenic
and racist character of this practice (BRASIL, 1993).
Despite all these difficulties, it is important to
recognise the many advances made in the struggle for rights and reproductive
and sexual healthcare, which allows us to understand this field in its totality
and in its different dimensions. The guarantee of these rights is achieved
through public policies, which contain actions encompassing the theme in its
entirety, such as sex education, access to information, access to family
planning, prenatal and childbirth healthcare, access to legal abortion, safe
and free access to testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections (STIs)
and access to the trans-sexualisation process. It is essential to understand
the importance of these rights and the need to strengthen social policies and
health services, the gateway to addressing these demands. One of the measures
that makes this strengthening possible is that of integrated actions,
fundamental for expanding access to these rights, alongside preventative and
promotional actions.
Public funds
and budget for SRRs
When dealing with social policies regarding access to SRRs,
it is important to contextualise certain specificities of Brazilian social
policies. Behring and Boschetti (2011) highlight the significance of colonisation
in Brazil, the historic weight of slavery on Brazilian society and its
condition of peripheral and dependent capitalism.
As a result, social policies in Brazil are marked by a
contrariness that arises from this class struggle. They represent the agendas
and demands of a working class already marked by poverty and other expressions
of the social issue, but they also represent the search for legitimacy by the
dominant class and, above all, forms of guardianship and favouritism.
If social policy is related to the class struggle, and considering that
work in Brazil, despite important moments of radicalisation, is riven by the scars
of slavery, informality and fragmentation/co-option, and that the dominant
classes never had democratic and redistributive commitment, there is a complex
scenario for struggles in defence of citizenship rights, which involve the building
of social policy (BEHRING; BOSCHETTI, 2011, p. 79).
Understanding the
relationship between the capitalist mode of production, in its different
phases, and the emergence and development of social policies, we observe that
certain elements permeating this socio-historical relationship are permanent, including
the conditions of late and dependent capitalism, racism, patriarchy, paternalism
and charity, and the fragmentation, focussing, and privatisation of social
policies. In the context of neoliberalism, all these elements are perpetuated
and deepened. Another central element of social policies in this context is
financialisation, which leads to the capture of public funds for interest
payments and public debt amortisation.
In this way, the centrality of the dispute over public
funds and the destination of public resources becomes clear, a dispute which
permeates the debate around the production of wealth and taxation, elements
that are at the forefront of people’s thinking in such an unequal society, and where
taxation is regressive, so that the highest percentage collected falls on the
working class, while the property and material goods of the ruling class are barely
taxed at all.
Public funds concern the State’s ability to mobilise
resources to carry out the interventions set out in public policies, including
economic and social policies, which permit either the modifying or preserving of
the status quo in any given region or country. These public resources
come mainly from the collection of taxes, contributions (social and economic)
and fees, in addition to other public revenues provided for by law, according
to Salvador and Teixeira (2014).
According to Behring (2021), from a Marxist
perspective, public funds can be understood as a mix of surplus value (surplus
labour) and necessary labour, as the State has to
appropriate a significant portion of surplus value with the purpose of ensuring
the conditions of capitalist production and reproduction. One of the main forms
of raising public funds is through the extraction of resources from society in
the form of taxes, contributions and rates of socially
produced surplus value.
The budget, as the most visible part of public funds
(SALVADOR; TEIXEIRA, 2014), is more than a technical planning instrument of the
State. Oliveira (2009) views the public budget as a political statement that
indicates who will finance the public policies of the capitalist State and, in
its allocation of resources, define the direction and forms of action of the
State in delivering its public policy priorities. In Brazil, the financing of
the public budget has been marked by highly regressive taxation, with the
poorest paying proportionally more taxes (SALVADOR, 2010), and, regarding
expenditure and according to Behring (2021), the main priority over the last 25
years has been interest payments and public debt amortisation.
As a way of confronting this perverse fiscal
tradition, the 1988 Federal Constitution (FC) defines instruments guaranteeing
resources to ensure that social policies remain viable, establishing minimum
spending levels for health and education policies at all administrative levels
(Federal, State, Federal District and Municipal) and confirmed, in Article 195
of the Magna Carta, social contributions to finance social security policies.
However, the social rights established in article 6 of the 1988 FC, and the
idea of expanded social security — given the options for macroeconomic policies
in the post-reality era — did not benefit from economy policies that supported
social rights and ended up hostages to continual fiscal adjustments.
With the inauguration of President Temer, there was a
resurgence of the offensive of capital, returning with force to neoliberal
orthodoxy, with severe reductions in social rights, and especially in the
financing of public policies. This was set out in the New Fiscal Regime (Novo
Regime Fiscal (NFR)), approved by Constitutional Amendment (CA) 95. The NFR
makes it impossible to allocate resources for social policies in the manner defined
in the 1988 FC. It freezes primary government expenditure (except for debt interest
payments) for twenty years, and limits corrections to the rate of inflation.[7] According to the NFR (CA 95), “[...] public spending
will not keep pace with income or population growth, in a country whose per
capita spending is still very low” (DWECK; GAIGER; ROSSI, 2018, p. 48). In this
context, policies, programmes and projects aimed at
Sexual and Reproductive Rights will lose resources within the federal public
budget, as highlighted below.
Social policies
aimed at SRRs under the Temer and Bolsonaro governments
The government of Michel Temer (2016-2018) launched an
attack on the rights of women, the black population and LGBTI+ groups, i.e. on agendas considered progressive and linked to social
movements historically opposing bourgeois hegemony. “In temporarily assuming
the Presidency of the Republic, on May 12, 2016, Michel Temer appointed a
veritable monochrome cabinet: all 24 ministers were male and white. An
exclusively male government has not been seen in Brazil since 1979” (GONÇALVES;
ABREU, 2018, p. 764).
One of the first blows against the rights of women and
other groups was the administrative reform implemented by Temer, in which he abolished
the ministries of Social Security, Science, and Technology. The Ministry of
Justice became the Ministry of Justice and Citizenship, incorporating the
Secretariat for Policies for Women and issues related to racial equality and
human rights (APROVADA..., 2016).
Under the ambit of the Ministry of Justice and
Citizenship and headed by former federal deputy Fátima Pelaes (of the Brazilian
Democratic Movement Party, Amapá (PMDB-AP)), a militant for the ‘right to life from conception’ and
former president of the Evangelical Parliamentary Front, the Secretariat for
Policies for Women (Secretaria
de Política para as Mulheres) came to be directed from a perspective of
police repression. As congresswoman Maria do Rosário (Labour Party, Rio Grande do Sul (PT-RS)) states, the support base of the Temer government “[...] is
born of conservatism, control over the female body and the culture of rape” (NO
GOVERN..., 2016, not paginated). Temer’s stance towards women became more
explicit in his speech on International Women’s Day, March 8, 2017, in which he
reduced the role of women to staying at home and taking care of children
(GONÇALVES; ABREU, 2018).
In terms of budget planning, the PAP from 2016 to 2019
makes only one mention in favour of women’s rights, in the form of a programme
called Policies for Women: Promoting Equality and Combating Violence, which has
equality and violence as its main axis for action, and which contains no
mention of SRRs.
Under the cosh of CA 95 of 2016, social policies, with
no guaranteed budgetary resources or constitutionally guaranteed minimum expenditure,
have suffered unprecedented setbacks. According to a survey carried out by
Salvador (2020) on the effects of the NRF, the various budgetary functions
directly related to the Welfare State which seek to guarantee rights within the
scope of public policies, have suffered a real-term reduction. For the period
2016 to 2019, the total fiscal and social security budget showed a small real-terms increase of 2.6% above inflation (measured by the
IPCA), however, the ‘Citizenship Rights’ function had a significant drop in applied
resources. In 2016, this function had an expenditure of R$ 2.17 billion which
fell to less than R$ 1 billion in 2019, a decrease of 57.44%, in values adjusted
by the IPCA (SALVADOR, 2020).
Within the functions of ‘Citizenship Rights’, is the
‘2016 Programme - Policy for Women: Promoting Equality and Combating Violence’[8], foreseen in the PAP of the Temer government and which had been brought
forward from previous government planning. The ‘2016 Programme’ has among its
objectives “Promoting economic, social, and sexual autonomy and the guarantee
of rights, considering women in their diversity and specificities” (BRASIL,
2016, p. 22).
Table 1, below, presents the budget execution for ‘Programme:
2016 - Policies for Women: Promoting Equality and Combating Violence’, for the
period 2014 to 2019, in values adjusted by the IPCA, at 2019 prices. It is
possible to compare and contrast the budgetary resources
that the programme had under the presidency of Dilma Rousseff (2014 and 2015),
and the effects of CA 95, under the Temer and Bolsonaro governments. 2016
represents the reference point for budget data for the purposes of CA 95,
starting in 2017.
|
Table 1 - Budget execution of the 2016 programme |
|||
|
Values in R$ adjusted by the IPCA, at 2019 prices |
|||
|
Year |
Authorised |
Paid |
Budget Execution |
|
2014 |
274,400,222.26 |
74,686,107.54 |
27.22% |
|
2015 |
313,552,735.24 |
64,422,530.24 |
20.55% |
|
2016 |
137,921,315.48 |
47,742,622.98 |
34.62% |
|
2017 |
104,399,876.12 |
38,712,319.72 |
37.08% |
|
2018 |
51,806,557.41 |
26,593,347.17 |
51.33% |
|
2019 |
62,948,565.36 |
28,684,375.51 |
45.57% |
|
Variation 2014- 2019 |
-77.06% |
-61.59% |
- |
|
Variation 2016-2019 |
-54.36% |
-39.92% |
- |
|
Source: SIGA Brasil. |
|||
|
Our production. |
|||
According to Table 1, the ‘2016 Programme’ has been
shrinking and its budget has been reduced over the period. It had a budget
allocation of R$ 313.5 million in 2015, which shrank to R$ 62.9 million under
Bolsonaro and the effects of CA 95.
The cycle of the ‘2016 programme’ budgetary management
shows that the policy for women is not a government priority, marked, as it is,
by falling resources and the failure to spend the authorised allocation. It
should be noted that when comparing the amount authorised with the amount paid
out in the ABL each year, only in 2018 was expenditure greater than 50%, nevertheless,
it remains the lowest amount spent in the series shown in Table 1.
In the 2019 budget, according to the data available from
SIGA Brasil, the ‘2016 Programme’, had 13 proposed budgetary actions, this ended
up being reduced to only two with authorised values, namely:
·
Action 14XS -
Construction of the Brazilian Women’s House (Construção
da Casa da Mulher Brasileira), with R$
19,231,462
·
Action 218B - Policies for Equality and Combating
Violence Against Women (Políticas de Igualdade e
Enfrentamento à Violência Contra as Mulheres), with
R$ 41,118,349.00.
The Bolsonaro government spent R$ 27,500,176.23 on
action 218B, only 66.9% of the authorised budget, this equates to a expenditure limited to 45.57% of the authorised
allocation, as shown in Table 1.
Among other neoliberal measures implemented by Temer, is
the Labour Reform Law (Law 13,467/2017, A Reforma Trabalhista), which contains changes including the extension of the working day,
the reduction of breaks, the possibility of direct negotiation between
employees and employers and even allowing pregnant women to work in places
considered unhealthy, putting the lives of women and children at risk. His
government also proposed PEC 151/2015 (Constitutional Amendment Project (Projeto de Emenda Constitucional)), which creates legal uncertainty regarding cases of
abortion already provided for by law, turning women into ‘potential criminals’.
It should be noted that the last year of the 2016-2019
PAP overlapped with the first year of the Bolsonaro government. The new PAP for
the period 2020 to 2023 brought three innovations: methodological
simplification, fiscal realism, and alignment and integration of the ministries’
strategic plans with the evaluation of public policies, all taking place under
Bolsonaro’s presidency. What has become clear, is that these new elements
served as a pretext for a downsizing of the PAP, its objectives, and goals. In
a slideshow regarding the PAP, containing only 11 pages, no mention is made of
the rights of women, or black, indigenous or LGBTI+ groups.
Actions in the first two years of Jair Bolsonaro’s
term dismantled the entire legal apparatus for accessing abortion and other
rights. Guided by fundamentalism, and most members of his government, these
actions deepened racism, sexism, and violence. The main difference between 2020
and previous years is that, in 2020, most parliamentary activity on this subject
was driven by the Government itself, and this should have been a positive
factor, were it not for the fundamentalist and conservative bias underlying the
actions. For example, even in the midst of the COVID
19 crisis, the Federal Government continued to act against the SRRs of women
and the LGBTI+ population.
According to the Feminist Centre for Studies and
Advice (Centro Feminista de Estudos e Assessoria (CFEMEA) (2020b),
[...] the target of the current Government are programmes that guarantee
the termination of pregnancies in cases currently authorised by law, especially
those related to sexual and reproductive health and sexual violence,
undermining the already weak capacity of the State to ensure basic and
comprehensive care for victims (CENTRO FEMINISTA DE ESTUDOS E ASSESSORIA,
2020b, p. 2-3).
Among the main measures, Ordinance No.
2,282, of August 27, 2020, deserves highlighting. It “Provides for the requirement
for justification and authorisation for the termination of pregnancy in cases
provided for by law, within the Unified Health System-SUS” (BRASIL, 2020a).
This Ordinance created a series of difficulties for women and health
professionals providing legal abortion services, especially the obligation to
report abortions to the police, even against the will or without the consent of
the girl or woman victim of sexual violence. This Ordinance can be read as an
institutional reaction to the outcome of a case in which a child from Espírito
Santo had their rights [to an abortion] upheld after multiple attempts by the
State to deny them (CENTRO FEMINISTA DE ESTUDOS E ASSESSORIA, 2020a, p.5). Following
a strong negative reaction, the ministry revoked Ordinance No.
2,282/2020 and replaced it with Ordinance No. 2,561/2020 (BRASIL,
2020b), which repealed some elements, but maintained the obligation to report
abortions, bringing legal uncertainty to professionals, coerced into violating
their Code of Ethics, who value the confidential relationship between doctor
and patient. It should be reiterated that health services must value, above
all, the reception, care, and health of the victim.
We must also highlight Decree No. 10,531,
of October 26, 2020, which “Establishes the Federal Development Strategy for
Brazil for the period 2020 to 2031 [...]” (BRASIL, 2020c, p.3), in which it directs
all public administrations to “[ ...] promote the right to life, from
conception to natural death, observing the rights of the unborn child, through
policies of responsible parenthood, family planning and care for pregnant
women” (BRASIL, 2020c, not paginated). “Of the nearly 70,000 rapes recorded in
2019, more than half were committed against girls under the age of 13. How can
the State, by executive decree, intentionally deny the right of access to legal
abortion?” (NATIONAL FRONT AGAINST THE CRIMINALISATION OF WOMEN AND FOR THE
LEGALISATION OF ABORTION, 2020, not paginated).
Furthermore, the closure, at the beginning of the COVID-19
pandemic, of clinics performing legal abortions, demonstrates the Bolsonaro
government’s complete disregard of the need to recognise sexual and
reproductive health services as essential. This has seriously impacted the
lives of people with a uterus and/or pregnant women, including increased
maternal mortality and the removal of access to legal abortion services.
In June 2020, Brazil abstained from voting on parts of
a UNESCO resolution regarding the need to guarantee the ‘sexual and
reproductive health’ of people affected by humanitarian crises. In 2020, Bill (Projeto
de Lei) No. 5435/2020, disguised as the ‘Pregnant Woman's Statute’
(Estatuto da Gestante), restricted and violated previously gained rights,
especially in the field of SRRs, by forcing children and women to continue
pregnancies resulting from sexual violence. This has now become known as ‘rape
scholarship’.
Although 2021 is not the object of this article, it is
worth emphasising that the Federal Government has continued to act against the
idea of reproductive justice. On April 19, Ordinance No. 13/2021 was
approved, proposed by the Ministry of Health and dealing
with the birth control service, it has deeply affected black, indigenous and
poor women.
One of Bolsonaro’s final attacks on people who
menstruate was on September 14, 2021, when Bill No. 4,968/2019 was
approved in the Senate, intended to “[...] combat menstrual precariousness,
which means a lack of access or lack of resources to purchase hygiene products
and other items necessary for the period of menstruation” (BRASIL, 2019, not
paginated). Menstrual precariousness affects thousands of people around the
world, a phenomenon that has expanded in the context of the pandemic. According
to senator Zenaide Maia, rapporteur for the proposal, 25% of young people have
already missed class because they were unable to access sanitary products.
Bolsonaro, despite sanctioning Law No. 14,214/2021, which created
the Programme for the Protection and Promotion of Menstrual Health (BRASIL,
2021), vetoed the free distribution of sanitary products to low-income
students, the homeless, the vulnerable, and inmates, which were the main targets
of the programme (BOLSONARO..., 2021).
Final considerations
We are currently witnessing the dismantling and
ruthless defunding of policies created by previous administrations, and the use
of resources for programmes that clearly violate freedoms and human rights. CA
95/2016 imposed a freeze on primary public spending, mainly in relation to
social spending, which has led to a greater impact on policies and programmes
that do not have ring-fenced resources and mandatory minimum spending.
The budget data analysed in this article expresses, in
financial terms, the setbacks created by government measures that weaken the
guarantee of women's rights, in particular those
guaranteeing social policies and programmes that ensure their rights and their
sexual and reproductive health. Austerity policies further impacted the
(de)financing of budgetary functions linked to human rights, as in the case of
the 'Citizenship Rights' function, which had its resources cut by almost 60% following
the approval of CA 95. One of the outcomes of these budget cuts will be the
impact on 'Programme: 2016 - Policies for Women: Promoting Equality and
Combating Violence', which already had a small budget and is now practically
extinct.
In conclusion, SRRs were not prioritised by the Temer
or Bolsonaro governments, nor considered essential for the maintenance of the
lives of individuals. Some actions were officially proposed, but little or
nothing was implemented. Measures with a moralistic, religious
and conservative bias, and counter to previously gained rights, appeared and
deepened. This is mainly due to the deepening of the neoconservative and ultra-neoliberal
project put into practice by both Michel Temer and Jair Bolsonaro, which disregarded
important guidelines regarding the rights of women, and black, indigenous, and LGBTI+
groups.
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________________________________________________________________________________________________
Valdenízia Bento PEIXOTO. Worked on the concept, design and orientation
of the research; in the analysis and interpretation of data; in writing and
designing the article and critical review; and approval of the published version.
Social Worker. PhD in Sociology. Adjunct Professor at
the Department of Social Service at the University of Brasilia. Tutor of the
Tutorial Education Programme in Social Work at the University of Brasília
(PET/SER/UnB).
Evilasio SALVADOR. Worked on the design of the article; data analysis and interpretation;
article writing and critical review; and approval of the published version.
Economist, Master, and Doctor in social policy.
Professor at the Department of Social Work and at the Graduate Programme in
Social Policy at UnB. Coordinator of the Centre for Studies and Research on
Public Funds, Budget, Hegemony and Social Policy of the Graduate Programme in
Social Policy at UnB. Research Productivity Scholarship from CNPq.
Ana Luiza Rosenbaum BIANCHETTI. Worked on data collection and partial writing of the
article.
Undergraduate student of the Social Service course at
the University of Brasilia. Scholarship student of the Scientific Initiation
Programme (ProIC) in the 2021/2022 notices of the University of Brasília.
__________________________________________________________________________
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