Quarantine Week 3 Post

What really struck me in the readings this week was how much change and progress occured on the local and personal level. With the exception of Cuba, there were few states discussed that underwent real legal and judicial reform in the area of women’s rights and reproductive rights. The widespread family planning efforts that Mooney discusses in Chile were largely funded by international groups, and supported by Chilean NGO’s, like APROFA, who used a pro-life narrative to educate women about family planning (Mooney, Murray; 300). As Cynthia Gorney discusses, the nationwide attitude towards family planning was very much impacted by the Brazilian women’s movement of the 1970s and 80s and by the popularity of novelas, which were ubiquitous across the country and portrayed the ideal Brazilian family as one with only a few children (Gorney, Murray; 306). Beyond just the idea of having fewer children, Brazilian women also supported one another in their active family planning efforts, giving each other dosage information for Cyotec and helping spread the information as to where to get it, despite the laws against abortion and its illegal street vending (Gorney, Murray; 307, 308). 

Outside of women supporting other women, the more localized power brokers (priests, doctors, etc.) helped to facilitate spiritual and physical healing from women’s, often illegal, reproductive decisions and actions. Priests were instructed to not absolve women if they confessed to having an abortion to them, and doctors were legally obligated to break doctor-patient confidentiality if they treated a women who had received an unsafe abortion. Most doctors and priests did not follow the instructions from the greater hierarchy at play, and supported the women who came to them. Since politicians were in the pocket of the church, essentially, and since they were of a higher class, and therefore did not have experience with dangerous abortion methods, there was no real reason for them, in their own minds, to push for much legislative change. In states like Chile, where the Church has particularly intense power, Bonnie Shepard sums it up well by stating, “morality is conflated with the law, so that making divorce or abortion or adultery legal is tantamount to giving them moral approval.” (Shepard, 132)