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Revealed: Brazil anti-abortion group handed public money [1]

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Date: 2023-07

Cervi’s website describes the organisation as a welfare centre that offers “comprehensive [care] to women and family members who are facing an unwanted pregnancy, are victims of sexual abuse, domestic violence, or have experienced abortion.” It claims to have assisted 18,000 people by 2020, of which 6,000 were women, but does not specify how.

Cervi has been heavily involved in campaigning against abortion rights in Brazil. In the federal capital Brasília, Cervi members have organised meetings and public hearings on women’s issues and reproductive rights. It also carries out extensive fundraising activities.

An investigation by independent outlet Agência Pública has now revealed Cervi received more than 170,000 Brazilian reais (£26,900) in public funding in the past four years. Of that, 100,000 Brazilian reais (£15,800) came from the National Department of Women’s Policy, which is part of the Ministry of Women, Family and Human Rights created by former president Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro named conservative evangelical pastor Damares Alves, now a senator, to head the ministry.

Strategic disinformation

Agência Pública’s reporters contacted Cervi on the phone numbers listed on the São Paulo metro posters. An undercover reporter booked an appointment and was told by a Cervi employee that this “is not an abortion clinic” but a space for women in vulnerable situations. The staffer said that Cervi helps women who have experienced violence or an unexpected pregnancy, or gone through an abortion. It also offers things like baby clothes and food staples.

The Cervi employee spoke about pregnant women who decided not to have an abortion after visiting the centre and gave our reporter false information about abortion procedures.

“There are different procedures and none of them are safe. You run the risk of losing your uterus. The risk you run is not only for the little one, you’re not only going to harm the baby, but your body will also be affected,” the staffer said.

She added that abortion “is not legal [in Brazil], even in cases of rape”. This is incorrect. Brazilian law has three exemptions for abortion: for rape victims; when a woman’s life is at risk, and if the foetus develops anencephaly, a severe birth defect.

The Cervi social worker claimed she was not trying to brainwash Agência Pública’s reporter, nor trying to convince them to see their supposed pregnancy through. However, she constantly asked our reporter to reflect more on the issue and presented them with a box filled with dolls that represented the foetus at different ages and sizes as the pregnancy progressed.

One in seven women around the age of 40 has had at least one abortion, according to Brazil’s National Abortion Survey, published in March. The survey data shows abortion is a relatively commonplace event and underlines the importance of treating it as a public health issue.

Gynaecologist and obstetrician Jefferson Drezett, who led care and support services for victims of sexual violence and carried out legal abortions for 24 years at the Pérola Byington Hospital in São Paulo, says it is a clear “abuse of their function” for government departments to fund anti-abortion organisations that promote misinformation.

“Whether it is with the correct information or with incorrect information, nothing can justify the Brazilian state financing an organisation whose principal aim is to not treat abortion as a public health issue, but rather as a religious moral issue”. He added that misinformation by groups like Cervi is “purposely deployed to inflict even more suffering and fear on women”.

Far-right links

For years, Cervi has been forging close political ties with figures on Brazil’s right and far-right, such as the former women’s minister Cristiane Britto, former São Paulo state deputy Janaína Paschoal and federal deputy Chris Tonietto. Britto succeeded Bolsonaro’s first women’s minister Alves, who left office to run for the senate seat in 2022. Paschoal has publicly spoken out against the decriminalisation of abortion in Brazil. Tonietto is a member of Bolsonaro’s political party.

Cervi’s founder and president Rosemeire Santiago has been crucial in the organisation’s cultivation of links with the far-right. Last year, she made an unsuccessful bid for state deputy, running as “São Paulo’s pro-life [candidate]” and winning strong support from Paschoal as well as the high-profile conservative lawyer and professor Ives Gandra Martins. During the campaign, Santiago took a fervently pro-life stance, argued that life begins at the moment of conception and spoke in favour of the Estatuto do Nascituro or Statute of the Unborn Child. This proposed legislation seeks to grant embryos and foetuses personhood and rights and would lead to the criminalisation of abortion under any circumstances.

Paschoal was one of the legislators who secured budgetary funding for Cervi. In 2021, she allocated 70,000 Brazilian reais (£11,100) to Cervi through the São Paulo’s government for the “procurement of equipment”, according to data from the state’s Transparency Portal.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/brazil-sao-paulo-anti-abortion-public-money-disinformation/

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