The president of Portugal has ratified a law legalizing abortion in the first ten weeks of pregnancy.
And the Minister of Health in Brazil has called for greater dialogue about reproductive rights. Abortion is illegal in Brazil (with health and rape exceptions), but the country has a very high abortion rate — higher than the U.S. rate. According to the Brazilian health minister, 200,000 women are treated complications from unsafe abortion in his country every year.
Needless to say, the Catholic church is opposed to legalizing abortion in both Portugal and Brazil.
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So, that makes two barely-second-world nations with overwhelmingly Catholic populations that have more reasonable reproductive policies (or at least more reasonable public debates on such) than the United States. Plus Mexico, too.
clearly Brazilian women and men need access to safe and effective birth control. the catholic church lobbies against birth control as well as abortion.
As a brazilian, I have to say that it’s largely political inertia keeping abortion illegal here. Yes, the church is against it, but while 75% of the people here claim to be catholic, the vast mojority barely care about what it says.
Poverty and irregular access to birth control also do a great deal to inflate the number of abortions and related health issues. But basically, what we have it a dormant situation in which no party wants to raise the issue: conservatives becasue it’s a current win for their side, and yet they don’t want to come off as intolerant fossils by being strident about it. Liberals, because they tend to be allied with moderately open-minded churches (Liberation Theology was big here) and often don’t feel like threatening that relationship.
It always seems that the Catholic church is against nearly everything that would keep people safe and/or healthy and/or happy.
At least it’s a step in the right direction. I’m all for positive steps. They always lead somewhere.
“It always seems that the Catholic church is against nearly everything that would keep people safe and/or healthy and/or happy.”
Because healthy/happy people tend to be less reliant on religion as a source of comfort – see Western Europe in the past fifty years.
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