After about two months of fighting in court, a woman who was pregnant with a malformed fetus with no chance of life outside the womb managed to have a legal abortion in Bahia.
According to the State Public Defender’s Office, the agency had been seeking to enforce the right to abortion since July and, despite medical reports indicating a pregnancy incompatible with life, the termination had been denied.
The Second Criminal Chamber of the Court of Justice of Bahia reversed the decision of the first instance and authorized the procedure, which was carried out last weekend.
For the coordinator of the Human Rights Specialization and the Women’s Defense Center, Lívia Almeida, the decision came a little late for the pregnant woman, but it has historical weight.
“It is a very well-founded decision and addressed several very important points, such as the secular state and the right to mental health. It is not fair to subject a woman to something as cruel as carrying and giving birth to a child and then burying it. I hope that it paves a less painful path for the next women to come,” highlighted the public defender.
The unanimous decision, handed down on August 29, indicated that the Second Chamber also recognized the risks to mental health of imposing a pregnancy with no chance of survival.
The decision highlighted the risk to mental health in the case of a woman being forced to continue a pregnancy against her will and even when diagnosed with “non-viability of extrauterine life”. A report from a psychologist was attached to the case, attesting to the suffering that the pregnant woman has been going through.
Even with medical examinations indicating the incompatibility of the fetus with life, the abortion was prevented in the first instance. The Court had understood that the medical reports stated “absence or divergence of technical elements that justify the performance”. Therefore, new examinations were requested.
A resident of a city in the interior of the state, the woman was referred to the Public Defender’s Office of Bahia “with a diagnosis of a fetus with compromised lungs, kidneys and heart, in addition to an absence of amniotic fluid, resulting in a neonatal mortality rate of 90-95%”. The pregnant woman was referred to the agency to exercise her right to abortion at 22 weeks of gestation.
The decision that guaranteed the procedure was only made when the pregnancy was approximately 27 weeks old. The average time between the receipt, filing and judicial authorization of cases of the same nature received by the Women’s Defense Center (Nudem) is one week.
According to the Public Defender’s Office, between 2022 and May of this year, Nudem received 73 cases of pregnancy diagnoses incompatible with life not provided for in the legal system in Bahia.
The majority of cases (57.5%) arrive at the institution with at least 20 weeks of pregnancy (57.5%) and are women living in inland municipalities (56.1%). The data are from the Nudem observatory for care for the interruption of pregnancies with fetal malformation incompatible with extrauterine life.
This content was originally published in Woman guarantees in court the right to abort a fetus with no chance of life on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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