AMAC Exclusive – By Ben Solis
Brazil’s new left-wing government under the presidency of Lula da Silva announced last week that the country would be withdrawing from the Geneva Consensus, an international anti-abortion declaration signed in 2020. At the same time, the government is discussing new laws which would dramatically roll back protections for the unborn. Both moves break Lula’s promises to pro-life Brazilians and threaten to make Brazil a haven for late-term abortion in Latin America.
Under the leadership of former President Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil adopted many pro-life policies and allied with other conservative world leaders like President Donald Trump to protect unborn life. As a signatory to the Geneva Consensus Declaration, Brazil affirmed that no international right to abortion exists and “in no case should abortion be promoted as a method of family planning.”
But in January 2021, just days after taking office, U.S. President Joe Biden withdrew the United States from the declaration. Lula’s move to follow suit was seen by many as a first step to reverse Bolsonaro’s pro-life policies.
The Lula government has also revoked a Bolsonaro-era requirement that hospitals report abortion procedures to the police and is reportedly considering regulations that would effectively allow abortion up to the moment of birth while also releasing abortion providers from liability for complications resulting from dangerous late-term abortion procedures.
The two key figures leading the radical pro-abortion charge within the Lula government are Nísia Trindade, Lula’s Minister of Health, and Nésio Fernandes, the Secretary of Primary Health Care at the Ministry of Health. During the electoral campaign, Ms. Trindade promised to reverse Bolsonaro’s pro-life policies, which she said offend “sexual and reproductive rights.” Mr. Fernandes also pledged to repeal supposedly “retrograde” measures to protect unborn life.
Following the strategy of abortion proponents in the United States, Fernandes has also used extremely rare cases to justify a broad policy of allowing late-term elective abortions. He has proudly touted his role in “winning” an abortion for a 10-year-old who was raped by her uncle and became pregnant in San Catarina in 2020.
Given Fernandes’s background, it is perhaps unsurprising that he holds such abhorrent views on unborn life. Fernandes was a scholarship winner of the Communist Party of Cuba and graduated as a medical doctor from the Latin American School of Medicine in Havana. According to Brazilian senior political journalist Gabriel de Arruda Castro, Fernandes has also openly praised the Cuban dictatorship, repeating Che Guevara”s greetings: “Hasta La Victoria Siempre! (Ever onward to victory).”
Fernandes has also always seemed more focused on politics than medicine. As a physiotherapy student in 2004, a program he dropped out of, he ran an unsuccessful campaign for councilor in his hometown of Tubarão. In 2018, the voters again refused to elect him as state deputy for Tocantins. He was also the state president of the Communist Party of Brazil.
Communist governments have a long and sordid history of imposing radical abortion regimes on their populations. Despite Catholic solid influence in the country, late-term elective abortions up until the moment of birth are widely available in Cuba and are paid for by the government. In 1920, the Soviet Union became the first country in the world to legalize the practice. Communist China also has a shameful record of forced abortions, and today has one of the highest abortion rates in the world.
According to the Brazilian Association of Conservative Lawyers, the changes proposed by Trindade and Fernandes would likely make Brazil’s abortion laws the most liberal in the Southern Hemisphere. The organization also published the declaration denouncing Lula’s government and the decision to withdraw from the Geneva Consensus. “[We] stand for the uncompromising defense of life from conception, as Article 2 of the Brazilian Civil Code says, that safeguards the rights of the unborn child,” the lawyers asserted, calling upon the government to resume the fulfillment of “its constitutional mission to protecting life from conception.”
For Lula, the move to abortion extremism represents a sudden shift after expressing pro-life sentiment during his campaign last year. “Not only am I against abortion, but all the women I’ve married are against abortion,” Lula said ahead of the second round of presidential elections last October. “And I think almost everybody is against abortion.”
Lula also published a personal letter to pro-life Catholics and Evangelicals shortly before the election, declaring that he would defend life. “Our future government is committed to protecting life in all its phases,” the letter read. “For me, life is sacred, the work of the Creator’s hands. My commitment has always been and will always be with its protection.”
The letter was read aloud in São Paulo at an event with around 140 evangelical leaders representing 35 Protestant denominations. Hundreds of Catholic parishes distributed it along with a photo of Lula accompanying Pope Francis.
Many Catholics within Brazil have loudly protested Lula’s betrayal, with the Brazilian National Conference of Bishops saying that such a policy shift would have far-reaching and disastrous consequences, calling for “wisdom and balance.”
“Any attack against life is also an aggression against the Democratic State of Law and constitutes an attack on the dignity and social well-being of a human person,” the bishops emphasized.
Nonetheless, Lula and his communist-inspired lieutenants appear poised to ram through their radical changes. It is another important reminder for pro-life individuals in both the United States and around the world that progress in defending life is often only one election away from reversal, and defenders of the unborn must remain ever vigilant.
Ben Solis is the pen name of an international affairs journalist, historian, and researcher.
