April 3, 2025
On March 31, 2025, members of the O’Neill Institute’s Center for Health and Human Rights (CHHR) and the organization Ríos filed an amicus curiae brief in Arguição de Descumprimento de Preceito Fundamental 989, currently before the Supreme Federal Court (“STF” in Portuguese) — the Brazilian Court with authority to decide constitutional matters.
The case challenges the structural barriers to accessing legal abortion in the Brazilian public health system, and the petitioners seek to declare a State of Unconstitutionality (“ECI” in Portuguese) in response to this situation. This state of affairs directly impacts the lives of girls, women, and people with gestational capacity who require access to voluntary termination of their pregnancies under the circumstances provided for in the Brazilian legal framework — pregnancy resulting from sexual violence, threats to the pregnant person’s life, and anencephalic fetus.
CHHR and Ríos’ submission seeks to provide the Court with international and comparative law perspectives, highlighting Brazil’s international obligations and other decisions from the Constitutional Courts of the region. Furthermore, the submission highlights how barriers to accessing legal abortion services violate fundamental rights guaranteed by both domestic and international frameworks, providing concrete examples to illustrate these violations.
These legal and factual barriers include the following: insufficient availability of services, a lack of acceptable and quality services that include inadequate practices in the care of legal abortion cases, the failure to apply abortion methods in accordance with the latest scientific health evidence, the barriers created by gestational limits imposed in practice; insufficient access to information on sexual and reproductive health, the transversal impacts caused by the improper use of the conscientious objection, and the negligence in maintaining professional secrecy in this context.
CHHR and Ríos hope the Honorable Court will consider the perspectives submitted and recognize the structural problem of allowing access to abortion in Brazil only under the cases allowed by the national framework. Furthermore, as emphasized in the submission, criminalizing abortion in circumstances outside of those narrowly outlined in the current law represents a barrier in itself. It is critical that the STF continues to examine the ways in which the criminalization of abortion amplifies the obstacles faced by girls, women, and people with gestational capacity in Brazil.