The fight for legal abortion has been underway in Brazil for decades and this week made some small gains. The sad state of affairs in Brazil regarding abortion, as reported by Cecilia Sardenberg for Open Democracy, will have little impact on Americans who oppose abortion for moral and religious reasons. But lawmakers should take note.

Sardenberg is blogging the “Conference for Public Policies for Women” being held in the country’s capital, Brasilia. She reports that a proposal to legalize abortion gained enough support at the conference to move the idea a little further toward genuine consideration by lawmakers.

Although abortion is not legal in the country— except in cases of rape or to save the life of the mother— nearly 37 percent of pregnancies end in abortions, something like 1.1 million per year. According to Brazilian ministry of health statistics, criminalization has done nothing to curtail the practice but it has created a healthcare crisis because a quarter of those 1.1 million abortions are botched, forcing the internally torn-up and infected victims who don’t die into hospitals for days of expensive treatment. The vast majority of those women are of course poor and black, the desperate people who turn to back-alley quacks. Wealthy knocked-up Brazilians avail themselves of a network of pricey clinics that perform abortions clandestinely but safely. In her OpenDemocracy essay, Sardenberg quotes Dr Greice Menezes, a researcher at the Federal University of Bahia’s school of public health, on the matter of class and race and abortion in Brazil: “Deep down, abortion is a portrayal of social exclusion: the law criminalizes all women who practice it, but punishes with death only those who are poor and black”.

London-based OpenDemocracy is featuring Sardenberg’s coverage of the conference in Brazil but also linking to blogs from this week’s first Global Safe Abortion Conference in London, which has hosted 800 delegates from more than 60 countries.

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Image: Lady Lucy!