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It’s such an important day, Women’s International Day. I have to confess that I have four pages
that my original idea was to follow, as English is my second language, but I’ll take the
risk of not following my pages and try to speak in a very open… and ask you to use
imagination if I move to a wrong way in language or in my thoughts.
I decided to start telling you a story of how Anis, the organization that I’m a volunteer,
and myself got involved in the zika virus epidemic.
So, it’s a short story. In January of this year, I was invited
by PAHO to be a member of a group of experts to draft a national, a regional policy on
zika virus epidemic and what we called, at that moment, the risk of microcephaly in the
future children. So, participating in this group gave me a different picture of what
was going on from inside in Brazil.
We are now facing this sensitive political and economic moment,
and we developed this internal perspective of not trusting the numbers of the epidemic,
and not trusting really what was going on in the center of the zika zone epidemic in
the Northeast of the country.
So, after being totally immersed in the international group of experts,
we had a clear idea that something was going really wrong in Brazil.
And we decided to admit that we have an epidemic.
And the epidemic was not related only to the zika and the mosquitoes,
but to women’s reproductive rights and the risk
of neurological birth defects in the future children.
So, we were informed that WHO would announce the emergency
global situation on February 1st. At the same day, we decided to announce that were prepared
to move to the Supreme Court to guarantee women’s and children’s rights
as a consequence of the epidemic.
I have to confess you, at that moment we didn’t have anything to offer,
only our ideias, only our organization, and a past experience related to a former case
to the Brazilian Supreme Court, and I’m open to discuss with you the kind of experience
we have doing this strategic litigation at the Brazilian Supreme Court.
So, I went to BBC night show, for the first time in my life experience during an interview, and we announced,
‘We are now preparing to make a demand to the Brazilian Supreme Court’
Legally speaking, we cannot move, as a civil society organization,
straightforward from society to the Supreme Court.
We need a partner which is recognized by the Supreme Court as a legitimate partner.
Ten years ago, we worked with a health trade union of a million members.
Of course, one week later of our announcement, I knocked at their door saying, ‘I’m back’.
Ten years later. And now we have an epidemic, we need more data, we need to know exactly
what is going on to make a demand on this taboo topic that is abortion in Brazil.
But at the same time, I was sure, and I’m happy to clarify to you exactly what we are now
preparing to make the demand, but it’s not only a case on abortion, to talk about social justice,
reproductive rights, it’s not only to talk about abortion, abortion is really important,
but also how to take care of babies.
If we do recognize that we live in a democracy,
we do believe that women have the right to choose to keep the pregnancy
or to terminate the pregnancy.
So, we knocked at their door, and they said, ‘Yes, let’s start our negotiation’,
but, differently from ten years ago, we are now facing an emergency.
In the beginning of February, the numbers were around 3,000 notified cases
and 40 confirmed cases for zika virus
and around 400 cases that we know we have neurologic birth defects, but we could
not find zika virus in any kind of biomedical test we have.
We now have around 6,000 cases,
600 confirmed for neurological birth defects,
and 82 found zika virus in babies.
But only to give you an idea, and I know that I’m recording, two weeks ago, I went to Pernambuco,
in Recife, the capital of the state, and I saw a huge paper on the wall, and it said,
“Only in Recife, we have 98, almost a hundred, cases confirmed for zika virus.”
So I asked the secretary, ‘how come? If in Recife only we have a hundred cases, how do we have less
than a hundred in national numbers?’ And he told me,
‘Our numbers are not included in the national numbers’.
So, basically what we have is that this is an optimistic
picture of the size of the epidemic in Brazil.
So we decided to move our group of work from Brasilia,
from our well-to-do neighborhood, where we don’t know even a case of baby
born with neurological defects, and we decided to live in Campina Grande, a small city from
sertao of Paraiba state. This place is one of the key of the zika zone in Brazil.
And it’s from there that I’m happy to tell you stories of women that I’ve met in the
last three or four weeks. Concrete, everyday women that are facing poverty, facing a weak
social protection State, and facing the epidemic in a way that they have to understand that
the mosquito that was there for decades as a result of a persistent negligence of the
Brazilian state is now a kind of challenge to their lives and the lives of their future children.
So, we are now prepared to make the demand. And we have, and I’m totally
open to share it in public, we basically have three strategies.
The first one, and it’s really good news,
last week we had a meeting of the National Association of Public Defenders,
and they are a legitimized organization to make a petition to the Brazilian Supreme Court.
Sinara is the lawyer of Anis, she will be the lawyer of the case, and she was with me
at the plenary session of the Public Defenders.
They said, ‘Yes. We’ll move with you to the Brazilian Supreme Court’.
For us, it was really a hugely important day, because,
for the demand that we’re planning to make, we need them. The near future of these women
is to litigate education, accessibility, social protection, everything related to basic needs to survive,
so we need the public defenders to be with us since the beginning.
But we still have the second organization. Sinara and I will fly to the South of the country
tomorrow to have a second meeting with that second organization, and our plans are maybe
to split the case, as we have so many things to ask, so many rights violated by the epidemic,
that maybe we can consider two different cases.
But always we have been expecting an individual case,
an everyday woman to call us to have a concrete case,
with a face to make the demand to the Brazilian Supreme Court.
So, we have these three possibilities. But I can tell
you that we are now ready to move to the final steps of the case.
So basically, what do we want to demand?
We named the demand as a family planning and protection to motherhood and childhood.
Of course you can ask me, and why not ask, ‘*** and reproductive rights’?
Because family planning is a constitutional right in Brazil. So we’re speaking constitutional
language, Brazilian constitutional language. And we have two groups of demands.
The first one is access to information, which means access to the best diagnosis available in
the public health system. It can be clinical diagnosis, and if we have by chance PCR,
the blood test, that’s fine, but if we don’t, the clinical diagnosis is enough to inform
women that they were infected by zika virus.
If the woman is infected by zika virus,
we would like to ask to give her the right to interrupt the pregnancy.
We’re not talking about forcing any woman to take any decision,
and we’re not associating the epidemic and the demand to any fetal diagnosis.
We’re associating with the risk of being pregnant
while the epidemic is out there. These women are suffering such a kind of psychological
torture that we consider that we have a strong constitutional violation going on.
And the second demand,
and it’s not an easy demand considering the economical climate in Brazil,
is to extend the social protection and a specific cash transfer benefit to all children infected
by zika virus and diagnosed with neurological birth defects.
As I said in the beginning, microcephaly is only one of the symptoms, of the outcomes of the epidemic,
which doctors and scientists have been naming ‘zika virus syndrome’.
The situation is much more severe than only, if you can say that way,
than only one symptom that is microcephaly.
So, I’d say this is the backstage of the case, the backstage of who we are, and the moment that
we are now moving to do this litigation at the Brazilian Supreme Court.
Before moving to your questions, I really would like to thank you, ambassador, for the invitation
for today, in such an important day, Women’s International Day,
to have this conversation with you.