Education and health in dispute: Anti-egalitarian movements and public policies

Abstract

In Brazil, during the last decade, sexual and reproductive rights became one of the subjects of struggle about educational and health public policies. In this paper, we show how, in the education field, proposals of inclusion of an egalitarian perspective about men and women and anti-discrimination initiatives in the basic and high school level started to suffer opposition as “gender ideology” while higher education was attacked, among other reasons, for adopting affirmative actions. In the health field, we reconstitute how the values of equality and integrality of our Brazilian National Health System (SUS) has been attacked when its services deal with gender, sexuality and ethnic-racial differences. In both fields, political groups that fight the advance of sexual and reproductive rights set into action an anti-equality agenda that also deepens class and ethnic-racial inequalities.