Political discourse in legislative proposals on abortion in the brazilian parliament between 2015 and 2018

Abstract

This paper presents the results of the content analysis of 25 bills that went through the Brazilian National Congress between 2015 and 2018 on the theme of criminalization and decriminalization of abortion. The objective is to describe and discuss the arguments used by the parliamentarians to support or reprove those bills. The analysis reveals that women’s reproductive rights are not protagonist of the discourse presented in the bills, which focus on the natural status of the fetus and on increasing penalties to the women who perform self-induced abortion. Even if the religious discourse is not so explicit, we can find many traces of it, though disguised behind a definition of the beginning of human life, to demarcate in time the recognition of the fetus as a subject of rights.