The Far-Right, U.S.-Linked Political Actors Bringing the "Crisis Pregnancy Center" Model to Brazil
Plus: How Brazil's abortion ban generates dangerous misinformation even in medical contexts, and offers a cautionary tale for the United States.
My visit to a Brazilian “crisis pregnancy center”
In March, I traveled with the International Women’s Media Foundation to Brazil as part of a cohort of journalists reporting various reproductive health stories. One of my main interests was in how members of Brazil’s far right are bringing American-style anti-abortion tactics to their country, especially “crisis pregnancy centers,” or anti-abortion centers.
If you’ve been reading this newsletter or any of my work for a while you know that CPCs are a major focus of my reporting. They are one of the anti-abortion movement’s most effective engines of disinformation, and an excellent recruiting tool. And in addition to manipulating, confusing, and deceiving people seeking abortions, they also endanger clients by advertising medical services—including testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections—that they rarely deliver on. In the U.S., they increasingly ensnare people who are falling through the cracks left by the closure of abortion clinics across the 21 states that have either banned or further restricted access to abortion in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.
And, as I revealed in a first-of-its-kind investigation, they have tremendous amounts of money.
Anti-abortion organizations have long been working to export this model abroad. But mostly, they’ve focused on countries where abortion is relatively accessible—like the U.K.—or where abortion has recently been wholly or partly decriminalized, like Colombia and Mexico. What, exactly, are they doing in Brazil, where abortion is illegal with very limited exceptions, and where people who qualify for those exceptions are still often turned away?
To find out, I visited one CPC in São Paulo. It’s called CERVI, an acronym that in Portuguese stands for Center for Life Restructuring. This tracks with what center’s founder, Rosemeire Santiago, told me about CERVI’s mission: “We help them to have a profession, not only give me, give me, give me. Otherwise, there would be no reason for working with women.”
Despite her claim during our interview that CERVI doesn’t deal in politics, Santiago has extensive ties to Brazil’s far right, including one of the propaganda outlets that attempted to sway the 2022 election in former president Jair Bolsonaro’s favor. She and CERVI also have ties to a U.S. CPC in… Michigan, of all places. Read the story for more of what I uncovered.
What I learned about abortion ban exceptions
My second piece from Brazil focuses on the exceptions to Brazil’s abortion ban—or in practice, the lack thereof.
Technically, abortion is legal in Brazil in three situations: in cases of rape, when abortion is necessary to save a pregnant person’s life, and in cases of fetal anencephaly, a severe malformation of the fetal brain and skull. The stark truth, however, is that sexual violence is more common than life-threatening pregnancy complications and fatal fetal conditions. As a result, a stunning 94 percent of legal abortions in the country are due to rape.
And the number of rape survivors who should be entitled to legal abortions is likely much, much higher. But there are very few facilities in the country providing legal abortion care, despite the fact that every public health facility with obstetric services should provide legal abortions. And a majority of medical professionals in Brazil object to participating in abortion care, which means survivors are often turned away.
Either because of their own moral objections, a fear of prosecution, or both, doctors often interrogate survivors to ensure their stories match up with the timeline of the pregnancy. At one hospital we visited on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, the medical director explained this process to me rather proudly.
It’s easy for Americans to dismiss these stories as evidence of other countries’ backwardness. But this is our future in the United States—and in many states, our present. Brazil has just been living under these laws for longer than we have (since 1940, to be exact). What I saw there is a cautionary tale for Americans who are focused on enshrining exceptions into abortion bans. Exceptions, in practice, simply don’t work. Read the full story to learn more.
More things I’m watching:
In case you missed it, the Supreme Court has two abortion-related cases on its docket this term.
First I want to mention the case that, overall, I’ve seen get far less attention: Idaho v. United States (also known as Moyle v. United States because two cases have been rolled into one). At issue in this case is whether Idaho can enforce its abortion ban, which has exceptions so narrow that they violate a federal law called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, or EMTALA. In a nutshell (and as I also explained in this TikTok), EMTALA requires emergency rooms to provide abortion care when that is the necessary treatment not just to save the life of a pregnant person, but when it’s necessary to preserve their health or future function. Idaho—along with five other states—enacted an abortion ban with exceptions so narrow they violate this standard. (You might remember that last fall, I spent ten days in Idaho reporting on the culture of fear created by this ban, the Christian nationalist takeover of government that led to it, and the locals organizing to take back their state.)
What Idaho (heavily assisted by the conservative legal super-firm Alliance Defending Freedom) is arguing in this case hinges on a concept called preemption, or the idea that when federal and state law conflict, federal law wins out. Except ADF and Idaho want to turn that idea on its head, arguing that, somehow, federal law actually requires doctors to follow state law. Even many of the Court’s conservatives clearly found the argument to be nonsensical, but the case and the broader strategy behind it are important to keep an eye on. Attempts to attack EMTALA—which governs all emergency medical care, not just pregnancy-related care—have implications for all of us. Ever heard that an emergency room can’t turn you away without checking you out? That wasn’t the case until EMTALA was enacted in the mid-80s. And the attempt to turn preemption on its head is part of a larger effort on the part of the far right to slowly whittle away the parts of federal government they don’t like, while beefing up the parts that suit them.
This brings me to the other, and much more highly publicized, abortion-related Supreme Court case this term: FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine. This is the case where a group of anti-abortion physicians sued the FDA in an attempt to reverse its approval of mifepristone, one of the drugs used in medication abortions. While it is theoretically possible the Supreme Court could reverse the approval of mifepristone—because the Supreme Court can do essentially whatever it wants—technically they are considering more narrow procedural questions.
During oral arguments in March, the justices—including some of the conservatives—were much harder on Alliance Defending Freedom’s Erin Hawley (yes, wife of Senator Josh Hawley) than I expected. However, Justices Thomas and Alito both referenced the Comstock Act, the never-repealed 1873 anti-obscenity law that provides an easy path to a total national ban on abortion, contraception, and anything else the far right doesn’t like. Resurrecting the Comstock Act is priority number one for the anti-abortion movement, and even if this test balloon fails, we will see them try again until they succeed.
As with all blockbuster Supreme Court cases, we expect these decisions in June, though they could technically come at any time. Stay tuned!
And if you’re on TikTok, you can now follow me there (please).