O debate parlamentar sobre aborto no Brasil : atores, posições e argumentos

The right to abortion in Brazil is limited and the Chamber of Deputies is one of the places where legislation on the issue can be changed. Unlike what happened in countries that have altered their punitive laws and decriminalized abortion, in Brazil is still a crime, but not punishable in cases where the pregnancy is the result of rape, when the woman is at risk of life and in cases of foetuses with anencephaly . Despite more than 60 bills of law aiming to change the legislation have been proposed in the House, none was approved, showing the difficulty of the discussion and to move forward on the issue. This paper aims to map the debate on abortion that has developed in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies from 1991 to 2014, analyzing what the positions and arguments mobilized, trying to understand the defaults and changes over the years. From the search in the House site were selected 915 speeches between the 49th and the 54th legislature. The analysis allowed us to observe that 61.8% of pronouncements are opposed to abortion, while only 15.7% are favorable. Furthermore, the data indicate that despite the women parliamentarians have spoken out in only 13.6% of the discourses on abortion, they accounted for 40.3% of the pronouncements favorable to the expansion of legal abortion. From 2005 it was possible to see a greater political and religious mobilization that contributed to the issue gained prominence in the 2010 presidential elections and may have influenced the decrease in speeches favorable to the expansion of legal abortion. More than half of speeches mobilized the inviolable right to life to defend their position. The other most frequent arguments were religious (30%), moral arguments (24%), legal (24%) and related to public opinion (22%). The issues of public health and individual freedom were the main arguments used in the pronouncements favorable to the expansion of legal abortion. In general, the analysis of the pronouncements indicates an emphasis on security and guarantee of the life of the foetus and an indifference towards women, whose autonomy is almost absent from the debate.