Abortion after the Zika virus epidemic in Northeast Brazil

Abortion and race in Brazil, National Abortion Surveys 2016 to 2021

We examine racial differentials in abortion among women in Brazil using data from three editions of the Brazilian National Abortion Survey (PNA), 2016, 2019 and 2021. We test the difference in means in data from separate surveys, combined surveys without reweighting, and combined and reweighted surveys. We also use logistic models for the chance of having an abortion. The results indicate that there is a consistent racial differential in the three editions of PNA, with the percentage of abortions among Black women being higher than among white women. In the combined and reweighted surveys, among Black women of all ages the probability of having had an abortion is 11.03% while among white women it is 7.55%. This means a difference of 3.5 percentage points, which translates into a 46% higher probability for Black women, statistically significant values for a 5% interval. Logistic regressions produce similar results, with an average predicted probability of 12.61% for Black women and 8.90% for white women, also significant. Racial differences remain statistically significant for various combinations of PNA editions. However, in the separate surveys, the difference in means tests are only statistically significant in 2016. Black refers to the group formed by Black and Brown women (pretas and pardas). Due to the small sample size, it is not possible to say much about the differences with Asian and Indigenous women.

Women, Administered Insecurity, and Multiple Alignments to Assuage Gender Inequalities in the Brazilian Zika Epidemic

This article deals with the Brazilian Zika epidemic that started in 2015 and became an important event for understanding Gender and Power in health treatment contexts. It discusses a combination of reinforcement of gender normed care and therapeutic itineraries overburdening mothers and the construction of political awareness and practice associated with demands for state services. Working with a concept of administered insecurity elaborated to understand people displaced during the implementation of planned government development policies, it argues that the planned nature of health systems, despite their explicit emphasis on the objective of treating the health of the population, also generate administered insecurity as planned administrators of scarcity. It uses data from a 4-year research project entitled “Doing Ethnography on Care” in Recife, Brazil, to show the multiplicity of contexts that are brought out through the practice of mothers in providing care for their Zika-syndrome stricken children, and how they reflect varying power relations that constantly re-dimension maternity along lines of gender relations in different institutional domains of treatment and research. The severe gender inequality in caring for infants was partially assuaged by multiple alignments made by the mothers and infants promoting dialogue and practice in varied contexts, including interaction with the research team. Family and Community Relations, Mediation, Favors, Accusations, Judicialization, Collective Action, formation of Associations, and learning to produce videos are seen as constructors of complex meaning and practice of mothering in a way in which gender goes beyond the limits of an overburdening practice of care. Gender provides a significant difference for mothers whose knowledge and familiarity of domains of health and health-related provision of services and knowledge, forged in their search for treatment for their child, create and legitimate spaces for the exercise of informed citizenship and a sharp awareness and resistance to practices by the state and other agents who administer insecurity. The final remarks synthesize some of the more important reconfigurations of gender relations and power in the context of the Zika epidemic and alerts to the challenge of the transitory nature of an epidemic and the gradual, and not so gradual, exhaustion of institutional interest for the dilemma of the mothers and also shows the role of anthropological research in promoting gender equality in epidemic contexts.