“É só acrescentar mais uma palavra à Constituição”: uma análise decolonial de discursos de autoridades do Poder Executivo Federal sobre aborto e suas repercussões para a garantia da interrupção legal da gestação (2019 – 2022)

Abstract

Jair Bolsonaro's term as president of the Federative Republic of Brazil (2019 – 2022) has been gradually recognized as a period of democratic regression, of threats and attacks on Brazilian institutions and authorities and, also, a term of great dissemination of hate speech and the dismantling policies for socially vulnerable groups. When it comes to sexual and reproductive rights, this scenario was aggravated by the emergence of the global COVID-19 pandemic, which ended up acting as a catalyst for the installation of a pro-life agenda already announced in the former president's election campaigns. Despite the fact that civil society has mobilized to stop setbacks in this area, the main departments that deal with sexual and reproductive health – Ministry of Health and Ministry of Women, Family and Human Rights – were headed by personalities whose commitment to the antigen crusade was also already known. In view of the instabilities in terms of sexual and reproductive rights, in this research, I set out to investigate the representations and values inserted in the discourses on abortion by authorities of the Federal Executive Power, during the term of 2019 to 2022, and their possible implications for guaranteeing the legal abortion, with a focus on the former president and the ministers who commanded the aforementioned ministries. For that, I used content analysis as a research method, submitting the corpus of analysis to 29 registration units, 5 categories and 2 codes, all elaborated from a bibliographic and documental review on the subject oriented to encompass different positions and arguments about abortion. The empirical results were interpreted from the decolonial epistemological approach, an universe from which I extracted three analytical keys as subsidies for understanding the relationship between the analyzed discourses and their concrete effects: political power in the Dusselian perspective, coloniality of gender and pedagogy of cruelty. In the end, it was clear that all the speeches analyzed were part of the code tending to the restriction or absolute prohibition of legal abortion, divided between the categories abortion as a sin and abortion as a crime. Many speeches, despite being contrary to the current regulatory framework on abortion, were forged solely with the intention of making an electoral bargain possible or attacking Brazilian institutions and authorities. As for the repercussions, I identified several events that threaten legal abortion, most of them commanded or discursively legitimized by the aforementioned authorities. The modus operandi that undertook this process was bordered by a self-referential political power and deprived of mediation between government representatives and the political community, which, in Dussel's point of view, constitutes an anti-democratic exercise of power. In addition, the analyzed speeches showed a government policy to strengthen coloniality of gender and the pedagogy of cruelty, with successive political interference in judicial decisions, mobilizations of pro-life groups in the legislature and in civil society, emptying spaces for public debate and, furthermore, the imposition of institutional blockages to legal abortion, concomitantly with the process of social desensitization to the pain and suffering of clandestine, arrested or killed women, by the moralizing violence of patriarchal power.