"Close the factory, woman! Family planning on the agendas of the Brazilian National Congress and the media
Name: LEILA MARCHEZI TAVARES MENANDRO
Publication date: 11/07/2022
Advisor:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| MARIA LUCIA TEIXEIRA GARCIA | Advisor * |
Examining board:
| Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| ANA TARGINA RODRIGUES FERRAZ | Internal Examiner * |
| MARIA LUCIA TEIXEIRA GARCIA | Advisor * |
Summary: Law 9,263 of 1996 is the law that regulates family planning actions and the voluntary sterilisation procedure in Brazil. Although this law has been the target of proposals for change since its sanction, the number of bills for this purpose has intensified since 2015. The general objective of this thesis is to analyse the discourses contained in the bills suggesting alterations to Law 9,263/1996 (from its regulation until December 2020), produced by the Brazilian Federal Legislature, by collating the propositions and discourses of the mass and feminist media, aiming to identify the conceptions of family planning that conform there and the relationship between these discourses. It involved documentary research, in a qualitative approach, using two different techniques of analysis: content analysis and critical feminist discourse analysis. The documents analysed are diversified and are organized into two types:
the Bills that suggest the amendment of Law 9,263 of 1996 (and documents related to them, produced in the Brazilian National Congress) that were in progress until 2020; and the repercussions of this debate in the media, expressed by the articles of the newspaper O Globo and the Fêmea newspaper, encompassing the years 1990 to 2020. The conception of family planning in the documents, except for the conception expressed in the Fêmea newspaper
documents, is limited to contraception. In the legislative documents, the discussion of family planning is reduced to contraception and methods of contraception, mainly to the sterilization of women. These documents revealed that changes in the law are necessary to facilitate the sterilization of non-white and poor women. Family planning, in the mass media newspaper
documents, is linked to population control and individual contraceptive measures. There was
also a tendency to favour holding women responsible for reproductive matters, with a focus on
female sterilisation. In the editorials of this media, family planning was treated as demographic
control, aimed at decreasing the number of children of poor women. The Fêmea newspaper
counterpointed the discourse by relating family planning to reproductive and social rights.
While the mass media newspaper worked to spread patriarchal conceptions of gender, the
legislative documents maintained them as not only valid but as granted and indisputable
conceptions. It was the feminist newspaper that worked in the opposite direction, challenging
the norm, and presenting discourses of resistance by addressing alternative forms of existence
for women in Brazilian society. The proposals of the legislative documents expressed the
offensive of conservatism, which had the parliament representation substantially increased after
the 2014 and 2018 elections. The discussion fostered by federal legislators did not contribute
to the advancement of achievements in the arena of women's reproductive rights. On the
contrary, the action pointed out by the parliamentarians as a solution is not to expand social
policies and reproductive rights but to be effective in containing the growth of the poor
population through an irreversible method, in a context of reduced social rights and the illegality
of abortion
