An arts and body image workshop for adolescents organized by Grupo Curumim, an IWHC partner in Recife, Brazil.

IWHC began partnering with Brazilian feminist organizations in 1986. Investing in a number of young, innovative groups located in Brazil's major cities, we aimed to help the feminist movement grow in size and influence. IWHC provided technical and financial support to these organizations so that they could expand and develop as institutions, and encouraged them to forge national and regional alliances around key issues in women's health and rights.

In 1991, many of these organizations came together to form a national network, known as Rede Nacional Feminista de Saúde e Direitos Reprodutivos (National Feminist Network for Reproductive Health and Rights). IWHC has supported Rede Feminista de Saúde from its inception, providing seed financial and technical support in 1991. In the past fifteen years, Rede Feminista de Saúde has grown into a strong, policy-oriented network of over a hundred member organizations, with representation in 24 Brazilian states. It is a critical coordination point for the feminist movement, and a reference point on policy, advocacy, and research on women's health for the public and nongovernmental sectors. Over the years, Rede Feminista de Saúde has made vital contributions to national and local debates on decreasing maternal mortality; increasing women's access to contraception; addressing the HIV/AIDS pandemic (particularly as it affects women); and monitoring local state and national health policies.

Today, our Brazilian partner organizations—many of them members of the Rede Feminista de Saúde—are using diverse strategies to meet the immediate needs of their communities while advocating for sustainable social change supported by public policies that recognize women's and young people's citizenship, health needs, and human rights. Our colleague organizations provide information on sexual and reproductive health to their communities through trainings, educational programs, health fairs, and advocacy campaigns. They provide women and young people with the skills and encouragement they need to bring their knowledge to bear in the formation of local health policies through participation in municipal health councils, the primary unit of Brazil's highly decentralized health system. And they are continually forging partnerships with policymakers, health providers, educators, and community leaders, in order to foster support for full realization of women's and young people's sexual and reproductive rights.

Current challenges

Lidiane Gonçalves of Grupo Transas do Corpo, an IWHC partner in Goiânia, Brazil, testifies at a public hearing on abortion policy organized by Transas in October 2004.

Over the last decade, a movement to address the public health crisis of unsafe abortion in Brazil—and indeed, across Latin America—has been steadily building momentum. Abortion in Brazil is legal only for narrowly defined causes: rape, incest, and to save the life of the woman. Despite these legal restrictions, however, an estimated one million illegal abortions occur in Brazil each year, and one in four pregnancy-related deaths are due to complications from unsafe abortion. Overall, medical complications from unsafe clandestine abortions are the fifth leading cause of hospitalizations in Brazil's public health system. Young women are particularly vulnerable—in 2001, more than 51,000 teenage girls ended up in public hospitals as a result of such complications.

Feminist and women's movement leaders from across Brazil are mobilizing to address this crisis. In February 2004, a group of feminist organizations and networks formed the Jornadas Brasileiras pelo Direito ao Aborto Legal e Seguro (Brazilian Initiative for the Right to Legal and Safe Abortion – BIRSLA) to advocate for the reform of Brazil's restrictive abortion laws as a matter of public health, social justice, democracy, and human rights. From the beginning, BIRSLA worked through its coordinating organizations to ensure that the Initiative's demands responded to the diversity of Brazilian women's needs, integrating the concerns and perspectives of young women, women living in rural areas, women living in situations of poverty, and Afro-Brazilian and indigenous women—all groups that have been traditionally excluded from participation in the abortion debate. Given our broad base of partners committed to securing sexual and reproductive rights, IWHC was able to facilitate many of these dialogues.

Participants at an IWHC-sponsored intergenerational dialogue on feminism in Latin America, held in Brazil in 2004.

In recent years, we have also supported our partners' efforts to increase generational diversity in their advocacy and programs, encouraging them to build alliances with the growing youth movement for sexual and reproductive rights, and fostering intergenerational dialogues on leadership, advocacy, sexuality, reproductive health, gender equality, and human rights.

Photos (top to bottom) by John Maier, Ellen Sweet, Virginia Ryan Joffe, and Angeles Cabria.