Rosa Weber plans start of abortion trial for next Friday

The president of the Federal Supreme Court (STF), Minister Rosa Weber, scheduled the start of the trial of the action that discusses the decriminalization of abortion up to the 12th week of pregnancy for next Friday (22).

The surprise is the fact that the trial is held in the virtual plenary, when the ministers just cast their votes in the Court system without discussion or transmission on TV Justiça.

ADPF 442, authored by PSOL together with the Anis Institute, was presented to the STF in March 2017, and requests that the articles of the Penal Code that treat abortion as a crime be considered unconstitutional. For the authors of the action, women would have the right to allow the death of their baby in an unwanted pregnancy up to 12 weeks of gestation, regardless of the circumstances. Today, according to the Penal Code, abortion is a crime, not punished when the pregnancy is the result of rape or there is a risk to the mother’s life. In 2012, the STF defined that the abortion of anencephalic fetuses should also not be punished.

To justify the request, PSOL and Instituto Anis state that the “in-utero human creature” would not be a “constitutional person”, holder of rights. Nothing in the Constitution or in the Brazilian legal tradition authorizes this distinction, other than the recent reasoning of some STF ministers and the statements of the authors of ADPF 442.

The proposal is pejoratively called a “legal abortion”, since the change in the law, if it were a consensus in society, should occur in the Legislative Branch, and not in the Judiciary Branch – even more so suggested by a dwarf party, which represents less than 1% of the Brazilian population. Today, 70% of Brazilians are against the legalization of abortion.

Voting will close on September 29, one day after Weber is expected to announce his retirement from the bench.

The president of the Supreme Court is also the rapporteur for the action and has a history of positions in favor of abortion. Still in 2018, the minister called public hearings to debate the decriminalization of abortion and stated that the issue needed “maturing”.

Two years earlier, in 2016, when judging a specific case in the First Panel of the STF, Weber said he did not consider it a crime if an abortion was performed in the first trimester of pregnancy.

Among the criticisms of the trial, politicians and pro-life activists emphasize that the issue should be debated in Congress and not decided by the Supreme Court, despite public opinion, which is mostly against intrauterine murder.