Reproduction and the Limits of Democracy in Republican Brazil

    The abolition of slavery in 1888 and the fall of the Brazilian Empire one year later saw the creation of Brazil’s first democratic state (Old Republic, 1889-1930). Yet the Republic was far from a full democracy. While slavery was the defining barrier to full citizenship before abolition, less overt yet still pernicious legal restrictions functioning through the markers of race, class, gender, and literacy maintained social hierarchies under the Old Republic. In urban Rio de Janeiro, the state expanded into the everyday lives of Brazilians at the same time that it restricted its citizens’ rights. Women’s biological reproduction highlights this paradox. While the state actively outlawed any forms of reproductive control—here defined as abortion and infanticide—it did not give all Brazilians the social and economic possibilities to raise a family outside of poverty.
    Specifically, the state criminalized the natural occurrences of miscarriage and stillbirth. Of 125 police investigations and court cases dealing with miscarriages and stillbirths mistaken for abortion and infanticide, as well as actual cases of abortion and infanticide, nearly one third of the cases dealt with the natural occurrences of miscarriage and stillbirth, yet they were treated as criminal until proven otherwise. These unfortunate but relatively common occurrences were de facto criminalized by the Brazilian state. It was poor women, however, who became targets, as they wore more likely to not have access to the necessary medical care and states services and thus disposed of the product of conception in a manner that brought the police’s attention. This paper argues that the Old Republic’s creation of a criminal culture that equated all miscarriages and stillbirths with the birth control methods of abortion and infanticide marked all women, but especially poor ones, as second-class citizens.