Risky pregnancies and puerperiums: official narratives from the Brazilian government about maternity hospitals considered undesirable in light of the health emergencies of Zika and Covid-19

Abstract

In 2015 and 2016, Brazil experienced a spike in notifications of babies born with the Congenital Zika Virus Syndrome (SCZV). The “global threat” was not the Zika disease itself, but being pregnant (or the possibility of becoming pregnant) (Fleischer; Carneiro, 2017; Diniz, 2016). Marcelo Castro, Minister of Health at the time, made a series of unhappy public statements suggesting that women of childbearing age should delay pregnancy. Five years later, Brazil became the country with the highest maternal mortality rate from Covid-19 (Pereira et al., 2020). Such a Dantean scenario disproportionately affects the black population, since in Brazil, the mortality of pregnant women from Covid-19 is almost twice as high among black women as among white women (Santos et al., 2020). It was in this context that the current Secretary of Health, Raphael Parente, suggested: “Delay pregnancy a little”. For the second time, in the five years since the Zika
and Covid-19 epidemics, health authorities admit that being pregnant in Brazil is a risk. The objective of this work is to discuss, based on ethnographic research, the strategies to remove the responsibility of the State in guaranteeing the sexual and reproductive rights of Brazilian women of reproductive age in these two health crises, comparing the guidelines of the Ministry of Health and its performance. The argument is that the failure to act in the face of these two epidemic contexts produced official discourses that support control and surveillance of female bodies, so that motherhood, would be associated to risk.