Now that researchers identified a tangible link between the Zika virus and fetal brain deformation, pregnant women and those of childbearing age in the Latin American countries hardest hit by the mosquito-borne virus will have to make tough decisions about their reproductive future. Use birth control? Abstain? Abort if there’s evidence of potentially lethal birth defects?
Now that researchers identified a tangible link between the Zika virus and fetal brain deformation, pregnant women and those of childbearing age in the Latin American countries hardest hit by the mosquito-borne virus will have to make tough decisions about their reproductive future. Use birth control? Abstain? Abort if there’s evidence of potentially lethal birth defects?
Or at least that’s how it ought to go.
In reality, women in many Latin American countries have almost as little control over their bodies as they do the weather. They are subject to rampant sexual violence, received little or no sex education and might have limited access to birth control. When they do get pregnant, abortion is illegal in most countries, though some have exceptions in cases of rape, fetal impairment or danger to the life of the mother. In El Salvador, the strictures are particularly harsh. There are no legal abortions, and women might go to jail for the “crime” of suffering miscarriage.
These realities make the paltry governmental response in El Salvador and like-minded countries — warning women not to get pregnant until the Zika crisis is over — all the more ludicrous. Just how does it help to scare women while offering no tools or information? It’s unrealistic, and even irresponsible, to expect women to somehow stave off pregnancy when birth control isn’t an option and rape is widespread. Although condoms are easily accessible, they can be unaffordable to poor women. Emergency contraceptives are even pricier or, in the case of Honduras, banned outright.
The World Health Organization declared Zika an international public health threat Feb. 1 based on its “explosive” spread throughout the Americas and the Caribbean. At the time, medical experts strongly suspected that the virus was implicated in microcephaly in more than 4,000 newborns in Brazil and feared that might be related to an uptick in another neurological condition, Guillain-Barre syndrome.
Complicating the unfolding crisis is the assertion by a group of Argentine physicians that the rash of microcephaly cases is because of a larvicide, pyriproxyfen, used to control mosquitoes. Though there’s not a shred of scientific evidence that this is the case, the Brazilian government stopped spraying, which might only worsen the Zika epidemic in that country.
Even before this new evidence came to light, the United Nation’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights called on Latin American countries to repeal their policies restricting reproductive rights and give women the help they need to avoid pregnancy if they want. It fell on deaf ears.
Doctors and public health authorities have a duty to appeal to their countries’ leaders to give women access to birth control and abortion — at the very least until a Zika vaccine is created or researchers rule out the virus as the cause of brain defects. That could be months or a year away. Their involvement is especially important, given that one pillar of culture in Latin America — the Roman Catholic Church — is offering little help. Catholic leaders said unequivocally that Zika changes nothing about the church’s ban on abortion.
Left unsaid is that the inability of women to control their bodies in a most basic way has a direct impact on their economic situation — and that the Zika epidemic could make things even worse for them and their families.
— Los Angeles Times