In the 1960s, doctors in the US had in a similar dilemma. The virus rubella can cause blindness, deafness, and other birth defects. Like Zika, the symptoms of rubella in everyone but pregnant women were so mild that nobody paid much attention. Then a pandemic hit in the 1960s. Abortion was illegal at the time, but so-called therapeutic abortions—if doctors deemed them medically justified—were allowed. Few doctors actually performed them, though.
The media picked up on the plight of white, middle-class mothers seeking abortions after getting rubella. LIFE even ran a cover story. That narrative ran counter to the stereotype of abortion-seeking women as poor, unmarried, and somehow deviant. “To have middle-class white married women speak publicly about abortion made abortion respectable and decent,” says Leslie Reagan, a historian at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and author of Dangerous Pregnancies, a book about abortion and the rubella outbreak. The conversation around abortion shifted in the US, leading to state laws that decriminalized abortions and eventually Roe v. Wade.
With Zika in Brazil, Galli thinks opening the debate to medical justifications of abortion could help destigmatize the issue. But she’s not optimistic, given the anti-abortion legislation currently in congress. “We are facing a lot of threats,” she says. “We are fighting to try to secure what we have instead of trying to advance and expand legislation.” For now, pregnant women face a set of choices more constrained than ever.
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