Democracy Gave Us This. There Has to Be a Better Way.

I started questioning whether democracy would ever actually be realized when I discovered feminism in my early 20s. This coincided with the start of my sexual life, and the absolute nightmare of figuring myself out as a young adult. Learning about the subjugation of women and the fact that if I were to experience an unintended pregnancy in my home country of Brazil, I would have no other option but to bring the pregnancy to term, drove home my absolute lack of autonomy and inability to fully participate in the society in which I lived.

Brazilian abortion advocates have been arguing that reproductive rights are essential for the functioning of democracy for decades. But in 1987, feminists lost a pivotal battle over the Brazilian Constitution, which was being written after 20 years of a brutal conservative military dictatorship. During the sessions that built the document, feminists wanted to include the right to abortion in the Constitution as an integral right to health, while the National Confederation of Bishops of Brazil argued for the inclusion of the protection of life from conception. Reaching a consensus required the complete erasure of abortion, for or against it, from the Constitution.

That loss permanently curtailed fundamental freedoms for women, even as Brazilians celebrated the end of authoritarianism. The story of the Brazilian left is similar to that of the left in the rest of the world: women, transgender, and gender-nonconforming people are often told that reproductive rights are not a priority when defending the state from fascism. But what is less recognized is that the lack of bodily autonomy that affects half of the population is already fascism.

In excluding reproductive rights from the Constitution, the question of women’s bodily autonomy became a matter of public political discussion and controversy rather than an issue of democracy. And, in fact, the controversy around abortion was weaponized soon after, during the elections of 1989, the first election since the Constitution was enacted. The left-wing unionist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva lost the presidential election because his ex-girlfriend went on national television claiming he had requested that she have an abortion when he impregnated her. Financed by his opponent Fernando Collor, this accusation resonated with the Brazilian electorate, which, still heavily connected to the moralism of the Catholic church that defines life as beginning at conception, could not parse the alleged scandal despite their overwhelming support for the candidate.

Lula would be elected president in 2002 and go on to serve two more terms, after being reelected in 2006 and, more recently, in 2022. But his rise to power required concessions that left women’s reproductive rights—especially abortion—unaddressed. Not to mention the fact that his successor in 2012, Brazil’s first woman president, Dilma Rousseff, didn’t once engage with the issue during her term. The irony of having a woman president and no legal and free abortion services for all was difficult to ignore.

To be clear, I don’t blame Rousseff personally for her lack of engagement with reproductive rights during her time in office. As the first female president of the country, Rousseff faced an increasingly misogynistic political landscape where she was constantly disrespected as a leader. It wasn’t only because she was a woman; it was also because she was a woman who believed she could be in a position of power, advocating for left-wing policies and refusing to allow corruption in her government. She suffered a great deal for that during her impeachment proceedings in 2016, which today are understood as illegitimate and illegal, when Jair Bolsonaro, then a member of Congress, voted in favor of ousting Rousseff while citing the man who tortured her during the military dictatorship. Witnessing a democratically elected president be impeached through democratic processes, in such a humiliating and hateful way, was the second time I had a gut feeling that something was wrong with this system.

At the same time, there are many women in Brazil who do want to be mothers—or are already mothers—but aren’t given the resources to raise their kids in safe environments where they can thrive. According to UNICEF’s most recent figures, there are 28 million children living in poverty in Brazil, and one in five households of families of color are food insecure. Additionally, Brazil recorded more than 6,000 deaths that were the result of police interventions in 2023 alone, most of them Black and brown boys and men whose mothers were never given the chance to raise their kids in communities without heavy policing and gun violence. 

If free and easy access to abortion is a matter of democracy, then access to conditions in which children can be reared safely is also a matter of democracy. Yet, neither are treated as such.

I have reported on the struggles of Brazilian Black mothers whose children have been murdered by the state for over a decade, and during that time I have watched them fight for accountability for state murders and reproductive justice for themselves and future mothers with little success. Their movement predates my work and will certainly outlive it, but watching these two movements exist in tandem and be repeatedly ignored by political leaders on the left has broken my belief in democracy as it exists today. 

I started identifying as an anarcho-feminist six years ago, when I realized that it isn’t actually democratic at all that people’s rights have to be voted on to be granted. It isn’t democratic that people’s ability to raise children or not raise children is up for debate. Both in Brazil and in the US, I have watched conservative legislators make abortion more difficult to access through ostensibly democratic means. I have watched conservative and liberal governments make the life of the working class more difficult and continually fail to address the inequality that is necessary for upholding capitalism.

Anarcho-feminism is a political system of analysis that combines anarchism and feminism, locating the subjugation of women within the hierarchies of capitalism and the household. Anarchism attempts to abolish all hierarchy in society, including the state and capitalism itself, recognizing that hierarchy leaves many marginalized people to fend for themselves as leaders make decisions about the population’s rights. Anarcho-feminists combine this approach with feminist analyses of women’s unpaid reproductive labor in the home, reimagining women’s place in society through both the abolition of the family as a structure of oppression and the abolition of the capitalist state, which largely depends on women’s reproductive labor to sustain itself. According to an anarcho-feminist framework, conservatives’ use of democracy to control women’s reproductive capacities is central to the survival of capitalism. 

In the United States, the overturning of Roe v. Wade three years ago has made the matter of women’s bodily autonomy a question of political and electoral power in individual states. So far, 41 states have some form of abortion restriction in effect with limited exceptions, according to the Guttmacher Institute. These restrictions were passed in a democratic process, albeit a gerrymandered one, because the electorate voted for legislators that do not support unfettered access to abortion. 

In Brazil, personhood bills have been pushed that would remove the few abortion exceptions in the country—cases in which the pregnancy occurred because of rape, the pregnancy is a risk to the person’s life, or the fetus has been diagnosed with anencephaly. Under a proposed law, termination procedures performed after 22 weeks of pregnancy would count as homicide and perpetrators could be incarcerated for up to 20 years, effectively punishing the survivors of sexual violence more severely than their own rapists. 

All of these bills were introduced through a democratic process. I am told by democracy advocates and protectors that these are misuses of democracy rather than outcomes of democracy itself—that democracy has to be strengthened for it to work properly. But there is no incentive for conservative politicians to want democracy to work properly if they are winning. So I’m left wondering: For how much longer will our rights be revoked through a broken system? And will we ever be able to reckon with how many people have been hurt, dispossessed, massacred, and left in poverty, with no resources, because of democracy?

If only a few people are able to live well, to choose their life path, to obtain full autonomy to make political choices at the polls that benefit their own lifestyles, are we really living in democratic societies?

To be clear, I am not arguing for an end to democracy or for fascism. What I want to emphasize is that the democracy we have today hasn’t worked for all people for a very long time, which is why the system itself is so vulnerable to attacks. True democracy must already include everyone’s right to bodily autonomy and reproductive justice so we are free to choose our political leaders without gerrymandering and the looming threat of full-throated fascism.

In the 2022 Brazilian elections, I voted for Lula as the left-wing political parties of the country pleaded for the public to preserve democracy after four years of Jair Bolsonaro’s systematic dismantling of social security, public health, and governmental programs. I don’t regret my decision to support Lula, who has been criticized for moving to the center on a number of key issues to stay in power. But as the 2026 Brazilian elections loom closer and closer, I wonder how many times I will be forced to vote for leaders who are unable to fight for reproductive justice—either because they are unwilling to or because the majority conservative population of Brazil would never accept it. I wonder for how long the basic rights of mothers will be a matter of legislation and lobbying, of convincing politicians that yes, police violence is an issue and we are losing young lives to it.

For how long will we be begging the authorities for better living conditions when true democracy requires that we already have full, autonomous lives so we can freely choose our leaders?

I no longer believe in democracy, because it doesn’t exist for all of us. But I do believe in the people who should be benefitting from democracy in the first place. I believe in the people’s capacity to make life better for each other, in the possibilities of community and building a society where we all do have rights over our bodies and dignified living conditions where we can all thrive. I believe in the people continuing to fight to make things right despite the brutality of capitalism and the facade of democracy we navigate today.