World
In Brazil, an abortion debate pits feminists against the church
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – In 2019, Mariana Leal de Souza, a 39-year-old Black woman living outside Brazil’s largest city, Sao Paulo, was having a hard time coping with the suicide of her teenage son when she was confronted with more difficult news: She was pregnant.
“I couldn’t believe it,” the social worker told Al Jazeera during a recent video call. “Mentally and financially, I wasn’t ready for another pregnancy after the loss of my son.”
She decided to terminate, but there was a problem: Brazil’s Penal Code permits abortion only if the pregnancy is the result of rape, puts the mother’s health at risk or doctors diagnose severe malformations to the fetus. None of these applied to Leal de Souza.
So she enlisted the help of three close friends, one of whom had connections to an underground supplier of Cytotec, a medication originally intended for ulcers but repurposed by low-income women in Latin America as a means to terminate unwanted pregnancies. Pooling their resources, they came up with $150 to buy the medication.
But the experience was agonizing. As Leal de Souza recalled: “It felt as though my body was expelling everything. I experienced chills, intense abdominal pain and bleeding.” She assumed these were standard complications and tried to tough it out, but the ensuing weeks brought her no respite.
“The bleeding wouldn’t stop, yet I couldn’t seek hospital care for fear of legal repercussions,” she said.
Two months later, with her abdomen swelling, Leal de Souza began to fear for her life. She decided to seek assistance at a nearby public hospital where she endured prolonged wait times and a barrage of inquiries before medical staff finally examined her.
Doctors made a startling discovery: A fetus remained inside Leal de Souza’s womb. She had been carrying twins, and only one fetus had been expelled.
The hospital concluded that this was the result of a miscarriage, sparing de Souza from criminal charges.
“I felt a sense of relief, yet simmering resentment lingered, knowing that if I were … white or [a] woman of means, I could have accessed safe clinical care without endangering my life,” she said.
‘All women get abortions but … only the poor go to jail’
As many as 4 million abortions are performed annually in Brazil, Latin America’s most populous country. Of those, only 2,000, or 5 percent, are performed legally.
Women who undergo illegal abortions face prison sentences of up to three years if convicted, and the doctors who perform them can spend up to four years in prison. Part of Leal de Souza’s ordeal, she said, was that she was well aware of cases involving poor women who had faced incarceration for terminating their pregnancies.
Her story sheds light on a glaring reality in Brazil, a country that is home to more people of African descent than any other country in the world save Nigeria: Black and marginalized women bear the brunt of legislation that criminalizes abortion.
A study conducted by anthropologist Debora Diniz found Black women are 46 percent more likely than white women to resort to unsafe abortion practices.
A federal legislator representing Rio de Janeiro, Luciana Boiteux, spearheaded a legal initiative in the Supreme Court in 2017 proposing the enshrinement of abortion as a constitutional right.
“The decriminalization of abortion is inherently a racial justice issue,” she told Al Jazeera.
Brazil’s abortion laws have remained largely unchanged since the 1950s. What has changed is the emergence in recent years of an animated feminist movement, inspired, at least in part, by the legalization of abortion in neighbouring Argentina in 2020 and the inauguration a year earlier of President Jair Bolsonaro, whose conservative administration was widely viewed as antagonistic towards Black people and women.
Bolsonaro’s policies sparked a response in the form of campaigns such as Nem Presa Nem Morta (Neither Imprisoned Nor Dead), which fights for the decriminalisation of abortion, and the women-led, anti-Bolsonaro Ele Nao (Not Him). Rallies have also been held, such as a March 8 demonstration in which thousands of protesters took to the streets of Rio de Janeiro to demand racial justice and safe, legal access to abortions.
At the march, one woman carried a placard that read: “All women get abortions, but while the rich ones travel to get one, we the poor go to jail.”
The women’s movement in Brazil is growing, but it has encountered pushback from the evangelical movement in its efforts to improve reproductive health for women.
Evangelicals’ influence on Brazil’s abortion discourse
With the Christ the Redeemer statue standing high over Rio de Janeiro, Brazil is typically associated with the Catholicism of its former colonizer, Portugal. But evangelical Christianity’s influence here began to expand 30 years ago, and today, one in three Brazilians identifies as evangelical. By some estimates, evangelicals will account for a majority of the country’s religious followers by 2032.
The proliferation of evangelicals in Brazil has helped discourage low-income women like Leal de Souza from seeking abortions.
“We’ve witnessed instances where evangelical nurses have exposed women and subsequently reported to authorities,” Boiteux, the federal legislator, told Al Jazeera in an interview in her office in downtown Rio.
Jacqueline Moraes Teixeira, a sociologist and researcher at the University of Brasilia, attributed evangelical growth to social and economic deficits in Brazil, one of the most unequal countries in the world.
“These churches bridge gaps left by the state, offering education, healthcare and sustenance, acting as indispensable [lifelines] for these communities,” she told Al Jazeera.
For Leal de Souza, however, evangelicals have shut down the communication that is the bulwark of democracy.
“We used to have open dialogues within my family and neighbours who are now evangelicals. Nowadays, dissent is met with condemnation. This silence prevented me from sharing my decision to terminate my pregnancy,” she said.
Evangelicals have also flexed their muscles on the political level. Of the 594 members of the National Congress, for example, 228 lawmakers from 15 parties belong to the Evangelical Parliamentary Front – 202 deputies and 26 senators.
“Evangelicals in Congress hold significant leverage and are regarded as an essential ethical bastion for religious activism in politics,” Moraes Teixeira said. “Consequently, their alliances and conservative stance carry significant societal weight.”
However, the final arbiter on lifting abortion restrictions is the Supreme Court.
In a session in September, Chief Justice Rosa Weber voted in favour of a measure to decriminalise abortion up to the 12th week of pregnancy. But the process was halted by another Supreme Court judge, Luis Roberto Barroso, who has since replaced the retired Weber as chief justice.
An investigation by the Brazilian news outlet Agencia Publica found that in the weeks leading up to the court’s deliberations, conservative politicians circulated anti-abortion campaigns on popular social media platforms.
For his part, Barroso said he is in favour of decriminalisation but wants more deliberation. In an interview with Al Jazeera last month, he said: “It’s challenging for the court to act against the sentiment of 80 percent of the population. We must shift public perception.”
“It’s crucial to engage society in dialogue and clarify the real issue: the unjust criminalization disproportionately affecting marginalized women,” he continued. “With greater awareness, I believe attitudes can evolve.”
World
Minnesota braces for what’s next amid immigration arrests and in the wake of Renee Good shooting
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Already shaken by the fatal shooting of a woman by an immigration officer, Minnesota’s Twin Cities on Sunday braced for what many expect will be a new normal over the next few weeks as the Department of Homeland Security carries out what it called its largest enforcement operation ever.
Protesters screamed at heavily-armed federal agents and honked car horns, banged on drums and blew whistles in attempts to disrupt their operations in one Minneapolis neighborhood filled with single-family homes.
There was some pushing and several people were hit with chemical spray just before agents banged down the door of one home on Sunday. They later took one man away in handcuffs.
“We’re seeing a lot of immigration enforcement across Minneapolis and across the state, federal agents just swarming around our neighborhoods,” said Jason Chavez, a Minneapolis city councilmember. “They’ve definitely been out here.”
Chavez, the son of Mexican immigrants who represents an area with a growing immigrant population, said he is closely monitoring information from chat groups about where residents are seeing agents operating.
People holding whistles positioned themselves in freezing temperatures on street corners in the neighborhood where 37-year-old Renee Good was shot and killed Wednesday, watching for any signs of federal agents.
More than 20,000 people have taken part in a variety of trainings to become “observers” of enforcement activities in Minnesota since the 2024 election, said Luis Argueta, a spokesperson for Unidos MN, a local human rights organization .
“It’s a role that people choose to take on voluntarily, because they choose to look out for their neighbors,” Argueta said.
The protests have been largely peaceful, but the Twin Cities remained anxious. Minneapolis public schools on Monday will start offering remote learning for the next month in response to concerns that children might feel unsafe venturing out while tensions remain high.
Many schools closed last week after Good’s shooting and the upheaval that followed.
While the enforcement activity continues, two of the state’s leading Democrats said on Sunday that the investigation into Good’s shooting death shouldn’t be overseen solely by the federal government.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and U.S. Sen. Tina Smith said in separate interviews Sunday that state authorities should be included in the investigation because the federal government has already made clear what it believes happened.
“How can we trust the federal government to do an objective, unbiased investigation, without prejudice, when at the beginning of that investigation they have already announced exactly what they saw — what they think happened,” Smith said on ABC’s “This Week.”
The Trump administration has defended the officer who shot Good in her car, saying he was protecting himself and fellow agents and that Good had “weaponized” her vehicle.
Todd Lyons, acting director of ICE, defended the officer on Fox News Channel’s “The Sunday Briefing.”
“That law enforcement officer had milliseconds, if not short time to make a decision to save his life and his other fellow agents,” he said.
Lyons also said the administration’s enforcement operations in Minnesota wouldn’t be needed “if local jurisdictions worked with us to turn over these criminally illegal aliens once they are already considered a public safety threat by the locals.”
The killing of Good by an ICE officer and the shooting of two people by federal agents in Portland, Oregon, led to dozens of protests across the country over the weekend.
Thousands of people marched Saturday in Minneapolis, where Homeland Security called its deployment of immigration officers in the Twin Cities its biggest ever immigration enforcement operation.
___
Associated Press journalists Giovanna Dell’Orto in Minneapolis, Thomas Strong in Washington, Bill Barrow in Atlanta, and John Seewer in Toledo, Ohio, contributed.
World
Netanyahu and Rubio discuss US military intervention in Iran amid ongoing nationwide protests: report
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Secretary of State Marco Rubio discussed the possibility of U.S. intervention in Iran, according to a report.
The two leaders spoke by phone Saturday as Israel is on “high alert,” preparing for the possibility of U.S. military intervention in Iran, according to Reuters, citing multiple Israeli sources. A U.S. official confirmed the call to Fox News Digital but did not provide additional details.
The report comes as nationwide anti-regime demonstrations across Iran hit the two-week mark.
On Saturday, the Iranian regime triggered an internet “kill switch” in an apparent effort to conceal alleged abuses by security forces and as protests against it surged nationwide, according to a cybersecurity expert. The blackout reduced internet access to a fraction of normal levels.
KEANE WARNS IRANIAN REGIME TO TAKE TRUMP ‘DEAD SERIOUS’ ON PROTEST KILLING THREAT AMID ONGOING DEMONSTRATIONS
Secretary of State Marco Rubio holds his end-of-year press conference at the State Department in Washington, D.C., Dec. 19, 2025. (Kevin Mohatt/Reuters)
On Sunday, Iran’s parliament speaker warned that the U.S. military and Israel would be “legitimate targets” if America strikes the Islamic Republic.
Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf issued the threat as lawmakers rushed the dais in the Iranian parliament, shouting, “Death to America!” according to The Associated Press.
President Donald Trump offered support for the protesters on Saturday, writing on Truth Social that “Iran is looking at FREEDOM, perhaps like never before. The USA stands ready to help!!!”
IRANIAN MILITARY LEADER THREATENS PREEMPTIVE ATTACK AFTER TRUMP COMMENTS
In this frame grab from video obtained by the AP outside Iran, a masked demonstrator holds a picture of Iran’s Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi during a protest in Tehran, Iran, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (UGC via AP)
At a news conference Friday, Trump said Iran was facing mounting pressure as unrest spreads across the country.
“Iran’s in big trouble,” he said. “It looks to me that the people are taking over certain cities that nobody thought were really possible just a few weeks ago. We’re watching the situation very carefully.”
The president said the U.S. would respond forcefully if the regime resorts to mass violence.
“We’ll be hitting them very hard where it hurts. And that doesn’t mean boots on the ground, but it means hitting them very, very hard where it hurts,” he said.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
Protests in Iran intensify for the 12th day. (The National Council of Resistance of Iran)
Fox News Digital reached out to the State Department and White House for comment.
Fox News Digital’s Emma Bussey, Brie Stimson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
World
Four killed, 20 injured in overnight Russian strikes across Ukraine
Published on
Russia fired more than 150 drones overnight into Sunday targeting close to two dozen locations across Ukraine, killing at least four people and injuring 20 more.
Ukraine’s Air Forces say they intercepted 125 drones aerially but confirmed that at least 25 strike drones struck their targets.
They added that Moscow’s latest barrage mainly targeted Kharkiv, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk, all of which were targeted in Saturday’s overnight strikes as well.
Local officials in the southern region of Zaporizhzhia say the strikes targeted residential areas and energy infrastructure. More than 385,000 homes were affected by electric, gas or water outages, at a critical time as temperatures plunged to 10 degrees below Celsius.
Regional lawmakers say service was restored to most of the affected households and areas by Sunday morning, but added that emergency work was still being carried out to restore power to the remaining homes.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of timing their attacks with the cold peaks of winter as to maximise civilian suffering.
“They struck targets that have no military purpose whatsoever – energy infrastructure, residential buildings. They deliberately waited for freezing weather to make things worse for our people. This is deliberate, cynical Russian terror specifically against civilians,” wrote Zelenskyy in a post on X.
He also noted that this week had seen heightened Russian assault on Ukrainian cities, announcing that his country’s defence forces recorded thousands of attacks using a variety of different weapons.
“Over the course of this week, Russia launched almost 1,100 attack drones against Ukraine, more than 890 guided aerial bombs, and over 50 missiles of various types – ballistic, cruise, and even the Oreshnik medium-range ballistic missile.”
The Ukrainian leader thanked all units responsible for protecting the country and responding to attacks, and praised their tireless efforts and resilience.
He also called on allies to ensure his embattled country maintains “stable support”, in defence and diplomatic fields as coordinated dialogue efforts continue in search of peace.
Meanwhile, Russia says that one person was killed in Ukrainian strikes on the western city of Voronezh. Officials say a young woman succumbed to her wounds at an intensive care unit of a local hospital after debris from a drone fell on her house during Saturday’s attacks.
They added that at least three others were injured in the attacks which targeted more than 10 residential apartment buildings, private homes and a high school.
The city of Voronezh lies just 250 kilometres from the Ukrainian border and is home to approximately one million people. The attacks, which Kyiv have yet to confirm, came after the Kremlin’s major offensive on Ukraine in the early hours of Saturday.
Additional sources • AP
-
Detroit, MI1 week ago2 hospitalized after shooting on Lodge Freeway in Detroit
-
Technology5 days agoPower bank feature creep is out of control
-
Dallas, TX3 days agoAnti-ICE protest outside Dallas City Hall follows deadly shooting in Minneapolis
-
Delaware3 days agoMERR responds to dead humpback whale washed up near Bethany Beach
-
Dallas, TX7 days agoDefensive coordinator candidates who could improve Cowboys’ brutal secondary in 2026
-
Iowa5 days agoPat McAfee praises Audi Crooks, plays hype song for Iowa State star
-
Health1 week agoViral New Year reset routine is helping people adopt healthier habits
-
Montana1 day agoService door of Crans-Montana bar where 40 died in fire was locked from inside, owner says