Brazilian women have amazing life stories, and we should be telling them

The spread of the zika virus threw some international light over a situation that has been, for a long time, deeply known among women in Brazil: when it comes to childbirth, they are overloaded with lots of responsibility, too little support and no autonomy at all. Facing the threat of a mosquito-borne virus disease that seems to be related to the birth of more than 4,000 babies with abnormally small brains, there were lots of mixed signals and a lack of information on the public responses about how to protect themselves and their babies.

One of the first responses came from the minister of Brazil Health Ministry, Marcelo Castro, who said that one could hope that women in reproductive age were contaminated with the virus before getting pregnant. “Sex is for amateurs, pregnancy is for professionals,” he added.

And then came the Church, suggesting that pregnant women should “face microcephaly as a mission.” A recent article from the Washington Post summarized what can only be seen as an unfortunate paradox. “How exactly are women supposed to prevent pregnancy in a heavily Catholic country when the Church opposes condoms and birth control pills?”

Under the historical disregard of the public policies, maternity — and all the deeply personal calculations women have to deal with before making a decision about it — is an issue women start dealing with in their early days.

Because we have an uterus. And a whole set of ‘tools’, as hormones, that prepares our bodies for this amazing/complex/scientific/miracle that is generating a life inside your belly. And when this ‘tool package’ starts working, we are not ready for it at all.

I consider myself lucky — I was 14, a teenager already, when I got my first period. But for some girls, it starts when they are as young as 9, 10, 12 years old, hopefully still playing with their toys. And when this happens, you have to start asking yourself questions that are way beyond your maturity level.

From that moment on, in a healthy, free and well-informed society, this girl better start learning about a wide range of subjects that surely will help define her life decisions and shape the kind of woman she wants to be in the future.

Given how your body has changed, how are you going to deal with all the attention from guys? If you decide to have sex, what are you going to do about birth control? Are you going to take contraceptive pills? Doctors now say it might give you cancer, you know, so maybe you should focus on condoms. But is that safe enough? Is it OK to ask your parents for help with birth control at your age?

Do you dream about cute little babies? Or do you feel that as a burden, because they may get in the way of your dream of, I don’t know, becoming an astronaut?

And oh, young lady, be aware of all the judgment. For each one of these decisions you make, you will find tons of people — men and women — telling you how you have chosen poorly, and trying to explain to you what your life priorities should really be about.

So, even if you meet a woman who has decided not to become a mom, don’t think that she did not give a lot of thought to this issue at some point of her life.

And if you ask her about how she finally came to any decision, I am sure you will both end up talking about so many important subjects that are being massively debated by society right now: sex, career, religion, abortion, relationships, birth control, violence, health, paternity and maternity leave, feminism, politics, poverty, human rights, education… the list only adds up.

In Brazil, this beautiful country where I was born and worked as a journalist for the last 12 years, women are speaking out as never before. Brazilian society is just finding out about how women are tired of being harassed since they were little girls (read about the hashtag #firstharassment; claiming their right to be in charge of their own reproductive decisions (hello, zika virus), demanding to be respected as citizens and consumers.

Women are willing to feel safe and free as they walk on the streets, making their own choices, minding their own business, building their lives in any way they want to.

They already advanced so much in occupying their space in society — it is time, now, for society to put much more effort into acknowledging and supporting that.

Working mostly as a financial and public policies reporter, I learned during my career that including real people’s stories in articles helps people understand and engage with even the most complex economics subjects that they would not care to read otherwise.

Listening to women’s perspectives and views on such important matters also helps to build empathy towards women and gender issues — which is not only good for the society, but also for business. More and more, we see evidence that Brazilian companies will have to re-learn how to communicate with women.

Brazil is still a very sexist country, in which women have to constantly fight stereotypes. One quick experiment makes it easier to visualize that. On Twitter, if you search for the hashtag #woman in English the first ones you find are: #womanleader #womanagainstfeminism #womankind #womaninbusiness.

If you search for the equivalent word in Portuguese, #mulher, the only hasthags that come up are: #mulheres nua (naked woman, in english), #mulhertemquesergostosa (woman has got to be hot) and #mulherpelada (naked woman, again). The Brazilian internet community surely could use more non-stereotyped engaging content about women to talk about.

One way of doing that is creating space for their voices in the media. Journalist Megan Kamerick, in her amazing Ted Talk in 2012, argued that the news media underrepresents women as news sources, and because of that tells an incomplete story.

Women should be telling their own stories, and that’s my goal creating the website — Cada Uma — the first one devoted to tell uplifting life stories of women in Brazil, with the threadline of each narrative being how the notion of motherhood affected these women’s life decisions and made them who they are today.

The website will also put those stories in the context of the public policies that are related to them, giving visibility and claiming response from public policy makers, when needed. These stories will help empower women, help them relate to each other’s common struggles and, hopefully, create also a community around the website, with events and panels, in which we can address the issues, the demands and all these important discussion in a safe space. Brazilian women are already accomplishing amazing things — we just have to let them tell the world about it.