Victims of Inequalities: Health Situation of Black and Poor Women Confronting COVID-19

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The Covid-19 is pedagogical pandemic. However, the pedagogy is appalling: according to the World Health Organization, every month hundreds of thousands of women seek for health services to take care of incomplete abortions. In Argentina, it is estimated that there are 3.330 women in this situation; 1.522 in Chile; 7.778 in Colombia and 18.285 in Mexico. For each woman who is admitted at a hospital for an incomplete abortion, the same individual may use the services twice: first, for abortion care and second, for the risk of COVID-19 infection [1]. There is a global presumption that exist a house in which people- who have bodies, who have genders, class and race- can be in social distancing [2]. Agreeing with Deborah Diniz [3], we all need to be looked after. This role, in the overwhelming majority of cases, is played by women, and this task distribution is uneven. Diniz hopes a postpandemic COVID-19 world in which feminist values could be part of our common vocabulary. When speaking about women, we regard those who walk for hours to get attention in reproductive health clinics to access contraceptive methods, because they do not want to become pregnant in the middle of a crisis; we are speaking about women helping other women to seek protection, away from their aggressor partners, at the same time that violence grows in times of social isolation. More than half of the Brazilian population is made up of women. Black, indigenous, white, in rural areas or in cities. Even with the government disregard, reality jumps into the eyes and shows faces and skin tones [4]. For Débora Diniz [5] poor women, who are mostly black, have no way to escape the contagion. Besides that, they will face unemployment, if not death, and an immersion in the risk of a very large contamination. The restrictions imposed by the pandemic have increased the barriers to access clandestine abortion by poor women. The spaces of death- clandestine abortion ones- made some bodies bleed, while other individuals protect themselves from the pandemic far from the threat of the virus or criminal law [6]. Numbers are outrageous and they also distance people from the reality, since in statistics the stories of these women are covert. Every maternal death is preventable, if access to the health service were appropriate. But maternal deaths never present itself alone in a public health emergency [7]. The Brazilian rate is four dead women for every 100 thousand women, 74% higher than the world average. In addition, a woman dies every seven hours in Brazil victim of feminicide [8]. They are women who, if they challenge the rules of domestic reclusion and submit to the servitude of work, they may fall ill as caregivers of those who ignore their rights, their life or their name [9].