Rio de Janeiro - The governor of Rio de Janeiro on Wednesday said that making abortion legal could be a way to help contain violence in the crime and drugs-plagued city, one of the most dangerous places in Brazil.
"The question of abortion has everything to do with public violence," Sergio Cabral said in an interview with the website G1.
Cabral said women of means are able to avert the ban on abortion by having the procedure done in secret clinics, whereas women who live in Rio's overpopulated and crime ridden slums do not have any way to end undesired pregnancies.
"If we take the number of children per mother in the well-off areas such as Copacabana or Lagoa, we see a birth rate similar to that in Sweden," he said.
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'These are the makings of misfits' "But the slums, like in Rocinha, have a birth rate similar to Zambia or Gabon. These are the makings of misfits," said Cabral, a 44-year-old Catholic.
He said he was basing his argument on the book "Freakonomics" by American authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, which links the slide in US criminal violence in the 1990s to the legalisation of abortion by the Supreme Court in 1973.
Cabral said Brazilian politicians "lacked the courage" to discuss the controversial topic of abortion, which is banned in the predominantly Catholic country except in cases of rape or risk to the mother's health.
According to official figures, clashes between police and drug traffickers who control the 700 or so slums in Rio result in an average of seven deaths per day.
"When we go into a slum we are met with gunfire. What should the government do? Accept it?" asked Cabral, who also favours legalising drugs, which are the basis for most crime in the state of Rio which has 15 million inhabitants.
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