Court fines SP City Hall for refusing legal abortion

The Fifth Common Law Chamber of the Court of Justice of São Paulo (TJSP) upheld the decision imposing a fine of R$24.8 million on the São Paulo City Council for non-compliance with a court decision guaranteeing access to legal abortion in the city, after suspending service at the Vila Nova Cachuirinha Hospital, in the northern region.

Patients should have been transferred to other units in the city, but the procedure was refused in those places. The fine imposed is set for January 2024 and has a daily value of R$50,000.

Before the court, the administration of Mayor Ricardo Nunes (MDB) claimed that the amount was disproportionate and asked for it to be reduced to R$500 per day. The City Council also argued that there had not been a complete identification of the patients involved in the proceedings, making the right to a defense impossible.

PSol parliamentarians and the São Paulo Public Ministry (MPSP) claim that the non-compliance continued for 497 days, resulting in the fine increasing to the value of a millionaire.

Understand the issue

In the previous decision of the court The city council has already been forced to refer new patients, and those whose operation was canceled at Vila Nova Cachuirinha Hospital, for legal abortion in other units.without imposing limits due to gestational age.
the However, the Municipal Health Department did not resume procedures at Vila Nova Cachuirinha Hospital, nor did it guarantee rescheduling to other units..
At the beginning of October, Judge Simone Gomez Rodríguez Casoretti, of the Ninth Public Finance Court, rejected the appeal filed by the administration of Mayor Ricardo Nunes (MDB).
The city council appealed again, demanding that the decision be suspended. the The municipal administration alleged the judge’s bias, citing judicial arbitrariness and alleged procedural irregularities.
It was also claimed that the defense was diminished by the failure to provide “minimum elements allowing verification of the days of the fine owed” and “the lack of notification from the defendant of the unlawful change in the amount charged”.
the City Hall also argued that it had not failed to comply with the injunction and that the fine was unjustified, as well as being unenforceable before the final judgment became final..

The rapporteur points out the ideological content and denies the appeal

Rapporteur Eduardo Prataviera said that the appeal submitted by the municipal administration had “clear ideological content.” He stressed that the State Attorney General’s Office provided strong evidence of the refusal to perform a legal abortion – a right guaranteed by law and protected by a decision of the Federal Supreme Court, regardless of gestational age.

According to the decision, the refusal could have occurred in hospitals belonging to the municipal network: Hospital da Mulheur SECONCI-SP, Hospital Fernando Mauro Péres da Rocha, Hospital Maternidad de Vila Nova Cachuirinha, Hospital Dr. Carmeno Carriccio Municipal, Hospital Municipal de Setubal and Hospital Mario Degne Municipal, among others.

Furthermore, the rapporteur concluded that the City Council’s claim that the judge would not be impartial or impartial “in turn reveals that the appellant’s argument is of a purely emotional/gravitational nature.”

Prataviera cites the normative decisions of caste councils “as hierarchically superior to judicial decisions and federal legislation on the subject,” referring to the decisions of the Federal Council of Medicine (CFM) and the Regional Council (Cremesp).

He wrote in the decision that the municipality “maintains a state of illegality and non-compliance with urgent protection, continues to deny the right to legal abortion and fails to properly and promptly refer patients, when they claim through their doctors that there is no structure in the requested unit, to the unit that performs this procedure.”

Finally, the rapporteur acknowledged the high value of the fine and, in this sense, stated that “the greater extent of harm inflicted by the municipality on women who were deprived of their basic rights and subjected to new cycles of institutional and existential violence due to ideological agendas is indisputable.”

the Capitals The municipality of São Paulo requested comment on the decision, but there was no response as of the publication of this report. The space remains open.