Shell, BASF ordered to pay $500 mln in Brazil pollution case

"The corporate logo of Shell, a Dutch petroleum company. A Brazilian judge has ordered oil giant Shell and chemical behemoth BASF to pay $500 million in compensation for hundreds of ex-workers suing for damages in a suspected plant contamination case, a judicial source said Monday. (AFP Photo/Tengku Bahar)" title

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Brazil claims successful test of parasite vaccine

"Photo illustration. Brazilian researchers say they have successfully tested a vaccine against schistosomiasis, a disease caused by parasitic worms that afflicts more than 200 million people worldwide. (AFP Photo/Saul Loeb)" title

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Brazil court OKs abortions for brainless fetuses

Brazil's supreme court has voted to authorize abortions in cases of fetuses with no brains.

Abortion is illegal in Brazil except when a pregnancy threatens the life of the mother and in cases of rape. The Supreme Federal Tribunal's 8-2 vote Thursday now decriminalizes abortions involving anencephalic fetuses.

Such fetuses develop without brains and cannot survive outside the womb for more than a few minutes. Most die before birth. Brazil has a high rate of such cases, with 10 out of every 10,000 pregnancies.

Brazil is the world's most populous Roman Catholic country and religious groups staged vigils outside the court and in other cities opposing a ruling to allow such abortions.

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Brazil lifts ban on aborting brain-damaged fetuses

BRASILIA (Reuters) - Brazil's Supreme Court on Thursday voted to legalize abortions of severely brain-damaged fetuses, loosening the law in the world's biggest Catholic country and a region where the spread of evangelical denominations in recent decades has maintained fierce opposition to abortion rights.

With only two of the 10 judges voting against lifting the ban, the decision marks a small but historic shift in abortion law in Latin America's biggest country. Brazil, like many countries in the region, has long banned abortions in all cases except pregnancies caused by rape and those which pose a threat to the life of the mother.

While private hospitals and illegal clinics have long found ways around the ban, the decision now makes it possible for mothers carrying fetuses suffering from anencephaly to abort the pregnancy legally.

The measure applies specifically to cases of anencephaly, a disorder that leads to a malformation or absence of large parts of the brain and carries an overwhelming likelihood that the baby will die shortly after birth.

Such babies "would never become a person," said Justice Marco Aurelio Mello, speaking for the majority. "This is not about a potential life, but about certain death."

Abortion rights advocates and medical groups for years have pushed for such a measure, arguing that mothers who carried babies likely to die post-delivery should be spared unnecessary trauma.

"The diagnosis itself is bad enough," said Cristiao Rosas, a physician and spokesman for a Brazilian federation of obstetrician and gynecology groups. "It's a condemned gestation, with no prognosis for extra-uterine survival, and with a devastating impact on the psychological and emotional health of the mother."

Religious groups in Brazil, which still wield significant sway at the ballot box and in matters of public opinion, remain fiercely opposed to any changes to abortion law.

"We all have an absolute right to life from conception until natural death regardless of any type of deficiency," said Luiz Carlos Ludi, a Catholic priest who led a protest this week outside the Supreme Court building in Brasilia.

Such sentiments, echoed by Brazil's growing evangelical population, mean any bigger changes to abortion law in the country remain unlikely in the near future.

"This is a small and gradual step for very specific cases," said Rafael Cortes, a political analyst at Tendencias, a consultancy in Sao Paulo. "Change bigger than this would be much more difficult."

During Brazil's last presidential election, in late 2010, the debate over abortion helped derail what had appeared to be an easy first-round victory for President Dilma Rousseff.

After religious voters flocked to a born-again candidate in the days before the first vote, Rousseff had to backpedal from her abortion rights comments to assure her victory in a runoff.

(Writing and additional reporting by Paulo Prada; Editing by Jackie Frank)

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Brazil alarmed over rising obesity rate

"A family enjoys Ipanema beach at sunset in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2011. In Brazil, a country known for girls in mini-bikinis and where body-consciousness borders on obsession, nearly half the population is overweight, a study by the Ministry of Health released Tuesday found. (AFP Photo/Antonio Scorza)" title

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