The Supreme Court in Brazil is deciding a historic case to decriminalize abortion. This is an unprecedented moment for my country. So I made this story for our Supreme Court. Right now, you have a chance to protect millions of Brazilian women. Let me show you. This is me, Eliza. I’m a Brazilian filmmaker. It’s the first month of the pandemic. All my film work is canceled. So I’m documenting an exciting new chapter of my life. But as is common for many pregnant women, I’m experiencing serious mood swings. Is it just my hormones? Or is it intuition? At 14 weeks, I get my answer. My doctor tells me my baby will not survive. He says my son has a malformation that is incompatible with life. My baby will never experience a single moment of joy. How can I continue to feel my belly grow for the next five months? This is a kind of torture for both me and my son. To me, it’s clear I should terminate my pregnancy. But I don’t have the legal right to have an abortion in my country. Abortion is a serious crime in Brazil. There are only three exceptions: when the woman’s life is at risk, rape or when the fetus’s brain doesn’t completely form. In all other situations, including mine, Brazilian women face up to three years in prison. My way of dealing with injustice is to make films about it. A year and a half later, I began traveling across Brazil, filming other women facing the same dilemma for a feature documentary. I met women who had legal and illegal abortions. Others delivered babies who died the day they were born. Priscilla’s story always stayed with me. She’s a devout evangelical. Her grandfather is a minister. But when she found out her third baby had a condition that was incompatible with life, reality changed her beliefs about abortion. Each woman told me about their difficult decisions. Many spoke about it for the first time. These stories were all different, but they all suffered silently. When you are too afraid to tell your own story, it doesn’t exist. There are believed to be about a half million abortions every year in Brazil, and less than 1 percent of them are legal. Inequality makes this even worse. Black women are 46 percent more likely to undergo abortions than white women. And like in the U.S., where many women are now forced to cross the state lines for legal abortions, we can also travel outside of Brazil. But almost nobody can afford it. I terminated my pregnancy in Portugal, where abortion has been legal since 2007. It was the worst moment of my life. But I also felt so privileged. I was angry for all the Brazilian women who are forced to have dangerous underground abortions. Now imagine going to jail after all of this. One out of every seven Brazilian women my age has had an abortion. Your mothers, your sisters, your daughters, your friends, but you probably don’t even know about it. In Lisbon, I had complications related to my uterine fibroids and was hospitalized for almost a week. Had I been at home and afraid to tell the truth, I might not have received life-saving care. In Brazil, it’s estimated that a woman dies every two days from an abortion. Before Portugal legalized abortion, it was a leading cause of maternal mortality. But since it was legalized, there have been almost no maternal deaths from abortion. What I have learned is that every abortion is in some way caused by an incompatibility with life. Sometimes in stories like mine, it’s an incompatibility with life outside of the womb. But it’s often an incompatibility with a woman’s economic or emotional life. When this incompatibility exists, women will always continue to seek abortions, no matter the danger or challenges. In other words, criminalization doesn’t reduce the number of abortions. Do we want to live in a country whose laws torture its citizens? Or do we want to join our neighbors like Argentina, Colombia and Mexico that faced the reality by decriminalizing abortion? To Luís Roberto Barroso, the incoming chief justice of the Brazilian Supreme Court, and to all the respected judges: Unlike in the United States, Brazil’s Supreme Court can fix this now. You have the opportunity to prioritize public health. Break our silence and save our lives. Please decriminalize abortion in Brazil.