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Brazil6. Women’s Reproductive and Sexual Rights 85OMCT recalls that the Committee on Economic Social and CulturalRights adopted General Comment 14 on the right to the highest attainablestandard of health at its 22 nd Session, in 2000. 86 With regard to gender,“the Committee recommends that States integrate a gender perspective intheir health-related policies, planning programmes and research in orderto promote better health for both women and men.” With regard to womenand the right to health, the Committee notes in paragraph 21 that “to eliminatediscrimination against women, there is a need to develop and implementa comprehensive national strategy for promoting women’s right tohealth throughout their life span.” The same paragraph states: “A majorgoal should be reducing women’s health risks, particularly lowering ratesof maternal mortality and protecting women from domestic violence.”Moreover, the Committee stresses that “it is also important to undertakepreventive, promotive and remedial action to shield women from theimpact of harmful traditional cultural practices and norms that deny themtheir full reproductive rights.”Despite the continuous demand of women’s organisations and health careprofessionals’ coalitions to legalize pregnancy interruption, abortion stillremains illegal except under severe circumstances, such as when themother’s life is threatened or in case of rape, as stated in article 128 of thePenal Code, introduced by law 2848 in 1940. There exists a law projecton abortion, still to be approved by the National Congress, PL 1135/91and annexes, which would modify articles 124, 125 and 126 of the PenalCode dating from 1940 that consider abortion caused by the mother orwith her consent as a crime. 87In the wake of the first program of legal abortion initiated in 1989 by theWoman’s health Assessor (Assessoria da Saúde da Mulher) in a publichospital through the approval of the Sao Paulo municipal law 692/89, 88and following the increasing demand of women for these services in otherareas, the Ministry of Health published in 1999 the first edition of theTechnical Standard regarding the prevention and treatment of the illresulting from sexual violence, which guarantees abortion services in thetwo cases legally admitted in the Penal Code offered by the Single HealthCare System (SUS). 89 It took a resolution of the ConstitutionalCommittee for Justice, barely obtained by 24 votes against 23 in 1997, to93