“We have to avoid pregnancy,” said Rosa, about the possibility of having a child during the Covid-19 pandemic. “I don’t want to have a baby. What I went through in 2017 when I had Raíssa, God forbid.”
Living in the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco, Rosa’s first child Raíssa was born during the Zika epidemic, the mosquito-borne disease that can cause severe birth defects when contracted during pregnancy.
Between 2015 and 2017, some 3,700 babies in Brazil were born with Zika-related microcephaly, a congenital malformation by which children are born with abnormally small heads. These babies are now...
