ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a feminist critique of ‘Alyne da Silva Pimentel Teixeira (deceased) v Brazil’, a 2011 decision of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. The case was communicated by the mother of an Afro-descendant Brazilian woman who died in the late stages of pregnancy. The death was avoidable; it resulted from fatal delays in the provision of necessary treatment following the medically induced delivery of her stillborn foetus. In this case, the Committee upheld the mother’s complaint. Its decision is ground-breaking, not least for being the first decision from an international human rights monitoring body that addresses the question of how human rights apply to pregnant women. This chapter considers the Committee’s decision through a feminist lens, and, in particular, draws attention to the Committee’s (feminist) method of ‘telling the story differently’ through contextualisation and intersectional analysis, which enabled it to frame Alyne’s death as an injustice rather than merely a tragedy. Despite the important advances made by the Committee, this chapter goes on to consider how the Committee might have further benefitted from feminist analysis in its decision.
