This paper analyzes how the truth of the rape is constructed in order to authorize a woman victim of rape to have a legal abortion. We have interviewed 82 health care professionals (physicians, nurses and technicians, social workers and psychologists) at five reference facilities for legal abortion in Brazil. The interviews aimed to understand the procedures and practices imposed on a woman in order to be allowed to have the legal abortion. In spite of the particularities of each facility, we have identified a shared regime of suspicion of the woman's narrative, which investigates the fact of the violence and the victim's subjectivity. The truth of the rape for the legal abortion is not a woman's narrative with a status of veracity, but it is a moral and discursive construction shaped by the victims' submission to the forensic regimes of the services.
Abortion; Abortion, legal; Rape; Violence against women; Sexual violence; Brazil