Getty Rubio: No abortions for Zika-infected women 
 
 Sen. Marco Rubio said Saturday that he doesn’t believe a pregnant woman infected with the Zika virus should have the right to an abortion — even if she had reason to believe the child would be born with severe microcephaly. 
 
 "I understand a lot of people disagree with my view – but I believe that all human life is worthy of protection of our laws. And when you present it in the context of Zika or any prenatal condition, it’s a difficult question and a hard one," Rubio told POLITICO. 
 
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 "But if I’m going to err, I’m going to err on the side of life." 
 
 Abortion and Zika became politically intertwined in June when Congress failed to pass a Zika-relief bill, in part due to a dispute over Planned Parenthood. Zika has started to spread quickly through Florida, which now has 422 cases -- more than any other state in the nation -- and it has alarmed families and health experts because the virus has been linked to severe microcephaly in infants born to some infected pregnant women. 
 
 “We’ve never before had a mosquito-borne disease that can cause a birth defect,” the Centers for Disease Control’s director, Tom Friedan, said Thursday in Doral after touring Wynwood. “That’s why we take it so seriously. The key is to protect pregnant women.” 
 
 Without prompting, Rubio acknowledged the challenges of the birth defects that result from Zika. 
 
 "Obviously, microcephaly is a terrible prenatal condition that kids are born with. And when they are, it’s a lifetime of difficulties," he said. "So I get it. I’m not pretending to you that that’s an easy question you asked me. But I’m prolife. And I’m strongly prolife. I believe all human life should be protected by our law, irrespective of the circumstances or condition of that life." 
 
 Rubio has taken a leadership role in trying to prevent the spread of Zika. He became the first Republican to co-sponsor President Obama’s $1.9 billion Zika-fighting legislation, which was watered down by House Republicans after it passed the Senate. The legislation ultimately failed. Rubio points out that he voted for every Zika bill he could. 
 
 The campaign of one of his Democratic Senate opponents, U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy, pointed to that vote and said in a press release Saturday that “Rubio exploited the Zika crisis to attack women’s health funding and Planned Parenthood.” 
 
 A staunch pro-life conservative, Rubio’s position on abortion has been consistent in the Florida Legislature, U.S. Senate and the campaign trail. A year ago, for instance, Rubio said on the presidential debate stage that he was opposed to abortion in cases of rape or incest. Murphy’s campaign called that position “extreme and offensive.” 
 
 Rubio took issue with the Democrats’ raising Planned Parenthood because, he said, “the words Planned Parenthood don’t appear anywhere in the law.” 
 
 Rubio said the bill limited federal Zika money to “community health centers and hospitals, basically Medicare providers… with limited funds, you wanted to ensure those funds were going to facilities in every community in the state. In the end, I voted for laws that don’t have that condition there, either. I just want the money to start flowing.” 
 
 Rubio faulted Democrats for not passing the scaled-back legislation. 
 
 “The Planned Parenthood angle is something they basically made up to have a political reason not to pass Zika so they can come back in August and campaign on it,“ he said. “That’s what I mean by political volleyball. Both sides have played that game. I would have preferred the House just passed a clean funding bill and I’ll vote for that if it comes out.” ||||| Daniele Santos, 29, holds her son Juan Pedro who is 2-months old and born with microcephaly, at their house in Recife, Brazil, February 9, 2016. REUTERS/Nacho Doce 
 
 CHICAGO (Reuters) - Researchers on Wednesday reported new evidence strengthening the association between Zika virus and a spike in birth defects, citing the presence of the virus in the brain of an aborted fetus of a European woman who became pregnant while living in Brazil. 
 
 An autopsy of the fetus showed microcephaly or small head size, as well as severe brain injury and high levels of the Zika virus in fetal brain tissues, exceeding levels of the virus typically found in blood samples, researchers in Slovenia from the University Medical Center in Ljubljana reported in the New England Journal of Medicine. 
 
 The findings help “strengthen the biologic association” between Zika virus infection and microcephaly, researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, wrote in an editorial that accompanied the paper. 
 
 Researchers in Brazil are scrambling to determine whether the arrival of the Zika virus in that country has caused a major rise in microcephaly, with more than 4,000 suspected cases of the condition reported to date. Brazil has confirmed more than 400 of those cases as microcephaly, and identified the presence of Zika in 17 babies, but a link has yet to be proven. 
 
 The virus is transmitted by mosquitoes. There is no treatment or vaccine. 
 
 Professor Tatjana Avšič Županc, who led the researchers in Slovenia, said in an email her team’s findings “may present the most compelling evidence to date” that birth defects associated with Zika infection in pregnancy may be caused by replication of the virus in the brain. 
 
 For definitive proof, however, she said more studies are needed. 
 
 In the NEJM paper, the mother showed signs of Zika infection during her 13th week of pregnancy, but ultrasounds during her 14th and 20th week were normal. 
 
 It was not until the woman returned to Europe that researchers found ultrasound evidence of severe fetal abnormalities during an ultrasound in her 29th week. 
 
 That suggests that ultrasounds may pick up signs of severe fetal abnormalities “only very late in gestation - in many cases too late to terminate the pregnancy,” Drs. Eric Rubin, Michael Green and Lindsey Baden wrote in the editorial. 
 
 In the Slovenian case, the woman also noticed reduced fetal movement and was told the fetus had a poor prognosis. She requested an abortion, which was approved by state and hospital ethics boards and performed at 32 weeks gestation. A normal pregnancy lasts 40 weeks. 
 
 Aside from obvious microcephaly, the fetus showed no other deformities. The woman had no family history of genetic abnormalities that could have caused the microcephaly. 
 
 Researchers did an autopsy, and instead of normal grooves formed in the brain during growth, the surface of the brain was smooth and there were numerous calcifications, which are suggestive of inflammation. 
 
 Brain samples tested positive for the Zika virus, and no other viruses in the same class, such as dengue, yellow fever or West Nile virus. The doctors also ruled out many other potential infectious causes of microcephaly, including rubella, cytomegalovirus and toxoplasmosis. 
 
 From the brain samples, the team was able to identify the complete genetic sequence of the Zika viral genome, which most closely matched a Zika virus strain isolated from a patient from French Polynesia in 2013 and a Zika virus strain isolated in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 2015. 
 
 Importantly, the team found no presence of the virus and no other defects in any fetal organs other than the brain, which suggests the virus selectively attacks nerve tissue, Avšič Županc and colleagues wrote. But exactly how the virus does this is not clear. 
 
 The discovery of viral particles and a high load of Zika virus RNA in the brain samples, coupled with the absence of other possible pathogens, and a complete viral genome present “strong evidence” of the Zika virus’ potential for causing birth defects, Avšič Županc said in an email. 
 
 In January, a team of researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that they, too, found evidence of Zika virus in brain samples from Brazil taken from two miscarriages and two newborns who died shortly after birth. 
 
 CDC published full results of their findings earlier on Wednesday. ||||| With no vaccine, no cure, and without even a reliable diagnosis, doctors are at a loss for how to protect their patients from the Zika virus. In the past year, the mosquito-borne disease has spread throughout Latin America, sparking panic because of a possible link to microcephaly—babies born with abnormally small brains. Without more information, medical advice so far has boiled down to this: Don’t get pregnant. So say official guidelines from Brazil, Colombia, and Honduras. El Salvador has gone so far as to recommend women do not get pregnant until 2018. 
 
 But most of these Latin American countries are also Catholic, so access to birth control is often poor and abortion is flat-out banned. “This kind of recommendation that women should avoid pregnancy is not realistic,” says Beatriz Galli, a Brazil-based policy advisor for the reproductive health organization Ipas. “How can they put all the burden of this situation on the women?” 
 
 In Brazil, where Zika has hit the hardest, birth control is available—though poor and rural women can still get left out. One report estimates that unplanned pregnancies make up over half of all births in the country. And abortion is illegal, except in cases of rape and certain medical conditions. A raft of impending legislation in Brazil’s conservative-held congress may make it harder to get abortions even in those exempted cases. 
 
 Now throw Zika into that. Scientists still haven't confirmed the link to microcephaly, but Brazilian researchers have confirmed the virus can jump through the placenta from mother to fetus. Circumstantially, the number of of microcephaly cases has gone up 20 fold since Zika first reached Brazil. In the face of fear and incomplete information, women will have to figure out how to protect themselves and their children. 
 
 Illegal Abortions 
 
 If a woman is already pregnant or accidentally becomes pregnant in Brazil, her choices are both legally restricted and medically confusing. 
 
 Illegal abortions already happen; 200,000 women in Brazil get hospitalized every year for complications from the procedure. Having one is punishable by up to three years in prison. 
 
 In 2012, a Brazilian supreme court decided that terminating a pregnancy would be legal when the fetus develops with no brain and has no chance for survival, a condition called anencephaly. Microcephaly, where the brain is too small, is more complicated: It can be fatal in some babies and result in permanent disabilities in others. 
 
 Zika makes the confusion even worse. The virus doesn’t make everyone ill, so not having any symptoms is no guarantee of safety. If a woman does get sick, the symptoms of Zika are not unique and diagnostic tests are not reliably available. Even diagnosis of microcephaly via ultrasound is tricky early in pregnancy. It can be hard to know how abnormal the size of an unborn fetus’ head is, says Kjersti Aagaard, an obstetrician at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, because “those measures are what help us date a pregnancy.” The reasoning is circular: A fetus’s head may be too small for their age, but if you don’t know the age, you don’t have a reference point. 
 
 Galli says she suspects individual women infected with Zika may try petitioning judges to allow abortions. Brazilian judges have on rare occasions granted abortions to women whose fetuses were in danger of severe birth defects, and one judge has expressed sympathy for Zika-infected women carrying babies with microcephaly. But this last-ditch legal route is slow and accessible only to well-resourced women. 
 
 Rubella and Abortion in the US 
 
 In the 1960s, doctors in the US had in a similar dilemma. The virus rubella can cause blindness, deafness, and other birth defects. Like Zika, the symptoms of rubella in everyone but pregnant women were so mild that nobody paid much attention. Then a pandemic hit in the 1960s. Abortion was illegal at the time, but so-called therapeutic abortions—if doctors deemed them medically justified—were allowed. Few doctors actually performed them, though. 
 
 The media picked up on the plight of white, middle-class mothers seeking abortions after getting rubella. LIFE even ran a cover story. That narrative ran counter to the stereotype of abortion-seeking women as poor, unmarried, and somehow deviant. “To have middle-class white married women speak publicly about abortion made abortion respectable and decent,” says Leslie Reagan, a historian at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and author of Dangerous Pregnancies, a book about abortion and the rubella outbreak. The conversation around abortion shifted in the US, leading to state laws that decriminalized abortions and eventually Roe v. Wade. 
 
 With Zika in Brazil, Galli thinks opening the debate to medical justifications of abortion could help destigmatize the issue. But she’s not optimistic, given the anti-abortion legislation currently in congress. “We are facing a lot of threats,” she says. “We are fighting to try to secure what we have instead of trying to advance and expand legislation.” For now, pregnant women face a set of choices more constrained than ever.
– Marco Rubio acknowledges that microcephaly, a birth defect associated with Zika virus, "is a terrible prenatal condition" and that children born with it face a "lifetime of difficulties." Nonetheless, the Republican senator from Florida tells Politico that he doesn't believe pregnant women infected with Zika should be able to get abortions. "When you present it in the context of Zika or any prenatal condition, it’s a difficult question and a hard one," Rubio says. "But if I’m going to err, I’m going to err on the side of life." Per the CDC, Florida is the only state that has Zika infections that were transmitted by local mosquitoes, as opposed to being travel related. According to the Miami Herald, there were 16 such cases as of last week. In June, a bill to provide $1.1 billion to the fight against Zika derailed when Democrats balked at a provision that would have prevented Planned Parenthood from getting any of the funds, according to Quartz. Rubio tells Politico that both parties have played "political volleyball" with the issue.