Abortion Rights in Mexico City
by Diana Santana
“Women have self-determination over their bodies …They have the right to decide whether to enter into motherhood. It is a basic right and an exclusive right of women.” — Deputy Daniel Ordoñez, introducing a bill to decriminalize first-trimester abortion in Mexico City
Two recent, sharply contrasting legal decisions related to reproductive health in the United States and Mexico City will affect women’s sexuality, reproductive choices, and overall quality of life in very different ways for years to come.
On April 24, the Legislative Assembly of the federal district of Mexico City voted by a margin of 46 to 19 to decriminalize abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. With this decision, Mexico City joins Cuba and Guyana as the only entities in Latin America that do not restrict a woman’s access to abortion during the first trimester. Leaders of Mexico’s influential Catholic Church have vowed to excommunicate any legislator who voted to approve the bill.
Although abortion has been legal in Mexico City when a woman’s health is in danger or the pregnancy is the result of rape, administrative barriers and social opposition have made it nearly impossible to actually obtain the procedure legally. Women with financial means can obtain safe abortions through private providers, or by traveling abroad, while poorer women often resort to unsafe methods, including traditional means, such as herbs, off-label prescription medicines, and procedures performed by untrained providers.
It is estimated that somewhere between 100,000 and one million abortions per year are performed in Mexico. Complications from unsafe abortion are the fifth leading cause of maternal mortality in Mexico, and the third leading cause in Mexico City. Between 2001 and 2005, more than 124,000 women were hospitalized for complications from unsafe abortion in Mexico City alone.
Mexico City’s legislators now have made it possible for all women to access safe and legal abortions in government clinics in the first trimester. This means that poor women in Mexico City will soon have better access to safe abortion services than some women in the U.S.
Ironically, the week before Mexico City expanded access to safe, legal abortion, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a law making it more difficult for women to access safe abortion services. In a 5–4 decision, the court upheld the first federal law banning abortions that doctors say are safe and often the best to protect women’s health. In the cases of Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood and Gonzales v. Carhart, the court overturned 30 years of established legal precedent protecting women’s health. Lower courts had previously rejected the ban — passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bush in 2003 — on the grounds that it lacked an exception to protect the health of the pregnant woman. With this decision, the Supreme Court told women that politicians, rather than medical doctors, will now make private medical decisions for them. In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, “the Court deprives women of the right to make an autonomous choice, even at the expense of their safety.”
In the United States, the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973 brought with it a sharp decline in maternal mortality and morbidity associated with illegal abortions. The Supreme Court’s new decision paves the way for further restrictions on safe abortion and on a woman’s right to decide if and when to have children, and it forces doctors to base their medical decisions on legislation rather than on their professional judgment and the needs of their patients.
In Mexico City, meanwhile, women will now be better able to decide if and when to have children, and doctors will have one more tool to protect women’s health. It is not impossible to imagine a future in which women in the United States cross the Rio Grande in order to access safe abortion services.
Diana Santana is program officer in the PPFA Latin America Regional Office.
Published: 05.11.07
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