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HEALTH-MEXICO: Abortion No Longer a Crime in Capital
By Diego Cevallos
MEXICO CITY, Apr 24 (IPS) - The Mexico City legislature voted Tuesday to
legalise abortion, after several weeks of heated debate in which
conservative groups and the Catholic Church traded insults with pro-choice
activists and threatened them with excommunication.
Mexico City has now joined Cuba and Guyana as the only places in Latin
America where abortion is legal.
The bill must now be signed into law by Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard
of the leftwing Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), who said he would do so
quickly. The new law will make abortion on demand legal in the city in the
first 12 weeks of pregnancy.
Women's groups and the PRD, which has dominated the municipal government
and the city legislature since 1997, said the new law was a triumph for
the rights of women.
Meanwhile, the Catholic Church and conservative groups, which held marches
and days of prayer against the bill, lashed out against the measure as an
attack on life itself.
"The decriminalisation that has been approved is a disgrace, but we have
not lost the battle," Jorge Serrano, head of the anti-abortion group
Comité Pro Vida, told IPS.
"We will not recognise this law and we will go to the clinics and
hospitals where abortions are practiced to denounce them and try to keep
them from carrying them out," he warned.
During the debates in the city legislature, small anti-abortion and
pro-choice groups demonstrated outside with placards, chants and music.
The demonstrators were not allowed into the building, which was guarded by
the police.
Conservative groups demanded that the issue be decided in a referendum,
and presented 70,000 signatures to that end. However, the PRD refused to
consider that possibility.
"The rights of women cannot be put to a vote," Lorena Martínez, a member
of a university women's group, told IPS.
The numerous surveys on the question carried out by private polling firms
and national newspapers show that a majority of people in the capital are
in favour of legal abortion, although around 40 percent are opposed to it.
The decriminalisation of abortion in the city enjoys a high level of
support despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of Mexicans profess
Roman Catholicism, whose leaders excommunicate those who practice
abortion.
The government of President Felipe Calderón of the conservative National
Action Party (PAN) is opposed to the bill passed by the city legislature,
but its spokespersons have said it will respect the new law.
Nevertheless, the PAN leadership announced that it would object to the
decriminalisation before the Supreme Court.
Pope Benedict XVI also spoke out, drawing fire from the left, which
complained that the Vatican was meddling in the affairs of another state.
The Calderón administration itself told the Church that it had gone too
far, through the Interior Ministry's head of religious associations,
Salvador Beltrán del Río.
In a letter dated Apr. 20, the Pope urged Roman Catholics in Mexico to
oppose decriminalisation of abortion and to staunchly defend every human
being's right to life, from the moment of conception, against any attack
from the "culture of death."
Mexican Archbishop Felipe Aguirre warned that all those who aid and assist
in an abortion will be automatically excommunicated.
The head of Pro Vida said that "whoever supports this criminal law will
pay for it in the next elections. They will not escape punishment."
PRD members of the Mexico City legislature reported some days ago that
they had received anonymous death threats by telephone and e-mail in
recent weeks, because of their support for legalising abortion.
Representatives of the PRD explained that the goal of the new law is not
to encourage abortion, but to recognise the reality and regulate it.
Mayor Ebrard said his administration does not encourage abortion, but
pointed out that back street abortions frequently lead to injury and
death.
The mayor said that his administration will support sex education and the
use of contraceptive methods to avoid unwanted pregnancy.
Although abortion in Mexico is considered a crime - with some
exceptions - which carries a penalty of between one and six years in
prison, only 28 women who had an abortion between 2000 and 2006 were
prosecuted, and 14 were sentenced, out of the estimated one million women
who resort to it every year.
A study by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) estimated
that in this country of 104 million people, up to one million illegal
abortions are carried out a year, equivalent to one-third of annual
pregnancies. However, other sources quote a figure of less than 500,000
abortions a year.
Mexico's 32 states all permit termination of a pregnancy arising from
rape, 27 states allow it when the mother's life is at risk, 13 if the
foetus is seriously malformed, and 10 when the aim is to protect the
mother's health.
Other studies show that unsafe illegal abortions are the fourth or fifth
cause of death among women in Mexico, and that obtaining permission for a
legal abortion in any of the abovementioned circumstances is difficult and
often nearly impossible.
Of the 193 United Nations member countries, 188 allow therapeutic
abortions, carried out for the wellbeing of the mother. Only Chile, El
Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and the Vatican prohibit abortion under any
circumstances, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).
In Latin America and the Caribbean, abortion is available on demand only
in Cuba and Guyana, although in nearly every other country activists and
women's organisations are clamouring for decriminalisation before the
foetus is viable, that is, capable of living outside the womb, which the
WHO defines as before 20 weeks' gestation.
The WHO says that some four million abortions are practiced in the region
every year, and that 5,000 women die from backstreet abortions. A further
30 to 40 percent of women who have abortions in those conditions suffer
severe complications.
(END/2007)
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