There is a long way to go in Latin America in terms of recognizing the right of women to dispose of their lives and their bodies. However, Mexico, a very conservative society, has just taken a major step on this road with two judgments rendered last week by the country’s Supreme Court. Two judgments which decriminalize the voluntary termination of pregnancy – in astonishing contrast, it must be said, with the support given in early September by the Supreme Court of the United States to an unspeakable anti-abortion law in neighboring Texas.
“Never again should a woman be prosecuted for having an abortion,” said Luis María Aguilar, a judge at the Mexican Supreme Court, at the time of rendering a first “historic” judgment last Tuesday. A decision, moreover unanimous, by which were declared unconstitutional articles of the penal code of the State of Coahuila, in the north of the country, which punish women having abortions with sentences of up to six years in prison.
The other judgment was handed down two days later. He invalidated a Sinaloa state law, also in the north, which equates voluntary termination of pregnancy with murder and considers life to appear from conception.
Two decisions which, although of a “local” nature, will necessarily have a national scope in that they constitute jurisprudence. Tuesday’s judgment means that, by court order, women who are refused an abortion will be able to obtain it. But these are decisions that are obviously not the end of the story, first because Mexico is also a federated country where, as here, the States are autonomous in the adoption of their laws, and then because that polls indicate that the majority of Mexicans – although this majority is shrinking – are opposed to legalizing abortion.
After Mexico City’s decision in 2007, only 3 of the country’s 32 states recognized the right to abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy: those in Oaxaca, Hidalgo and Veracruz. In the rest of the country, the practice is still prohibited, except in cases of rape. Lawmakers in 19 states ruled at one time or another by one of the two main right-wing parties (the PRI and PAN) have passed provisions obliging authorities to “protect life from conception”.
With the result that abortion is no longer specifically a crime, access to care and services in hospitals and clinics may nevertheless remain difficult to obtain for a long time to come in much of Mexico. In recent years, thousands of women have been subjected to criminal investigations for having had an abortion. Denounced by doctors and nurses, they most often end up in the hands of the police after attempting to have an abortion at home and finally going to the hospital following complications. Either, the decriminalization of abortion will necessarily put a stop to this judicial violence and the dangers that clandestine procedures represent for women’s health.
The battle of the Mexican feminist movement for the legalization of abortion is progressing, but it is not won for another reason: in Mexico, it has been written since 2018 in the law that the doctor has the right to refuse by “objection of conscience ”of practicing a medical act that goes against his personal convictions – moral or religious. Mentalities steeped in Catholic culture are evolving in Latin America, but resistance remains strong. In Argentina, the legalization of abortion last year sparked an outcry among many doctors. In Mexico, the question is so divisive that the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, said of the left, does not even want to get involved. Beautiful case of a politician who relies on the courts. The Supreme Court, which will continue to take care of it, must debate, perhaps this week, this conscientious objection clause and, by extension, access to hospital services. Another necessarily eagerly awaited judgment.
Here then is the highest Mexican court which, in the context of a society strongly influenced by the Catholic Church, takes the side of women’s equality. Meanwhile, the United States Supreme Court, against a predominantly pro-abortion American opinion, refuses to disavow a Texas law that prohibits abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, even in cases of rape or incest. , and which turns Texans into “bounty hunters”. Here, Mexico is advancing; there, the United States, sick of their Trumpism, retreated.
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