While women in Mexico City have had the pro-choice option of abortion for more than a year, females in the rest of the country are bound to the whims of a macho-dominated social structure.
Abortions performed during the first trimester of pregnancy have been legal in Mexico City since April 2007. They remain illegal in the rest of Mexico, however, as well as throughout most of Latin America.
By passing the law, the city government sought to make abortion available to any woman seeking one, including the city’s poorest residents. Implementing the law has been a challenge, though.
Some 85 percent of Mexico City’s doctors have refused to provide the procedure and even at facilities that do, women frequently complain that they are mistreated and stonewalled by health care providers.
According the The New York Times, Mexico’s Supreme Court began deliberating a challenge to the new law in August, filed by the conservative federal government and supported by anti-abortion groups.
To overturn the city law, eight of 11 magistrates must vote against it. If the court rules in favor of the law, anti-abortion groups have said they will push for a referendum.
“It is a debate over absolutes; it is an issue that is not really subject to debate,” explained Armando Martinez, president of the College of Catholic Lawyers of Mexico to The N.Y. Times. As is often the case in these situations, reality is a little more complicated.
First, in regards to unplanned pregnancies, there is a definite class issue that prompted the law in the first place. In Mexico and elsewhere, women from wealthier families do have access to professionally provided abortions, such as from their own private doctors or across the border in the United States.
Though abortions are legal to the rest of Mexico in cases of rape or incest, such abortions are almost impossible to obtain in practice, according to Human Rights Watch.
Likewise, lawmakers also seek to curb the practice of the city’s poorest women going to illegal clinics or midwives.
“For the people with money, this was not a problem,” explained Dr. Armando Ahued, Mexico City’s health secretary. “But for our people with no resources, what could they do? They went to clandestine clinics,” Ahued told The Times.
Indeed, the legalization of abortion can be looked at as the democratization of health care services, making the options for both rich and poor more equitable and eliminating the opportunity for a “black-market” to flourish in the vacuum created by the absence of legitimate services.
This also brings to the foreground the role of government in public life. In the United States, the abortion debate is conditioned by the longstanding and widely-accepted principle that government should stay out of peoples’ personal lives, except in cases where the public good is put in jeopardy.
Furthermore, there is also the expectation that the government’s primary role is to provide a safe environment for all of its citizens. As to whether an adult woman choosing to end a pregnancy in the first trimester is a matter affecting the public good is subject to debate.
In Mexico, the Catholic Church remains a powerful and respected institution, placing much more emphasis on the maintenance of traditional morality and less on individual freedom.
With so much cultural contact and population exchange between Mexico and the U.S., it is likely that Mexicans will continue to demand more individual freedom to determine their own destinies.
Christopher Herrin is a graduate Religious Studies major and a columnist for the Daily Forty-Niner.
