Why is legalization of abortion making rapid advances in Mexico?
Pro-abortion activists march in Mexico City on Nov. 26, 2024. / Credit: Congress of the State of Mexico Puebla, Mexico, Dec 5, 2024 / 11:00 am (CNA).
Over the past six years, the legalization of abortion has accelerated rapidly in Mexico, with 19 of the country’s 32 states taking steps to decriminalize the deadly procedure.
What’s behind this trend? ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner, asked several pro-life leaders in Mexico to weigh in.
Political factors
Luis Antonio Hernández is responsible for the Mexican platform Voto Católico, which analyzes the positions of Mexican politicians as they relate to the values of the Church.
In an interview with ACI Prensa, Hernández pointed out that the increasing decriminalization of abortion throughout the country “could not be explained without the role played by the majorities achieved and built by MORENA,” the National Regeneration Movement, founded in 2011 by former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
This role, according to Hernández, was carried out hand in hand with his political allies during the country’s most recent election cycles: the Labor Party (PT) and the Green Ecologist Party of Mexico (PVEM).
In 2007, Mexico City — previously the Federal District or D.F. — was the first entity to decriminalize abortion up to 12 weeks. This happened while Marcelo Ebrard, who at that time was part of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), was head of government, the party López Obrador also belonged to at the time.
In October 2011, López Obrador left the PRD and formalized the creation of MORENA. When he won the 2018 elections, Ebrard joined his government as minister of foreign affairs.
A major push for the decriminalization of abortion got underway during López Obrador’s six-year term in power, between December 2018 and October of this year. MORENA, which in the 2018 elections obtained a large majority in the congresses of several states, took advantage of its power political effort to promote legislation in favor of abortion, getting 12 state congresses to approve regulations favorable to the practice.
Since Oct. 1 of this year, following the inauguration of the country’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum — also from the MORENA party — and thanks to the majority her party holds in additional state congresses, the states of Jalisco, Michoacán, San Luis Potosí, Zacatecas, State of Mexico, and Chiapas have all decriminalized abortion up to 12 weeks.
While during López Obrador’s six-year term abortion was decriminalized in an average of two states per year, under Sheinbaum, in just 59 days, six states have done so.
Another important point highlighted by Hernández is the arrival of a woman to the country’s presidency. This is a factor that, he said, “has been the touchstone to promote this agenda that seeks to achieve supposed benefits and false rights for women.”
As Hernández sees it, the ideological training of a large number of MORENA’s legislative and political officials has also played a crucial role, as they appear to be “fully convinced of this ideological current.”
Marcial Padilla, director of the pro-life platform ConParticipación, agreed that abortion is being decriminalized in Mexico “by a political will that is telling local congresses to carry out these actions.”
This, he told ACI Prensa, “is noticeable in the dirty, accelerated way in which these processes are being carried out, including sometimes even hiding it from society or voting in secret as happened in Jalisco.”
During an evening session on Oct. 4 of this year, the Congress of Jalisco took up and voted on modifications to the state penal code. With 20 votes in favor, 16 against, and one abstention, abortion was decriminalized up to 12 weeks. However, the voting was done in an anonymous manner, so it is not public knowledge who the legislators who approved the initiative are.
“It is a political decision far removed from society,” Padilla said, warning that “as long as we have a government that thinks about pushing women to consider abortion as an option instead of addressing their real needs, we are only going to see a spiral of violence and a spiral of death.”
Breakdown of the family
Padilla also said that one of the factors that has facilitated the decriminalization of abortion in the country is an “accelerated decomposition of nuclear families.”
The “instability of family units means that women increasingly find themselves in a vulnerable situation in which situations may arise where they become afraid, feel alone, and come to think about abortion,” he said.
Paulina Mendieta, spokesperson for the Women for Mexico collective and other initiatives to help vulnerable women, warned that “abortion is a million-dollar industry.” She noted that there are international aid organizations that offer money to local institutions “and they tell you that there is a condition [to give it to you] and the condition is often the promotion of abortion.”
Mendieta also pointed out the “lack of creativity to solve the real problems of our country. So, because of this mental laziness, they prefer to say: ‘Abortion [is] an option. Because we do not have the possibility of really resolving what women are experiencing.’”
In this sense, she called on platforms that defend women and are in favor of abortion to realize that legislators, by approving these measures, “are not solving women’s problems; on the contrary, they get her more into trouble. “They should be the first to call abortion a false solution.”
She pointed out that a woman who suffers domestic violence “is going to commit an abortion and lose the life of her child, but she is going to return home and continue being violated.”
“Abortion is not solving women’s real problems,” she reiterated.
The ‘spiral of silence’
One of the reasons why abortion is becoming normalized, according to Mendieta, is the so-called “spiral of silence.” She observed that in popular consultation exercises carried out by the National Front for the Family in the State of Mexico and Mexico City, “the vast majority [of the people] are against abortion.”
However, she explained that “for the media and social networks in general, it is better to say that you are in favor of abortion. So, the moment someone says ‘This is not right,’ they are crossed out, they are punished.”
In 2023, the French multinational market research and consulting company Ipsos conducted a survey on abortion in Mexico.
The results found that 26% of respondents believed abortion should be legal in most cases, while 23% believed it should be illegal in most cases. Another 19% believed it should be legal in all cases, while 16% maintained that it should be illegal in all cases. Sixteen percent of the respondents did not express a defined position.
Those who defend life, Mendieta lamented, are accused of being “ignorant, that we do not know the reality of women, that we are losers, that we are wasting our time, that we are not in favor of women.”
With these accusations, according to the pro-life leader, “they silence you, they punish you socially for saying that you are against abortion.”
A spiritual battle
María Lourdes Varela, director of the 40 Days for Life prayer campaign for Latin America, assured ACI Prensa that “behind every abortion is the devil.”
Varela said that in today’s society there is the widespread idea that a baby represents a “great threat to the dream, to the profession, to the future of the girl, and turns into the enemy of his or her own mother,” and that is “what the devil wants: to separate any act of love and life from God.”
“The devil rejoices in the murder of babies in the womb,” the pro-life leader said.
She explained that, although the outlook seems bleak and at times it feels like “a lost war,” in their days of prayer outside abortion clinics they find the opposite, because it is then “when we see conversions, when we see lives saved, even if it is only one. They are like caresses from God telling us: ‘Keep going, keep fighting.’”
“In the face of the pain of seeing so many lives lost, so many laws and so many people defending things that are aberrations,” Varela invited the faithful to “continue seeing Christ triumphant. So I encourage you to persevere in faith. How? Well, through the sacraments.”
Why so much interest in abortion?
In a Dec. 1 editorial, the Archdiocese of Mexico expressed its concern about the “number of states that have addressed the issue in a synchronized manner, and with unprecedented speed.”
The text, published in the weekly Desde la Fe, denounced that those who promote abortion “maintain the same narratives of supposed benefits for women and supposed rights” and criticized the fact that “arguments against it are not taken into account, even though they are well-founded in science and law.”
In addition, the editorial warned that the “misnamed ‘right to decide’ is really a slogan that disguises the intention to force pregnant women in a state of vulnerability to abortion.”
The archdiocese also recalled that “each of us loses some humanity when one of our brothers is discarded, murdered, whether in his development in the womb or as an adult” and stressed that “no economic benefit, no ideological benefit, compensates the loss of human beings at the hands of others.”
This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
