Damn good news.
MEXICO CITY, March 30 — Dominated by liberals, Mexico City’s legislature is expected to legalize abortion in a few weeks. The bill would make this city one of the largest entities in Latin America to break with a long tradition of women resorting to illegal clinics and midwives to end unwanted pregnancies. . . .
The contours of the debate are familiar to veterans of similar battles in the United States. But Mexico City’s law would be groundbreaking in Latin America, where most countries allow abortion only under strict conditions, like when the life of the mother is in danger or when she is a victim of rape or incest. Only in Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guyana can women have abortions for any reason during the first trimester. Three countries — Chile, Nicaragua and El Salvador — ban it without exception.
The Mexico City bill would make it legal to have an abortion during the first trimester for any reason. The procedure would be free at city health facilities. Private hospitals would be required to provide an abortion to any woman who asks for one, though doctors with religious or ethical objections would not be required to perform abortions.
Jill has written extensively here about the high human toll that draconian abortion regimes take. And some of the most draconian regimes are found in countries where the Catholic Church has strong influence.
Not surprisingly, the Church is fighting tooth and nail against the liberalization of abortion laws in Mexico City:
Catholic leaders and church officials have denounced the proponents as “baby killers” and have warned that the law could provoke violence against doctors who agree to provide the service. A group of Catholic lawyers are pushing for a citywide referendum on the issue, hoping to avert the vote in the city Legislative Assembly.
Yeah, the law could “provoke” violence. Violence that will just fall out of the sky. I think we’ve seen that it doesn’t take much to prime that particular pump.
Feminists who’ve been fighting for the decriminalization of abortion are countering the hellfire-and-brimstone with actual fact: that women — particularly if they have little control over contraception — are going to have abortions regardless of whether they’re legal; at least if you legalize abortions, you can reduce the very real harm that illegal abortions can cause.
Leftists and feminists, meanwhile, have accused opponents of turning a blind eye to reality. They say millions of women here, and indeed throughout much of Latin America, already ignore the law and choose to abort fetuses, often in dingy underground clinics or the private homes of midwives. They risk infection, sterility and sometimes death.
“Women are dying, above all poor women, because of unsafe abortions,” said María Consuelo Mejía, the director of Catholics for the Right to Decide. “What we would like is that these women never have to confront the necessity of an abortion, but in this society it’s impossible right now. There is no access to information, to contraceptives. Nor do most women have the power to negotiate the use of contraceptives with their partners.”
Interestingly, the opposition to abortion rights in Mexico City is at least willing to think about ways to avoid the need for abortion — unlike the forced-pregnancy lobby in the US. Scott compares and contrasts:
The key question of abortion policy is always not whether women will get abortions, but whether non-affluent women will have access to safe abortions. It’s strongly in the interests of the forced pregnancy lobby to ignore this reality, because once you do take it into account abortion criminalization is essentially indefensible.
Another interesting aspect of the article is the reaction of pro-criminalization elites: “[Calderon’s] health minister and other surrogates in the conservative National Action Party, however, are in the thick of it. They have proposed streamlining adoption laws, improving sex education and providing subsidies to unwed mothers as alternatives.” This makes them more serious than most of their American counterparts, at least. But I would ask the same question I would of “Feminists For Life”: if you favor these things, what’s stopping you? Why are they merely “alternatives,” particularly given what an ineffective tool criminalization is when it comes to preventing abortions? And, again, the answer is that American criminalization regimes are about a lot more than protecting fetal life.