Bill to Legalize
Abortion Set to Pass in Mexico City
By JAMES C. McKINLEY
Jr., NYTimes on the Web, March 31, 2007
MEXICO CITY, Mar. 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.
But the measure has stirred a vicious debate and shaken this heavily Roman
Catholic country to its roots. In recent days, the bill has dominated
conversations from family dinner tables to the president’s office.
Celebrities and politicians of all stripes have lined up on both sides, throwing
verbal darts at one another. Catholic and feminist groups have staged
dueling protests and marches.
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.
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.
The debate in Mexico threatens to revive tensions between President Felipe
Calderón, a conservative who opposes abortion, and the leftist Party of the
Democratic Revolution, whose candidate narrowly lost the election last year and
still refuses to concede.
Mr. Calderón has tried to stay above the fray, but he said last week, “I am in
defense of life.” His 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.
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.”
Conservatives respond that abortion is tantamount to murder. “This law is
a law that will cost many lives,” said Jorge Serrano Limón, the head of Provida,
an anti-abortion group. “If it is signed, it will spill a lot of blood,
the blood of babies just conceived in the maternal womb.”
Mr. Serrano Limón and other opponents also dispute that the law will end illegal
abortions. The procedure carries such a stigma here, they say, that
whether legal or not, many women will seek out underground clinics to keep their
condition secret from their friends and families anyway.
The bill, tentatively scheduled for a vote on April 19, is likely to pass the
66-member city Legislative Assembly with a solid majority, and the mayor,
Marcelo Ebrard, has said he will sign it, the sponsors say. It would
legalize abortion in the capital, which has eight million residents, and could
make Mexico City a magnet for women seeking abortions across the country.
The debate now roiling Mexico would have been nearly unthinkable a decade ago,
proponents of the law say. The topic was so taboo that the church once
excommunicated actresses and television producers for bringing it up in a soap
opera.
“People are talking about abortion openly for the first time in Mexico,” said
Lilian Sepúlveda, a lawyer with the New York-based Center for Reproductive
Rights who tracks the issue in Latin America. “It is historic.”
Still, lawmakers in the Assembly are bracing for an ugly fight, and each side
has held competing rallies.
Several hundred people in favor of the law marched Thursday afternoon through
the narrow streets of the historic downtown. The crowd was made up mostly
of women, largely from women’s rights groups and political parties that support
legalizing abortion.
Last Sunday, Cardinal Norberto Rivera was among the church leaders who joined a
protest march down the boulevard to the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Despite a ban on the clergy taking part in politics, the cardinal told the crowd
of several thousand, “We are united here so that they hear our voice, the voice
of life.”
“They say that it’s a problem of a woman’s rights over her body, but they ignore
the right over their bodies that all the aborted girls and boys have,” he said
later in his homily. “They deny them the fundamental right, which is the
right to life.”
Víctor Hugo Círigo Vásquez, the majority leader of the Assembly, said many of
the 34 legislators from his Party of the Democratic Revolution who support the
measure had received threatening calls and messages on their cellphones, as well
as nasty e-mail. They were told they would be excommunicated or go to hell
if they approved the law.
“There is a media lynching campaign that has been orchestrated by clerical
groups from the very, very far right,” he said. He added, “It’s a black
campaign that’s coming hard.”
The bill’s prime sponsor, Jorge Díaz Cuervo of the Alternative Party, said
church leaders had broken Mexican law by meddling in the legislative process.
“This is a layman’s state,” he said. “There is no reason to impose the
beliefs of one church on 100 percent of the people.”
Many women here are watching the political battle with a mix of trepidation and
hope. Like many laws in Mexico, the abortion law is honored as much in its
breach as its observance.
Government officials estimate at least 110,000 women a year seek illegal
abortions in Mexico, and many abortion rights groups say the number is much
higher. At least 88 women died in 2006 from botched abortions, the Health
Ministry says, though it is far from clear that all cases were reported.
For the well off, it is common knowledge that certain gynecologists perform
illegal abortions in private hospitals, disguising the procedure as something
else on documents.
For the poor, unwanted pregnancies often mean finding a midwife or an
underground clinic, abortion rights advocates say. Some young women also
resort to huge doses of drugs for arthritis and gastritis, available over the
counter, that can cause miscarriages. Others use teas made from
traditional herbs to cause miscarriages. All of these methods carry
dangers.
The story of one woman, Dolores, who did not want her full name used, is
typical. When she was 18, she became pregnant after her first sexual
encounter with a boyfriend she barely knew, mostly because she knew nothing
about contraception or even the basics of sexuality.
“I was alone and had no help,” she said in an interview. “In fact, I
thought about it a lot before I made the decision, but in the end there was no
other way. I wasn’t in the economic position to face the situation.”
Panicked, she visited a midwife, who inserted a flexible tube into the womb to
let air in and provoke a miscarriage. Dolores was told to wait three days
before removing the tube.
She started bleeding within 15 minutes of leaving the midwife’s house. The
bleeding continued unabated for a month. At last, she fainted in front of
her parents from a loss of blood and they took her to a hospital, where she
recovered slowly after a week of treatment. “I almost died,” she said.
Now 41, she has never carried a baby to term. Two of her pregnancies ended
in premature births, and both infants died.
Yazmín Quiroz, Elisabeth Malkin and Antonio Betancourt
contributed reporting.
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