The Daily - Mexico’s Path to Legalizing Abortion

Episode Date: September 15, 2021

In a major turn of events in Mexico, which has one of the largest Catholic populations in the world, its Supreme Court last week decriminalized abortions.The Supreme Court ruling is a milestone for Mexico’s feminist movement. But change might not come quickly: Abortion law is mostly administered at the state level in Mexico, much of the country remains culturally conservative, and many Mexican medical workers are morally opposed to abortion.In a country where polls indicate most people don’t believe that abortion should be legal, what effect will the ruling have in practice?Guest: Natalie Kitroeff, a correspondent covering Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean for The New York Times. Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: The Supreme Court’s decision to decriminalize abortion set a legal precedent for the nation. But applying it to all of Mexico’s states will be a long path. Read this article in Spanish here.Abortion may no longer be a crime, but a battle looms over whether public hospitals will be required to offer the procedure. Read this article in Spanish here.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. A landmark court ruling has put Mexico on a path toward legalizing abortion. But in a deeply conservative and Catholic country, the question is whether changing the law around abortion will change how people in Mexico feel about it. Kevin Roos spoke with our colleague, Natalie Kitchoff, in Mexico City.

It's Wednesday, September 15th. So, Natalie, it's been a big month of news on the issue of abortion in the U.S. There was this Supreme Court ruling on a Texas law. But you've been following another major abortion ruling that came down last week from the Mexican Supreme Court. Could you tell us about that ruling? So Mexico's Supreme Court last week said that abortion is no longer a crime. They decriminalized abortion across the country. It was a major turn of events for Mexico, which has one of the biggest Catholic populations in the world. So what does that mean exactly? What does it mean to

decriminalize abortion? So in order to understand what it means to decriminalize abortion, you kind of have to understand what it means that abortion is a crime. In most states in Mexico, there have been laws on the books that basically say that women can go to jail for up to three years for receiving an abortion. There are exceptions for certain cases, including if the pregnancy was the result of rape. But in most states in Mexico, women who get abortions can be criminally charged for receiving an abortion. And to really get what that felt like, I talked to a woman named Martha Mendez. And what did Martha tell you? So Martha, a few years ago, rushed to the hospital after having taken an abortion pill and suffering complications.

She was bleeding. She was in a ton of pain. She got to the emergency room and the doctors and nurses really refused to let her see a specialist. They told her that what she had done was wrong, that she should wait. And she was not seen until she was really in crisis, at which point she's taken back. They do a procedure to remove what remained of the fetus. And when she wakes up, she is greeted by a nurse who is carrying a bundle wrapped in a sheet. And the nurse says,

ask it for forgiveness because you killed it. And then the nurse wheels her bed into the maternal ward where mothers are receiving their babies, their newborns. And Martha is meant to watch this, to understand what she's done. And afterwards, you know, the doctors and nurses have been telling her that she's committed a crime and she's going to jail. So right after she's released from the hospital, she's sent directly to the local prosecutor's office

where she's told to confess to the crime of getting an abortion. And this kicks off a years-long legal battle for Martha where she really fights these charges and was only able to close this case in 2019. But she loses all of her friends. She has to drop out of university. She moves out of the state where she's from, far away from her family. This is a trauma that's stuck with her that she says really has changed her life. That's a really remarkable story. How many women are there like Martha, women who have been charged in Mexico for seeking or getting an abortion?

It's also anybody who helps a woman receive an abortion can be investigated for this. So it's pretty common. I mean, we don't know how many people have had the exact experience Martha's had, but my colleague Oscar Lopez and I talked to several women who had gone through this process. And how does this ruling by the Mexican Supreme Court impact these kinds of stories, these kinds of situations, these types of criminal charges? So what the Supreme Court said last week is that laws like the one under which Martha was charged are not constitutional, that you can't pursue criminal charges against women for getting an abortion. This ruling seems like a dramatic shift for Mexico to go from prosecuting people like Martha to decriminalizing abortion altogether.

How did Mexico get here? I mean, it has been a long, long road. What we saw from the Supreme Court last week is really the product of a longstanding feminist movement in Mexico. And among their most significant battles has been for broader access to abortion. They, for decades, were working behind the scenes with states, with legislatures to try to push for broader access to the procedure. And all of that really culminates in 2007, when the nation's capital, Mexico City, takes this major step of legalizing abortion up to 12 weeks into a pregnancy. And this is the first place in a very Catholic, conservative country that moves to do this. But it's met with an immediate outcry across the country and a very swift legal challenge.

But the next year, the Supreme Court upholds the Mexico City law. But it sounds like almost from the time Mexico City legalized abortion, there was intense pushback from some sections of Mexican society. Exactly. So what happened next? Well, around 2019, the feminist movement really gets supercharged. It was this buildup of a lot of different things. Violence, the rate of violence against women had been increasing for a while. There were high profile allegations of rape by police officers. And these tensions just boil over onto the streets

where you see women taking to the streets and doing these massive demonstrations on a level that hadn't been seen in a long, long time. And what they're protesting is the violence, but they're also demanding broader access to abortion. I mean, you saw people with signs on the streets in these protests saying legal abortion now. And while sometimes it was difficult to discern exactly what the specific policy agenda was, it was clear that what was on their mind was access to abortion

without facing criminal penalties. And how did these protests and all this public activism actually help this movement accomplish its goals? One of the most obvious things it does is that it puts this issue on the national agenda. And it makes abortion and women's rights in general a topic at dinner tables across the country. a topic at dinner tables across the country. And part of the reason is that the women that are protesting are doing so in a really visible way. They're occupying federal buildings. They're occupying congresses. They're smashing things. They're putting graffiti on federal property. They're demanding that lawmakers listen to them. You know, this is a major turn of events in Mexico where you didn't really see this level of street protests from women ever before.

And one of the things that this does is it changes the climate inside the country and the way that people look at the issues that these women are talking about. And soon enough, you start to see states begin to take up the issue of abortion in a new way. So three more states over the last two or three years have decriminalized abortion, in part because of the activism of this movement. So this ruling from the Mexican Supreme Court,

which decriminalized abortion, sounds like a huge achievement for this feminist movement. Yes, for sure. It is a milestone for the movement, but it comes in the context of a building backlash, specifically to the issue of making abortion legal. And as opponents are gathering steam to really fight this ruling. We'll be right back. natalie you said that opponents of abortion in mexico are gearing up to fight this supreme court ruling what do you mean, at the most basic level, this ruling didn't actually immediately, automatically decriminalize abortion across the country. Mexico has a federal system just like the U.S.,

and these laws are really handled at the state level. And most states, 28 out of 32, still have laws on the books that make abortion a crime. In order for that to change, activists either need to challenge those in the states or state legislatures need to change those laws on their own. And there's a really good chance that abortion opponents are going to mount a battle to prevent these things from happening. So the fight to get these laws off the books is probably going to be a long one. And it's not even the only hurdle to actually implementing this ruling across Mexico. What are the other hurdles? Well, there's a real cultural resistance

to abortion becoming legal in Mexico. I mean, this is a predominantly Catholic country in which a majority of people, 53% of Mexicans, still oppose making abortion legal, which is what decriminalization does. And I mean, more broadly, the surge in feminist protests has been met with a lot of skepticism in Mexico. One poll showed that the vast majority of Mexicans were actually opposed to those demonstrations. And then at the highest levels of government, you have a Mexican president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who ran on a leftist platform, but who's also really religious and whose base is a working class, often socially conservative Mexican voter. And so he has not come out strongly one way or the other on the Supreme Court ruling on abortion.

He's been careful not to inflame any of those deep tensions that still exist in Mexican society. So you're sketching a picture that sounds like in some ways the mirror image of the abortion picture in the U.S., where you have a majority of people who support the right of women to have abortions, and you have this sort of well-organized minority group that has successfully used the courts to restrict that right. And in Mexico, you have the opposite. You have a popular majority who oppose legalized abortion and this, you know, well-organized women's rights movement that has used the courts to expand access. That's exactly right. But, you know, beyond the courts and the broader public, there's something deeper going on in Mexico, which is that this cultural

conservatism around abortion extends to the medical community as well. These debates are playing out in hospitals. Right. I'm thinking about Martha, the woman whose story you told us earlier, and the nurse who forced her to sit in the maternity ward and watch all of those mothers with their newborns. Yes, that's exactly right. And that's a perspective that's not uncommon, experts say, within the medical community in Mexico. A lot of medical professionals, doctors and nurses, refuse to perform abortions. And that's partly related to their medical training. Experts say that medical education in Mexico doesn't often include extensive teaching on how to perform safe abortions. And so you have some doctors and nurses who believe that abortion is morally wrong. there is a backlash within some pockets of the medical community to the idea that they would be required to be involved in abortion care at all. And so the question becomes, now with this new

Supreme Court ruling that has said abortion is no longer a crime, will these doctors and nurses who are opposed agree to perform the procedure or will they say no? Right. You can legalize abortion all you want, but if you don't actually have doctors and nurses who are willing to perform those procedures, women aren't necessarily going to be able to get them. Yes, exactly. And this is actually something that we have seen in Latin America before. In Argentina, which legalized abortion in December 2020, there are a lot of doctors who continue to refuse to actually perform the procedure. They have registered as conscientious objectors. That's something they can do. And that's made access to abortion increasingly difficult, even in a country that just legalized it. And that issue, that possibility is something

that the Mexican Supreme Court is addressing head on. They discussed on Monday, and they're going to continue discussing the question of whether there should be limits on a doctor's right to refuse to perform abortions on moral grounds. One of the things they're considering is whether to require public hospitals to have some medical professionals on staff who are willing to perform the procedure. They're also considering whether to prohibit medical professionals from harassing or discriminating against women who want to have abortions or from trying to persuade them against it. It seems like the court is saying if the goal is to ensure that women have access to legal abortions,

maybe it's not enough to just decriminalize abortion. Maybe you actually have to take some steps to ensure that women can actually get them. Yes, that's exactly right. This ruling on conscientious objection will probably ultimately determine just how widely available abortion is in practice. But still, even if you put limits on conscientious objection, you can legislate about up to there, right? I mean, what women who want to get abortions in Mexico face goes way beyond even just their experience inside of hospitals. I mean, they often live in communities that are really religiously conservative in which this procedure is seen as a moral wrong by their

family, by their neighbors. And so, you know, changing that is a goal of the feminist movement now. They see that as the next frontier in this fight. I'm struck that this Mexican court ruling came shortly after this Texas law that restricts abortion after six weeks that was held up by our own Supreme Court and that has led some people to speculate that American women, maybe women in Texas who live close to the border, could actually find themselves going to Mexico to get the abortion services that they can't access in their own state. But from what you're describing, it sounds like that's a pretty remote possibility, at least in the near term. Yes, that's right. The future of abortion access in Mexico, that's something that's going to be

decided over months and years, not weeks, right? But you do have the distinct possibility that in Texas, where a new law essentially bans abortions after six weeks, would have more restrictive abortion laws on the books than Mexico, where the Supreme Court has signaled that it would approve abortions up to 12 weeks into a pregnancy. And what about the implications for other countries in Latin and South America? Could this Mexican Supreme Court ruling have implications for them as they consider the future of abortion in their own countries? Yes, almost without a doubt, this ruling is going to have broad implications across Latin America. Colombia's constitutional court will soon take up the issue of whether to decriminalize abortion

beyond a couple of narrow exceptions. And so this ruling in Mexico is expected to be looked at there. And just more broadly, symbolically speaking, this is a really big deal in Latin America. Mexico is now on the road to becoming the most populous Latin American country to allow the procedure. So that may spark renewed efforts in countries where it remains illegal to fight that. And it also may spark a backlash. You may see renewed efforts by opponents to try to dig in and hold the line in places where the laws could change. So it is without a doubt a major moment across this hemisphere, and it really remains to be seen how it's going to play out.

So where does all this leave women in Mexico like Martha? Did she tell you what her reaction was to the ruling? She felt relief. Martha told me that when the ruling was handed down, she was elated, honestly. I mean, she knows this is the beginning of efforts to broaden abortion access across the country. Like everyone else here, she knows that there is a lot that remains to be done on both sides of the issue. Natalie, thank you. Thanks, Kevin. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today.

On Wednesday morning, it appeared that California's Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, was on course to remain in power, with opponents of recalling and replacing him, leading over supporters by a wide margin. Voter turnout was high. At least twice as many people cast ballots in this recall as they did in California's last recall back in 2003. That year, Democratic Governor Gray Davis was ousted and replaced by a Republican, Arnold Schwarzenegger. a Republican, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

And the intensive care units of hospitals in the American South are running dangerously low on space because of surging COVID-19 infections. One in four hospitals there now report that more than 95% of their ICU beds are occupied. That's up from one in 10 hospitals in June. Today's episode was produced by Soraya Shockley, Rob Zipko, Chelsea Daniel, and Michael Simon-Johnson. It was edited by M.J. Davis-Lynn, engineered by Chris Wood,

and contains original music by Dan Powell and Marian Lozano. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landverk of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bilboro. See you tomorrow.