By Cordelia Rizzo
In 2007, Mexico City’s legislature affirmed a woman’s right to choose to terminate her pregnancy during the first trimester. Today, this remains the only pro-choice law in the whole country. In response, conservative congresses in other parts of Mexico have toughened their own anti-abortion laws.
But ordinary Mexicans are just beginning to find out the draconian effects of these laws: Most shockingly, women are being incarcerated for having abortions in Guanajuato, a state in the country’s central highlands. One hundred and sixty women have been investigated for having abortions in the past 10 years in Guanajuato. Nine were sentenced and left free on parole while six of them are doing time in prison. In a few cases, the investigated women, some of them mothers, have been charged with the murder of a family member and given sentences of up to 30 years of imprisonment. Women are being persecuted even for having spontaneous miscarriages. No wonder: A clause establishing that spontaneous miscarriages are not to be punished, present in other state constitutions, is notably missing in Guanajuato’s constitution. The climate is such that even hospitals are reporting women to government authorities, according to Las Libres, a Guanajuato-based NGO, and Human Rights Watch.
This is just the latest and most offensive development in Guanajuato’s legislature’s attempts to disempower women who already face huge barriers to getting access to reproductive health services and education.
Mexico is fairly religious country. While pro-choice followers are certainly few and having an abortion has always been a crime since colonial times, anti-abortion laws have only recently become the touchstone of conservative politics. Most Mexicans believe in exceptions in cases of rape, to save the life of the mother or if there is a high risk of serious birth deformities. Even among those who find the procedure morally wrong, few would condone the incarceration of women who’ve had an abortion.
Upper-class and middle-class women who seek to undergo the procedure attend private clinics in the capital or travel across the border to the United States. Poor women seeking the procedure risk their lives by going to clandestine, and often unsanitary, clinics, drinking abortive potions and even attempting to perform the procedure themselves.
Anticipating a popular backlash, Guanajuato Governor Juan Manuel Oliva Ramírez has declared that the six jailed women may be liberated soon enough. He denies that they have been unfairly incarcerated and insists that women are not being persecuted in his state.
Guanajuato’s politicians and the high church officials in cahoots with them insist that the logic behind the enforcement of the anti-abortion laws is the protection of the right to life and family values at a time when both are endangered by extreme liberalism and moral corruption. But this crusade’s crushing consequences for Mexico’s women prove otherwise.
