On Wednesday, Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled to decriminalize abortion at the federal level, holding that national laws prohibiting the procedure are unconstitutional. The ruling not only orders that abortion be removed from penal codes, but requires that federal public health institutions offer abortion procedures.
“Today is a day of victory and justice for Mexican women!” Mexico’s National Institute for Women wrote on social media.
The decision comes two years after the court ruled that abortion is not a crime in Coahuila, a state on the Texas border. While that ruling prompted a state-by-state process of decriminalizing the procedure, abortion was still criminalized in twenty Mexican states before the Supreme Court’s decision on Wednesday. These states will now have to abide with the court’s order and decriminalize the procedure.
Former Supreme Court justice Sen. Olga Sánchez Cordero celebrated the ruling, writing on social media that the court’s decision represents a “move towards a more just society, in which the rights of everyone are respected.”
Reproductive rights activists in Latin America have worked to expand abortion rights over the past few years, with success in Argentina in 2020 and Colombia in 2022. “Globally, there is an overwhelming trend towards the liberalization of abortion laws,” the Center for Reproductive Rights notes on its website.
The reforms in Mexico and other Latin American countries contrast significantly with developments in the United States, where the federal Supreme Court ruled last year to overturn abortion protections nationwide. Mexico has since become a safe haven for U.S. residents from Texas and other states who are seeking abortion access.
Verónica Cruz, an abortion rights activist in Mexico, told CNN that her organization, Las Libres, is increasingly receiving calls from concerned Americans who are turning to Mexico for abortion access. “It surprised me that Mexico is going forward, and the United States is going backward,” Cruz said. “I never imagined that.”
In fact, the U.S. is one of only four countries worldwide that have rolled back the legality of abortion. “The devastating regression on abortion rights in the United States makes the country a stark outlier to the global trend toward liberalization,” the Center for Reproductive Rights said in a statement.
Even before the U.S. Supreme Court rolled back the nationwide right to abortion, some Americans were forced to travel to other states — and even out of the country — to access abortion care. The Mexico Supreme Court decision in 2021, which ruled that abortion was not a crime in Coahuila, came just one week after Texas’s “bounty hunter” law took effect. The Texas law, which is currently being challenged in court, prohibits abortions of fetuses with detectable cardiac activity and allows any private citizen to sue Texas abortion providers who violate the law, as well as any person who “aids or abets” an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy.
“Before September we would receive 5-7 American women per month. After September, we received 7-10 per week,” Sandra Cardona, a reproductive rights activist in Mexico who helps run “Red Necesito Abortar,” told CNN. “On the day of the Supreme Court decision, we received 70 messages. And things have continued like that, without slowing down.”
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
Last week, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment. We are presently looking for 143 new monthly donors before midnight tonight.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy