Abortion In Mexico

Mexico is at the center of the global battle over abortion. In 2007, a watershed reform legalized the procedure in the national capital, making it one of just three places across Latin America where it was permitted at the time. Abortion care is now available on demand and free of cost through a pioneering program of the Mexico City Ministry of Health, which has served hundreds of thousands of women. At the same time, abortion laws have grown harsher in several states outside the capital as part of a coordinated national backlash. In this book, Elyse Ona Singer argues that while pregnant women in Mexico today have options that were unavailable just over a decade ago, they are also subject to the expanded reach of the Mexican state and the Catholic Church over their bodies and reproductive lives. By analyzing the moral politics of clinical encounters in Mexico City's public abortion program, Lawful Sins offers a critical account of the relationship among reproductive rights, gendered citizenship, and public healthcare. With timely insights on global struggles for reproductive justice, Singer reorients prevailing perspectives that approach abortion rights as a hallmark of women's citizenship in liberal societies.

In this history of childbirth and contraception in Mexico, Nora E. Jaffary chronicles colonial and nineteenth-century beliefs and practices surrounding conception, pregnancy and its prevention, and birth. Tracking Mexico's transition from colony to nation, Jaffary demonstrates the central role of reproduction in ideas about female sexuality and virtue, the development of modern Mexico, and the growth of modern medicine in the Latin American context. The story encompasses networks of people in all parts of society, from state and medical authorities to mothers and midwives, husbands and lovers, employers and neighbors. Jaffary focuses on key topics including virginity, conception, contraception and abortion, infanticide, "monstrous" births, and obstetrical medicine. Her approach yields surprising insights into the emergence of modernity in Mexico. Over the course of the nineteenth century, for example, expectations of idealized womanhood and female sexual virtue gained rather than lost importance. In addition, rather than being obliterated by European medical practice, features of pre-Columbian obstetrical knowledge, especially of abortifacients, circulated among the Mexican public throughout the period under study. Jaffary details how, across time, localized contexts shaped the changing history of reproduction, contraception, and maternity.

In From Back Alley to the Border, Alicia Gutierrez-Romine examines the history of criminal abortion in California and the role abortion providers played in exposing and exploiting the faults in California's anti-abortion statute throughout the twentieth century. Focused on the patients who used this underground network and the physicians who facilitated it, Gutierrez-Romine provides insight into the world of illegal abortion from the 1920s through the 1960s, including regular physicians as well as women and African American abortionists, and the investigations, scandals, and trials that surrounded them. During the 1930s the Pacific Coast Abortion Ring, a large, coast-wide, and comparatively safe abortion syndicate, became the target of law enforcement agencies, forcing those needing abortions across the border into Mexico and ushering in an era of Tijuana "abortion tourism" in the early 1950s. The movement south of the border ultimately compelled the California Supreme Court to rule its abortion statute "void for vagueness" in People v. Belous in 1969--four years before Roe v. Wade. Gutierrez-Romine presents the first book focused on abortion on the West Coast and the U.S.-Mexico border and provides a new approach to studying how providers of illegal abortions and their clients navigated this underground network. In the post-Dobbs moment, From Back Alley to the Border shows us how little we have learned from history.

It is increasingly implausible to speak of a purely domestic abortion law, as the legal debates around the world draw on precedents and influences of different national and regional contexts. While the United States and Western Europe may have been the vanguard of abortion law reform in the latter half of the twentieth century, Central and South America are proving to be laboratories of thought and innovation in the twenty-first century, as are particular countries in Africa and Asia. Abortion Law in Transnational Perspective offers a fresh look at significant transnational legal developments in recent years, examining key judicial decisions, constitutional texts, and regulatory reforms of abortion law in order to envision ways ahead. The chapters investigate issues of access, rights, and justice, as well as social constructions of women, sexuality, and pregnancy, through different legal procedures and regimes. They address the promises and risks of using legal procedure to achieve reproductive justice from different national, regional, and international vantage points; how public and courtroom debates are framed within medical, religious, and human rights arguments; the meaning of different narratives that recur in abortion litigation and language; and how respect for women and prenatal life is expressed in various legal regimes. By exploring how legal actors advocate, regulate, and adjudicate the issue of abortion, this timely volume seeks to build on existing developments to bring about change of a larger order. Contributors: Luis Roberto Barroso, Paola Bergallo, Rebecca J. Cook, Bernard M. Dickens, Joanna N. Erdman, Lisa M. Kelly, Adriana Lamačková, Julieta Lemaitre, Alejandro Madrazo, Charles G. Ngwena, Rachel Rebouché, Ruth Rubio-Marín, Sally Sheldon, Reva B. Siegel, Verónica Undurraga, Melissa Upreti.

Using extensive interviews, including discussions with heads of state and church, and original research in Kenya, Mexico and Poland, Andrzej Kulczycki examines how cultural history, women's movements, the Catholic Church and transnational influences have shaped abortion policies in those nations and beyond.

Abortion in Mexico examines the social, legal, and judicial condemnation of abortion in Mexico from the early post-contact period through the present day.

Selected rape victim testimonies. -- Impunity for sexual and domestic violence. Sexual and domestic violence: Underreported and underrepresented in government crime estimates - Inadequate legal framework for the prevention and punishment of violence against women: State law and policy on domestic violence ; state law and policy on sexual violence. - Lax implementation of legal standards: Pervasive distrust of rape victim testimony ; Other barriers to reporting rape ; Undue emphasis on reconciliation and mediation ; The cost of justice ; Lack of public services. -- Abortion in Mexico. Legal framework, public debate, and occurrence - Prosecution for illegal abortions. -- Obstructing access to legal abortion after rape. States with no administrative guidelines for abortion after rape: Non-existing or inaccurate information on legal abortions ; Denial that cases of unwanted pregnancy after rape exist ; Aversion to facilitating legal abortion after rape ; Actively discouraging abortion after rape ; No legal abortion for incest and "Estupro" ; Undue delays ; Intimidation in the justice sector. - States with administrative or legal guidelines for abortion after rape: Unduly complicated procedures ; Illegal delays ; Lack of information or biased information ; "Covert" provision of abortion services and continued stigmatization ; Intimidation in the health sector ; Need for accompaniment. - Conscientious objection by medical professionals - Consequences of limited access to abortion after rape. -- International legal standards. International law and violence against girls and women in Mexico - International law and abortion after rape or incest : U.N. Treaty body concern with legal obstacles to abortion after rape or incest ; U.N. Treaty body concern with administrative obstacles to abortion after rape or incest. -- Conclusion. -- Detailed recommendations. To the federal government of Mexico: To the president of Mexico ; To the federal congress ; To the national health ministry ; To the national ministry of the interior. - To state governments and the government of the federal district: To state governors and the head of government for the federal district ; To local congresses and the legislative assembly of the federal district ; To health ministries of the states and the federal district ; To the attorney general offices of the states and the federal district ; To the integrated family service agencies (Sistema para el Desarrollo Integral de la Familia, DIF) of the states and the federal district. -- Acknowledgements.

At a UN General Assembly Special Session in 1999, governments recognised unsafe abortion as a major public health concern, and pledged their commitment to reduce the need for abortion through expanded and improved family planning services, as well as ensure abortion services should be safe and accessible. This technical and policy guidance provides a comprehensive overview of the many actions that can be taken in health systems to ensure that women have access to good quality abortion services as allowed by law.