A Victory of Sorts for Abortion Rights in a Mexican State

By GINGER THOMPSON August 29, 2000

 groups across Mexico celebrated a victory today against resurgent efforts by conservative politicians and church leaders who had sought to chip away at already limited rights to abortion.

The latest battle was fought in the central state of Guanajuato, where the Legislature passed a bill this month that would have made the state the only one in Mexico to extend the ban on abortions to cases of rape.

Word spread today that the governor would send the bill back to the state congress for further study; the action amounts to a veto, his aides said. The governor, Ramón Martín Huerta of the National Action Party, known as the PAN, is to announce his decision on Tuesday.

Legislators of his own party, which is conservative, narrowly passed the measure earlier this month, inciting furious protests across Mexico by abortion rights advocates, who worried that the measure would move Mexico a step closer to making all abortions illegal. Those same advocates also say the Guanajuato measure is the most alarming example of how the Roman Catholic Church and its right-wing allies in the PAN have been politically energized by the election of the party's Vicente Fox, a native of that state and a Catholic, who will become Mexico's president in December.

"This is a great day for all women in Mexico and a warning to the PAN," said Veronica Cruz Sánchez, 29, who coordinated weeks of protests that helped defeat the abortion measure. "In just a few months, they will hold the office of the presidency, and now it should be clear that they cannot impose their will on the people."

 

Abortion laws differ from state to state in Mexico. However in all 31 states and the Federal District of Mexico City, abortion is generally illegal except in cases of rape.

Several other states permit abortion when pregnancy puts the mother's life at risk, when the fetus appears to be seriously malformed and when a woman has been artificially inseminated without her knowledge.

In the most liberal exception, women in the southern state of Yucatán with at least three children can have legal abortions if they are financially strapped.

While the overwhelming majority of Mexicans call themselves Catholics, intellectuals and the middle class have historically been guardedly secular in their politics. After the revolution at the turn of the last century, the Mexican government passed some of the toughest antichurch laws in the world. Religious schools were closed; foreign priests were deported; church property was seized and Mexican priests were prohibited from voting or even wearing religious garb in public.

Although the laws were not always stringently enforced, they served to limit the Catholic Church's involvement in politics. Then in 1992, under the leadership of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the government amended the Constitution to repeal those restrictions.

Since then, said a church historian, Martaelena Negrete, church leaders have become increasingly outspoken and active.

Just a few weeks after Mr. Fox, a divorcé, became Mexico's president-elect, a Catholic newsletter, Nuevo Criterio, urged him to stand as a moral example to the country and to reconcile with his former wife or to vow never to remarry.

Two weeks ago, Cardinal Norberto Rivera condoned the actions of two vandals who destroyed a drawing called "La Patrona" on display at an exhibit in Guadalajara; it portrayed the Virgin of Guadalupe as a naked blonde bombshell. Cardinal Rivera called the drawing an insult to Catholics and insisted that the church must defend itself against all forms of attack.

Mr. Fox, formerly the governor of Guanajuato, has tried not to get pulled into the political storm in his home state by restating campaign pledges not to initiate any changes in the abortion laws after he takes office, even though he opposes abortion. And he promised not to meddle in the decisions of state legislatures.

Abortion rights proponents called the statements a troubling style of doublespeak that emboldens the most conservative sectors of the National Action Party. Mr. Fox's refusal to speak out for or against the proposals, they worry, has allowed conservative forces within the party to believe that they have tacit approval to proceed.

"This is one of the things that most worried us when Mr. Fox was elected," said Susana Vidales, a spokeswoman for a reproductive rights group called GIRE. "Fox may have different feelings than the ones expressed by the Legislators in Guanajuato, but we knew the most conservative sectors of his party would feel that his triumph was theirs. And groups supported by the church have been empowered."

When asked about the importance of the measure, a legislator from the National Action Party who helped pass it was unable to cite any statistics about abortion or rape. Instead, she said her party's ideology had called them to protect the lives of unborn children more forcefully.

"We understand that a woman who has been raped has suffered a great trauma," said Angelica Patricia Flores, the legislator, who is a mother of two. "What we are trying to prevent is that she suffer another one by having an abortion."

In recent weeks, newspapers have been filled with comments from bishops and priests across the country in support of the measure. In Mexico City on Sunday, as word began to leak that the governor would not sign the measure, Cardinal Rivera said during his homily that "even in the case of a pregnancy that is the result of rape, we must ask the woman to accept the mysterious designs of God."

Such comments have stirred furious reactions from abortion rights advocates. And last week in a political strike back at the Guanajuato measure, the socially liberal mayor of Mexico City signed legislation that legalized abortions in the capital in cases where the mother's life is in danger and the fetus shows serious malformations.

The abortion rights advocates said that because abortion is largely illegal, women are forced to seek clandestine procedures that are not performed by licensed doctors. Death from complications from abortion, according to the National Population Council, is the fourth cause of maternal deaths in Mexico.

"Absolutely no one has indicated they are in favor of abortion, much less as a family planning measure," said the Mexico City mayor, Rosario Robles, of the Democratic Revolutionary Party. "Our fight is against death, against the deaths of thousands of women."

But Bishop José G. Martín Rábago, the bishop of Guanajuato's industrial capital, León, said in a recent interview, "There has been a new, clearer consciousness within the church that it has the right to express itself. And so it has changed from a church that was timid, even silent, to one that makes its opinions known."