Mexico’s Supreme Court decriminalizes abortion nationwide
Mexico’s Supreme Court decriminalized abortion nationwide Wednesday, two years after ruling that abortion was not a crime in one northern state.
That earlier ruling had set off a grinding process of decriminalizing abortion state by state. Last week, the central state of Aguascalientes became the 12th state to decriminalize the procedure. Judges in states that still criminalize abortion will have to take account of the top court’s ruling.
The Supreme Court wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that it had decided that “the legal system that criminalized abortion in the Federal Penal Code is unconstitutional, (because) it violates the human rights of women and people with the ability to gestate.”
The court’s sweeping decision Wednesday comes amid a trend in Latin America of loosening restrictions on abortion, even as access has been limited in parts of the United States. Some American women were already seeking the help of Mexican abortion activists to obtain the pills used to end their pregnancies.
