What’s happening with women’s rights to choose in Mexico?

Original text by Francisca Daniela. 

In this pandemic year, the decriminalisation of abortion was rejected in Puebla, Hidalgo, San Luis Potosí, Guanajuato, Aguascalientes and Quintana Roo, while in Oaxaca, even though we won there, it’s still not necessarily free and in Mexico City, access to legal abortion was hindered by budget cuts.
 
Over these last two years, under a so-called “progressive government”, we haven’t been able to properly access our sexual and reproductive rights, much less a comprehensive sexual education at all educational levels, not even free and unrestricted access to contraception as needed.
 
An example of this is the misogynistic declarations of the mayoress Célida Teresa López Cárdenas, who’s running for re-election in Morena in Hermosillo (Sonora), who called the feminists fighting for their right to choose, “morons.” This shows us that this is a woman who oppresses other women through patriarchal mandates that seek to control our right to planned motherhood and deny us access to a full and satisfying sex life. No more of this retrograde nonsense!
 
The pandemic coupled with patriarchal oppression will not stop our fight.
 
In this year of public health crisis, young, working women have faced an increase in unwanted pregnancies, a consequence of the lack of free and unrestricted contraception, as well as sexual violence in and out of the home, meaning women and people who can get pregnant are left without the ability to exercise our right to choose.
 
In 2019, the legal termination of pregnancy was approved in the Congress of Oaxaca, becoming the second body after Mexico City, where we wrested it from the parliament. However, legal abortion in a safe and free manner has not yet been achieved.
 
During this pandemic year, decriminalisation of abortion was rejected in Puebla, Hidalgo, San Luis Potosí, Guanajuato, Aguascalientes and Quintana Roo.
 
Meanwhile, in Mexico City, in this past year alone, 8784 legal abortions were carried out in contrast with 15,241 in 2019 according to data provided by the capital’s Ministry of Health. These are figures that show how access to legal termination of pregnancy has been impeded by the extreme crisis in the healthcare sector, leading to the traffic light system of restrictions . This is without taking into account that, for this year, the lockdown due to the pandemic is expected to result in 145,000 unwanted pregnancies, on top of those that already occur each year in women between the ages of 15 and 49.
 
Abortion – yes or no?
 
Constitutional reforms of the states, which were approved after the decriminalisations in Mexico City and Oaxaca, promote “the protection of life from conception”, reducing women to just a uterus, as if they’re merely incubators; reproductive machines, where a part of their bodies becomes a person with supposed “human rights” which contradict the rights of the woman.
 
Is the product of conception a living person or simply a living organism, like cells or other components of a human being?
 
The discussion isn’t limited to science, it extends to religion. The first article of the constitution talks about people and the human rights they have, and there is no reference to living organisms. A person, in legal terms, is a born human being, not an unborn one. A born human is the living being that comes out of its mother’s womb, and its first year of life is complete 365 days after birth, not 12 months after being conceived. Not even the Catholic church baptises foetuses in the mother’s womb, much less embryos.
 
Nor does the federal constitution, or the international agreements signed by Mexico, state that an embryo or a foetus is an individual endowed with legal capacity.
 
Those that are born, however, do have rights. By that token, a woman can’t surrender her fundamental rights for the sake of protecting the supposed rights of an unborn entity, but she does have rights over her own body and, in this case, over her pregnancy. If she so wishes, she can make sure that it develops in the best conditions possible or she can abort it.
 
Andrea D’Atri, founder of the international women’s and sexual diversity group Bread and Roses, tell us that the question, “Are you in favour of or against abortion?”, excludes any reflection and ignores the complexity of the issue. She adds that what the debate should actually be about is the right to an abortion that isn’t done in secret.
 
Over the course of history, since time immemorial, women have been voluntarily ending their pregnancies in many different ways, despite knowing that they were risking their own lives. This is because when women who didn’t choose to be mothers fall pregnant, they are faced with the question of whether to end the pregnancy or not, and many of them choose to abort. For this reason, we have to change the question from, “Are you in favour of or against abortion?” Abortion is a reality and our opinion on it doesn’t change the fact that it exists! It happens. There can be institutions and people in favour of or against it, but abortion is an undeniable fact because, when women don’t want to or can’t carry on with their pregnancies, they don’t abide by principals, codes or institutions, whether legal or religious.
 
Therefore, keeping abortion illegal only serves to contribute to a million dollar business of large private clinics. It makes it a privilege afforded only to women of the monied classes while others will continue dying as a result of these backstreet abortions which, in some cases, are performed in unsanitary conditions that lead to infections, haemorrhages, uterine perforations… Or else, women get themselves in debt to a private abortion business, paying huge sums of money that us working class women don’t have, just to access the procedure and come out of it alive.
 
Free and legal abortion: a class issue
 
Every time that Congress rejects legal abortion, they’re forcing working women to bandage their bodies up so that the pregnancy isn’t noticeable because, even if it is a wanted pregnancy, it could get them sacked or stop them from finding work.
 
And those who don’t have access to social security, how can they anticipate risks to their health during pregnancy? For example, when a woman is suffering from malnutrition, it can lead to anaemia which, when combined with excessive working hours during pregnancy, can be lethal or cause birth defects. Conversely, issues with obesity can cause high-risk pregnancies which can lead to pre-eclampsia, hypertension and even diabetes in the baby. How can these acute problems in women be prevented if nutrition is not a priority for governments or employers, despite the fact that it’s a right in the same way that health is?
 
Not to mention those who experience miscarriages on factory production lines as a result of strenuous working hours, or those who are anxious about a new pregnancy because they can’t support their already sizeable families. And what about those who can’t afford childcare? How can they access the right to planned and wanted motherhood?
 
What alternative do we have?
 
All this has been exacerbated by the difficult economic situation that has worsened during the public health crisis. So, we should fight on, taking a lesson from the marea verde in Argentina, with a strong, nationwide women’s movement, taking to the streets to fight for all of our rights to choose, not just those who have financial power. We need to conquer and win the right to free, safe and legal abortion from the state: access for all, especially for poor women, working women and young women.
 
And we can achieve this by strengthening the organisation in schools, workplaces, neighbourhoods. We shouldn’t trust that institutions will grant this because of their good will; they’ve demonstrated that they’re the same institutions that perpetuate negligence and impunity in cases of disappearances and murders of women. They’re the same institutions that kill us, as we saw recently in Tulum when police restrained a migrant woman, Victoria Esperanza.
 
Pushing forward with this fight for our right to choose also requires confronting the 4T, the right wing and the ultra-conservative sectors, and for this, we need powerful allies to stand with us and support us. Therefore, we call on all those who fight against the precariousness of our lives and against patriarchal violence to join us, because we must all join forces. If we win our rights over our own bodies, we will be better placed to win in other future fights.

Source article: www.laizquierdadiario.mx/Que-pasa-con-el-derecho-a-decidir-de-las-mujeres-en-Mexico


Translated by Molly Shevlin