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The Supreme Court’s decision to legalise the procedure across all 32 states follows a growing trend throughout the region, which is renowned for its deeply conservative values.
On Wednesday, Mexico’s Supreme Court unanimously ordered that abortion be removed from the federal penal code across all 32 states, in a historic decision welcomed by women’s rights groups throughout the country.
The ruling will mean access to the procedure for millions, an extension of a growing trend in Latin America known as the ‘green wave.’
In recent years, this movement – which has seen feminist campaigners region-wide challenge societies plagued by hostile attitudes towards women’s bodies – has brought about a string of legal victories for reproductive rights.
Following in the footsteps of Colombia, Uruguay, and Argentina, Mexico’s Supreme Court said the denial of the possibility of terminating a pregnancy ‘violated the human rights of women and people with the capacity to gestate’ and announced that the federal public health service and all federal health institutions will now be required to offer abortion to anyone who requests it.
It could also result in the exoneration of people who have been convicted of abortion-related crimes in the past, which sets a precedent for adaptation across a historically conservative region, long-permeated with stringent abortion laws that, in some cases, have led to incarceration for those violating them.
‘No woman or pregnant person, nor any health worker, will be able to be punished for abortion,’ said Rebeca Ramos, executive director of GIRE, which filed an injunction last year against the Mexican regulation from 1931 criminalising the procedure.
