All countries are changing according to their circumstances. Sometimes they take steps forward on a topic, sometimes back. We are seeing it in the United States. After 50 years of having recognized the right of women to voluntarily terminate a pregnancy, the Supreme Court of that nation finally backed down. On Friday, he ruled that it is up to each of the states of the American Union to legislate on this matter.
Neither slow nor lazy, 26 of the 50 entities announced the prohibition of this right. There will be no more legal abortions. The American conservatives got away with it. For decades they worked to bring judges to the ends of their thinking in the Supreme Court and reverse the historic case Roe vs. Wade that legalized, in 1973, the right of women to voluntarily terminate a pregnancy throughout the United States with minimal government restrictions.
The liberals rested on their laurels and considered the conquest of this right as an irreversible fact. They were wrong.
We Mexicans have a lot to learn from what happened.
Here, unlike in the United States, we are going in the right direction, that is, recognizing the right of women to decide what to do with their bodies. I think that I have always been a liberal on this issue.
And, as I always repeat, it is not that I am in favor of abortion. No way. I think having an abortion is one of the most difficult decisions a woman can make in her life. However, it is up to them, according to her circumstances and convictions, to make such a decision. The State should not get involved in this matter in the first weeks of pregnancy.
This point is essential: when the product of a gestation is already considered as a life to be safeguarded. There is still no medical or legal consensus on this. It is part of the controversy between conservatives and liberals. I, by the way, greatly respect the first ones who do debate with arguments and empirical evidence. So far they haven’t convinced me. The ones you can’t argue with are the “ayatollahs” who insult or quote God.
Leaving aside the issue of the temporality in the legalization of an abortion, whether or not it is at three months of pregnancy, the decision must be made by women in the first weeks. Many will decide not to do so because of their religious convictions and they will be within their rights. Others don’t. Let them decide. It is not up to the State to strictly prohibit it, much less punish it with jail.
That is why I celebrated last year’s decision of the Supreme Court of Justice of our country. In a unanimous vote of ten votes to zero (a judge was absent for personal reasons), the Mexican ministers declared invalid article 196 of the Penal Code of Coahuila for establishing a prison sentence for the woman who voluntarily performed her abortion, or who had an abortion with her consent.
In this way, the Plenary of the Court ruled that the criminalization of the voluntary interruption of a pregnancy is unconstitutional as it violates the right of women and pregnant people to decide. He recognized, yes, that, as time passes, the product of a gestation deserves different protection from the State.
With that resolution, led by Minister President Arturo ZaldĂvar, our Court took a liberal stance, sending the message that women cannot be punished in Mexico for having an abortion or prevent health personnel from assisting them in this operation.
And, as a majority of more than eight votes of the Plenary was reached, the cases of penal norms, present and future, of the states that criminalize abortion in an absolute manner must be considered as unconstitutional. There can be no doubt.
Thanks to the Mexican Supreme Court, almost 50 years after Roe vs. Wade in the United States, a right was recognized for which old and new feminists had been fighting. But, beware, we cannot pass as if nothing happened in the northern neighbor, a country that was always more liberal than ours, but where, now, the conservatives got away with it and achieved a setback. Therefore, the fight must continue. The recognition of a right cannot remain at the level of the Judiciary. At the end of the day, we must continue fighting so that the federal and state congresses legislate this right, in such a way that women throughout the country can have abortions without problems in public and private hospitals, as is the case today in Mexico City.
#Mexico #direction