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Mexico’s Supreme Court Refuses To Decriminalize Abortion

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Mary Margaret Olohan
July 30, 2020 2:16 PM ET

Mexico’s Supreme Court passed up a chance Wednesday to legalize abortion throughout the country.

Four out of five Supreme Court justices voted against upholding an injunction that would have decriminalized abortion during the first 12 weeks of a pregnancy, the BBC reported. One justice said upholding the injunction would “greatly overstep the constitutional powers of this Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation,” according to the BBC.

The case revolved around a Veracruz law prohibiting abortion except in cases of rape, if the mother’s life is in danger, or if the unborn baby is malformed, Vatican News previously reported.

Abortion is only legal in two out of Mexico’s 32 states, according to the BBC.

Abortion advocates had hoped that the Supreme Court ruling would allow for similar injunctions in other states, increasing abortion access throughout the country, the BBC reported.

“What separates this moment in time from similar moments in U.S. history is that the Justices in Mexico understood that their mandate was not to make new laws and overturn the will of the people, but instead to interpret the law as it was written and commonly understood,” Americans United for Life President & CEO Catherine Glenn Foster said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“The bravery and honesty of the Mexican Supreme Court contrast sharply with the actions of the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade and cases since that have ignored the democratic process in favor of an unfettered ‘right’ to abortion,” she added. “The U.S is still only 1 of 7 nations, of 198 across the globe, that legalizes abortion for any reason after fetal viability. We can learn so much from our brothers and sisters to the South.”

Justice Juan Luis Gonzalez Alcantara Carranca had pushed for the Supreme Court to uphold the ruling, according to Catholic Philly.

“The decisions of the woman during the period of the first 12 weeks of pregnancy … are part of the private sphere that is not subject to the sanctioning power of the state,” Gonzalez wrote in his proposal, the publication reports. “The total prohibition on interrupting a pregnancy — via criminal classification — is a barrier that creates discrimination against women in relation to the right to health.”

But Mexican Catholic bishops had spoken out against expanding abortion ahead of the pivotal ruling.

“We affirm, according to scientific evidence, that human life begins at the moment of conception,” Bishop José Jesús Herrera Quiñones, the bishop of Nuevo Casa Grandes, said in a July 24 statement on behalf of the Commission for Life of the Mexican Bishops’ Conference, according to Vatican News.

“Abortion provides no support for the woman, who can even become a victim in her mother’s womb,” he added.

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