QUINTANA ROO, March 7, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A sixteen-year-old high school student has accused a high school prefect of seducing and impregnating her, then forcing her to submit to an abortion, according to reports in the Mexican national press.
The girl, who remains unnamed, reportedly says that Víctor Zárate Villanueva, principal of the Gabriela Mistral secondary school in the state of Quintana Roo, began a sexual relationship with her while she was doing community service work in the school’s library. Such work is obligatory for Mexican high school students.
Sources close to the minor told the Vanguardia newspaper that after impregnating her, Zárate and a colleague, ethics professor Nura Montero Medina, approached her family and offered to take her to a clinic for a medical checkup. Instead, they took her to Mérdia, Yucatan, where she was forcibly given an abortion.
The Human Rights Commission of Yucatan has reportedly examined the case and has issued a “cautionary measure,” asking the Subsecretary of Education to remove the two school officials as well as the facility’s director Aurturo Rodríguez, while the case is in process. The Vanguardia reports that the illicit relationship between Zárate and the minor was common knowledge among the school’s staff, according to the commission.
In addition to the statutory rape of a minor and kidnapping, abortion is illegal in virtually all cases in the states of Quintana Roo and Yucatan, as well as all of Mexico’s 31 states. It is only legal in the nation’s Federal District, where a 2007 law permits the killing of the unborn during the first 14 weeks of pregnancy.
Forced abortions of minors by their adult rapists is a common problem in the United States, where children are coerced by their abusers to have abortions in legal clinics. Despite laws requiring pregnancies of minors to be reported to the authorities, a number of investigations have shown that abortion clinic staff regularly neglect to do so, and perform the abortions without asking questions.