(Population Research Institute) — The September 6 headlines in the international press seemed to leave no doubt: the Supreme Court of Mexico had issued a ruling decriminalizing abortion throughout the country. The stories that followed went even further, insisting that the ruling compelled all hospitals to provide abortions and that no doctor who performed an abortion could be punished for doing so.
Who could doubt that the abortion movement had won a great victory in Mexico? After all, the same story was repeated by all the main media players, from CNN, BBC, and the New York Times, to AP, Reuters, and El País in Spain. Not to mention that the entire legion of the worldwide abortion lobby joined the chorus of celebration, to which even the U.N. quickly chimed in.
Don’t fall for the lie.
This media campaign is nothing more than an attempt to manipulate public opinion. It was intended to convince the Mexican people, the majority of whom are pro-life, that the battle is over. That the abortion movement has won such a decisive legal victory that abortion on demand is now the law of the land and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that anyone can do about it.
The goal of these global liars was to so dispirit and demoralize the Mexican pro-life movement – and by extension pro-lifers around the world – that they would simply give up the fight for life. Give up, go home, you have lost.
But a closer look at what just happened in Mexico reveals that nothing could be further from the truth: the issue of abortion is far from closed in Mexico.
Currently the Federal Penal Code considers that abortion violates “the human rights of women and persons with gestational capacity” and therefore criminalizes it.
The ruling that came down from the First Chamber of the Mexican Supreme Court temporarily suspending this provision is called an amparo. An amparo is a temporary order issued while a case is under review.
The case in question was filed by GIRE, Mexico’s leading abortion advocacy group, and asks the Supreme Court to declare that the provision in the Federal Penal Code that punishes those who engage in induced abortion to be unconstitutional. While their case is under review, GIRE – supposedly on behalf of Mexican women, requested the Court to issue the amparo.
In issuing the amparo the First Chamber of the Court violated its own rules.
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First of all, an amparo is only supposed to be issued in response to a request from an injured party which claims that his or her rights have been violated. One cannot make a request for an amparo on behalf of others, yet this is precisely what GIRE did. They filed a request for a writ of amparo on behalf of all “Mexican women.”
In fact, the original trial judges dismissed GIRE’s original case for lack of standing. GIRE is an organization, not an individual, and therefore cannot perform an abortion. Nor is it even in the business of performing abortions. So it has not been, and cannot be harmed by laws criminalizing abortion.
In other words, GIRE clearly does not qualify for an amparo. Yet the Supreme Court, violating its own rules, claimed that GIRE is “a person suffering harm” from the pro-life provisions of the Federal Criminal Code and issued the amparo anyway. It is currently reviewing the constitutionality of these provisions, which are Articles 330, 331, 332, 333 and 334 of the Federal Criminal Code.
Part of the impetus for violating Mexican law in this way surely comes from north of the border. Since Joe Biden arrived at the White House, the Mexican Supreme Court has made a sharp left turn. Note that Vice President Kamala Harris attended the inauguration of Mexican President Andres Lopez Obrador in June 2021. Shortly thereafter, the White House announced that the Biden administration and Lopez Obrador had signed an agreement “to relaunch the High Level Economic Dialogue (HLED)” between the two countries.
At the same time, the Mexican Supreme Court swung into action, striking down state laws limiting abortion. On September 7 the axe fell on two articles of the Penal Code of the State of Coahuila (Section II articles 196 and 224) that criminalized abortion. Then, two days later, the Court ordered annulled Art. 4(a) of the Sinaloa State Constitution which protected life from conception. (“From the moment an individual is conceived, he or she enters under the protection of the corresponding law, until his or her death,” the law had read.)
What sort of financial incentives were offered by the abortion zealots in the Biden administration in return for these actions? If past history is any guide, they were substantial.
The amparo also violates the Mexican Supreme Court’s earlier rulings. In 2007, in a case involving the decriminalization of abortion in the Federal District (Mexico City), the Court decided to return the issue to the states. In a ruling similar to the Dobbs ruling overturning Roe v. Wade in the U.S., the Court decreed that each Mexican state should decide for itself at what point in pregnancy to defend human life and whether or not to criminalize abortion.
In the years following, the pro-life movement won victory after victory at the state level. By this year, no fewer than 23 of Mexico’s 32 states had passed laws protecting life from conception.
But in recent years, the Mexican Supreme Court has changed direction. By 2021, pro-life leaders like Rodrigo Ivan Cortes, president of the National Front for the Family, were increasingly alarmed by this radical shift in the Court’s rulings. As Cortes pointed out, the same judges sit on the court, but they are now issuing rulings that “do not respect or conform to their own previous rulings.”
It is clear that the Biden administration, and other international aid groups, are pouring money into Mexico’s pro-abortion movement. Infotecnia reports that the 10 main pro-abortion groups in the country have received more than US185 million over the past year, and that 70 percent of this money comes from abroad. Most of this goes to Mexfam – a branch of the IPPF that is a favorite of USAID, to a front group called Católicas por el Derecho a Decidir (Catholics for the Right to Decide), and to GIRE, the plaintiff in the current lawsuit.
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Despite these tens of millions of dollars in funding, despite the abortion pressure coming from the Biden administration, and despite the willingness of the international press to lie about what is going on in Mexico, abortion remains illegal in that country. The amparo illegally issued to GIRE only applies to GIRE. And it does not provide any legal grounds for forcing hospitals to perform abortions or to sanction doctors who do not want to engage in such deadly acts.
But the ever-devious abortion movement has one final trick up its sleeve. The Mexican abortion movement is now holding up the country of Argentina as a model. Similar to Mexico, Argentina’s Supreme Court had ruled that, in one particular case of one particular abortion in one particular province, the abortionist should not be punished.
The abortion movement in Argentina then deliberately misled the public by saying that the Court had legalized abortion throughout the entire country.
The Mexican abortion movement, with the apparent complicity of the Mexican Supreme Court, seems to be using the same deceitful tactic. They are trumpeting that “abortion is now legal” in all of Mexico when the Court said no such thing.
The battle now moves to the Mexican Congress, which is expected to consider whether or not abortion should be decriminalized. And here Mexican pro-lifers will stand and fight.
We at PRI will stand with them.
Reprinted with permission from the Population Research Institute.