By Matthew Cullinan Hoffman
MEXICO CITY, August 22, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In the days leading up to an historic ruling on the constitutionality of abortion, one of the primary arguments presented by pro-abortion forces has fallen apart.
The argument, advanced by the government of Mexico City, is that the city’s abortion legalization ordinance is necessary to prevent the deaths of thousands of women annually due to "unsafe abortions".
The city government’s claim, however, was shattered by data submitted to the Supreme Court last week, which shows that only eight women died in Mexico City as a result of abortions in 2006, when the procedure was illegal. It is not known how many of those abortions were provoked, and how many were miscarriages. The statistics were produced by Mexico City’s health department.
Approximately 21 million people live in the nation’s Federal District, the area covered by the law.
The official statistics from Mexico City contradict statistics advanced by the World Health Organization, Planned Parenthood, and other abortion advocacy groups, which claim that the death rate from illegal, "unsafe" abortions should be several times higher (see https://who.int/reproductive-health/publications/unsafeabortion_2003/ua_estimates03.pdf).
Writing for Cronica, political commentator Guillermo Velasco Barrera notes that this claim was key to the case presented by Mexico City.
"The President of the Human Rights Commission of Mexico City, expressed his confidence that the justices would ratify the constitutionality of the law to ‘avoid thousands of deaths’," writes Velasco Barrera.