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The Mexican capital legalized abortion on Tuesday, defying the church but delighting feminists in the world's second-largest Roman Catholic country.

Mexico City lawmakers voted 46 to 19 to pass a leftist-sponsored bill allowing women to abort in the first three months of pregnancy.

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Full story here

Not much in the news ever surprises me.

This did.

[ 25 April 2007: Message edited by: Tommy_Paine ]

I know that its members have been subjected to death threats and worse..ie planned semi-riots at their presentations...for many years.

My eldest daughter is living in the Republic of Ireland right now, and she tells me the church doesn't have the influence on politics that it once enjoyed.

And since this is the feminist forum, we should not forget that, once again, it is the women there that we should be learning from.

Standing up to death threats in Mexico. There are few of us so courageous.

[ 25 April 2007: Message edited by: Tommy_Paine ]

That must mean cities have a huge amount of self-governing authority in Mexico.

Both in Canada and the US, it took the federal government, as well as the supreme court in both countries, to make this happen.

Yet it doesn't seem to be necessary in Mexico. That's the first time I have heard of a city having that degree of jurisdictional authority over an issue like this.

I imagine this will mean abortion services will be accessible now in that city, but not in other cities, unless they too change their rules.

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Originally posted by Steppenwolf Allende:
Just question here: it's the actual city council that voted to legalize abortion.

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Originally posted by Michelle:
Wow. That's huge! Hopefully this means the right will start to be recognized in other areas of the country as well.

Keep your church off of my body!

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M.Gregus: In Canada, isn't abortion covered under criminal law, which makes it a federal matter? I wonder how in Mexico it becomes a matter of municipal jurisdiction.

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Abortion is not a crime in Canada. Canada is one of the few countries in the world that has NO criminal law restricting abortion at all. It is treated as a medically necessary procedure, covered under health legislation.

Canada's heroic protagonist for the rights of women, Dr. Henry Morgentaler, played a fundamental role in the struggle and deserves the eternal thanks of all those Canadians who support the rights of women. May his name live forever in Canadian history.

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One person who hated the new law was Dr. Henry Morgentaler, a family physician from Montreal, and a Polish survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. Dr. Morgentaler had lobbied for a change to the old law back in 1967, stating that women had a basic right to abortion, that it was not just a privilege. After the publicity, a parade of women started to show up at Dr. Morgentaler's office, pleading for an abortion. At first, he refused -- I'm so sorry, I can't help you, he would say -- It's a crime, I might have to go to jail. But after awhile, Dr. Morgentaler started to feel like a coward and a hypocrite. Finally, after hearing about one too many terrible deaths from illegal abortion, he decided to act. He began to provide abortions to women in his office. Dr. Morgentaler's conscience felt better, but now he was an outlaw. Even with the liberalized abortion law, he was still an outlaw, because abortions were only supposed to be performed in hospitals, with the permission of three doctors.

In 1973, Morgentaler publicly declared that he had defied the law by performing 5,000 safe abortions outside hospitals, without the approval of any committee. He even filmed himself performing an abortion and had it shown on television. What happened next changed Canadian jurisprudence forever. He was arrested, then brought to trial three times by the province of Quebec (where he practiced), and three times Quebec juries refused to convict him. The courts were outraged at this rebellion by the juries against the law, because Morgentaler had clearly broken the law, and even boasted about it.

At the first trial, the court simply reversed the acquittal, citing jury error. Morgentaler was sentenced to 18 months in jail, where he suffered a heart attack while in solitary confinement. Also during his prison stay, he was tried on a second set of charges and acquitted again by another jury. There was a political cartoon published at the time that showed a prison guard pushing Dr. Morgentaler's food under the grill and saying, "Congratulations, doctor, you've been acquitted again!"

Morgentaler's ordeal created an uproar in the civil rights community, and resulted in a new federal law that prohibited courts from cancelling a jury verdict. The law was named in honour of Dr. Morgentaler. The government set aside the doctor's first wrongful conviction, but ordered a new trial, at which he was acquitted again. Finally, after serving 10 months in jail, Morgentaler was released. By this time, Quebec had a new government, which decided that the abortion law was unenforceable. They offered Morgentaler freedom from prosecution and dropped all further charges against him.

Meanwhile, a growing abortion rights movement was becoming galvanized by Morgentaler's struggle. Hundreds had mobilized around his legal defence, and his civil disobedience was a major catalyst for the budding feminist movement in Canada. In May, 1970, one year after the new abortion law, the first national feminist protest took place -- the Abortion Caravan. Women travelled over 3,000 miles from Vancouver to Ottawa, gathering numbers as they went. In Ottawa (Canada's capital), the Abortion Caravan held two days of demonstrations. As a finale, 35 women chained themselves to the parliamentary gallery in the House of Commons, closing Parliament for the first time in Canadian history. The Abortion Caravan helped politicize and activate women around the country. One group, the Canadian Alliance to Repeal the Abortion Law, or CARAL, formed in 1974. Today, they are called the Canadian Abortion Rights Action League -- Canada's only national group dedicated to defending abortion rights.

After Morgentaler was finally freed from the threat of criminal prosecutions in his own province of Quebec, he decided to challenge the law in other provinces. With the help of CARAL and other women's groups, he spent the next 15 years opening and running abortion clinics across Canada, in clear violation of the law. Two of his clinics were raided by police, and Dr. Morgentaler, along with other doctors, was charged with "conspiracy to procure a miscarriage". At the 1984 jury trial, everyone was acquitted -- Morgentaler's fourth acquittal! Unfortunately, Canadian governments and courts are very slow learners. The government appealed, the appeal court squashed the acquittal, and a new trial was ordered yet again. Now it was Dr. Morgentaler's turn to appeal -- to the Supreme Court of Canada. Finally, on January 28, 1988, the Supreme Court handed down an extraordinary ruling. Canada's abortion law was declared unconstitutional, in its entirety. They tossed it out. Dr. Morgentaler's struggle was over, his actions and principles were vindicated, and all Canadian women now had the promise of complete reproductive freedom.

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Anyway, back to Mexico. Abortion law in Mexico is covered at the State level, not only the Federal level. However, Mexico City is like Washington, D.C. in the USA in the sense that it is not a state. It is a Federal District or something like that.

There are, however, gigantic numbers of illegal abortions in Mexico and, undoubtedly, many women die as a result of these. The new law will, hopefully, reduce the carnage and set an example for other states in Mexico to follow suit.

No doubt the anti-abortionists will threaten violence there, just as they did and have done in our own country.

[ 25 April 2007: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

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Originally posted by N.Beltov:
No doubt the anti-abortionists will threaten violence there, just as they did and have done in our own country.

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Originally posted by N.Beltov:
i was referring to the kind of violence like the attempt to murder Winnipeg doctor Jack Fainman in 1997.

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Yah, I knew whatcha meant. I was just thinking, though, that if abortion is legalized, they threaten (and do) violence like you're talking about. But, even when it's illegal, they are perpetuating violence.

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Originally posted by Sven:
"Threaten" violence? By keeping abortion illegal, they are perpetuating violence every day.

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Follow up question: Can one be a feminist and be against abortion?

[ 05 May 2007: Message edited by: Phrillie ]

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Originally posted by Tommy_Paine:
Maybe they learned a thing or two from us. Didn't the people of Quebec throw off the influence of the Catholic Church during the Queit Revolution?

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Mexico beat Quebec to the punch on anticlericalism by half a century. They established that tradition in the Revolution, under Zapata.

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Originally posted by Tommy_Paine:
My eldest daughter is living in the Republic of Ireland right now, and she tells me the church doesn't have the influence on politics that it once enjoyed.

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This is true. I was in Eire last spring, and during my visit, the government legalized gay marriage. The church said nothing and the population as a whole rose in a huge wave of apathy.

[ 05 May 2007: Message edited by: Ken Burch ]

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Originally posted by Ken Burch:
... and the population as a whole rose in a huge wave of apathy.

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