Mexico’s Supreme Court decriminalizes abortion nationwide raising possibility US citizens will cross the border to seek terminations

• Supreme Court ruling comes two years after abortion was decriminalized in a single northern state
• Ruling had set off a grinding process of decriminalizing abortion state by state
• Now all states will be forced to take account of the top court’s decision

Mexico’s Supreme Court decriminalized abortion nationwide Wednesday, two years after ruling that abortion was not a crime in one northern state.

That earlier ruling had set off a grinding process of decriminalizing abortion state by state. 

Last week, the central state of Aguascalientes became the 12th state to decriminalize the procedure. Judges in states that still criminalize abortion will have to take account of the top court’s ruling.

The court announced on social media today ‘that the legal system that penalizes abortion in the Federal Penal Code is unconstitutional, since it violates the human rights of women and people with the capacity to gestate.’ 

FILE – A woman holds a banner reading in Spanish, ‘Legal, safe, and free abortion’ as abortion rights protesters demonstrate in front of the National Congress on the ‘Day for Decriminalization of Abortion in Latin America and the Caribbean,’ in Mexico City, Sept. 28, 2020. Mexico’s Supreme Court on Wednesday, Sept. 6, 2023, has decriminalized abortion nationwide. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell, File)

The court’s sweeping decision comes amid a trend in Latin America of loosening restrictions on abortion, even as access has been limited in parts of the United States. 

Mexico City was the first Mexican jurisdiction to decriminalize abortion 15 years ago.

The Information Group for Chosen Reproduction, known by its Spanish initials as GIRE, said the court decided that the portion of the federal penal code that criminalized abortion no longer has any effect.

‘No woman or pregnant person, nor any health worker will be able to be punished for abortion,’ the non-governmental organization said in a statement.

The impact also means that the federal public health service and any federal health institution must offer abortion to anyone who requests it, GIRE said.

The court ordered that the crime of abortion be removed from the federal penal code.

With some 100 million Catholics, Mexico is the largest predominantly Catholic country after Brazil. The Catholic Church opposes all forms of abortion procedures.

Hundreds of mostly poor Mexican women have been prosecuted for abortion, while at least several dozen remain jailed.

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