Advocates celebrate first anniversary of safe abortion in Mexico City

In Mexico today, reproductive rights activists are celebrating the first anniversary of a vote to legalize abortion in the Federal District of Mexico City. On April 24, 2007, a wide margin in the city’s Legislative Assembly passed landmark legislation permitting abortion upon request during the first three months of pregnancy.

The law requires that the Mexico City Ministry of Health provide legal abortion services, free of charge for district residents, to any woman who requests them. It also requires the ministry to increase efforts to prevent unwanted pregnancy with expanded education and health-service programs. However, while the law has successfully improved women’s health in Mexico City, it has also been met with a constitutional challenge.

The legislation went into effect just two days after the vote, and its impact was felt almost immediately. In the first two months after the vote, approximately 700 abortions were performed. After one year, the Mexico City Ministry of Health reported that 7,820 women had received legal abortion services (compared to 66 legal procedures during the four years before the law change). This number includes women from other parts of Mexico, as the new guidelines did not establish a residency requirement, allowing women from other parts of the country to travel to the district to obtain safe abortion services. (However, only district residents are entitled to free services; women from elsewhere pay fees based on a sliding scale.)

A recent survey shows strong support for the new law: 63 percent of those interviewed agree with it, compared with only 26 percent opposed (10 percent did not respond). This is a significant change from just a year ago, when only 46 percent supported the law and 43 percent opposed it (again, 10 percent did not respond).

“The success of this law is due to the crucial combination of legal change, combined with the ready response from the health system—from directors down to the clinical staff—and women who immediately took advantage of the new legal framework,” says Dr. Raffaela Schiavon, director of Ipas Mexico. “The combination of these three elements has made the City of Mexico a historic example for women."

Together with a wide range of partners, Ipas collaborated with the Ministry of Health to implement the new law quickly. They worked together to 1) identify training and equipment needs to strengthen services in the assigned Ministry hospitals, and 2) to determine contents of the guidelines for abortion care, which were issued approximately one week after the law came into effect. As a result, safe abortion care was widely available throughout the federal district.

Prior to the new law, women in Mexico City were disproportionately affected by unsafe abortion. It was the third-leading cause of maternal mortality in the Federal District, compared to the fifth nationwide. According to national hospitalization data, more than 124,000 women were hospitalized in Mexico City for complications from unsafe abortion between 2001 and 2005.

Still, safe abortion in Mexico City may be in jeopardy. While the city health services were working to implement the new law, two federal institutions in Mexico – the Attorney General and the National Commission on Human Rights – have tried to block it, bringing constitutional challenges in the Mexican Supreme Court. The Court began a series of sessions in April to hear briefs from pro- and anti-choice organizations. Ipas and allied organizations prepared for these hearings by developing arguments and materials covering legal, philosophical, medical and social reasons to support Mexico City’s abortion law. Dr. Schiavon will testify before the court at 12:50 EST on April 25.

For more information, contact:
Kirsten Sherk
Senior Associate, Media Relations
e-mail: sherkk@ipas.org
phone: 919.960.5612
fax: 919.929.0258