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In what’s being referred to by local news media as a “historic” action, Mexico’s oldest and most prestigious medical association made a bold public statement last week supporting sexual and reproductive rights and the decriminalization of abortion.

“The National Mexican Academy of Medicine (ANMM) expresses its concern over the current state of the sexual and reproductive health of women,” the statement opens, emphasizing particular concern for the most vulnerable—women at the beginning of their reproductive lives as well as those at the end, and women who are marginalized on the basis of ethnicity, geography, education, and social and economic class.

The two-and-a-half page statement featured on the association’s website comes in the wake of a series of reforms to state constitutions recognizing life from conception. Since elective first trimester abortion was legalized in the federal district of Mexico City in April 2007, 16 of Mexico’s 31 states have reformed their constitutions to criminalize abortion.

In the statement, the Academy notes its ethical responsibility to help shape public health policies in order to serve the greater good. In addition to directly stating its “decided position in favor of the free reproductive choice of women and of couples,” the academy explains the detriment that criminalizing abortion has on public health: “To obligate women to have an unwanted child violates their right to free procreation, established as a guarantee to individuals in our country. Criminalization, instead of eliminating abortions, only promotes a lack of safety, increasing in a disproportionate way the deaths and complications among the poorest and most marginalized women.”

The statement further urges that any intervention in public health should be in accordance with the human rights principles set forth in the Mexican constitution and in the international agreements to which the country subscribes.

“As a whole, these rights irrefutably sustain the right that all women have to the self-determination of their health, as well as to a freely chosen motherhood.”

The importance of the ANMM’s statement is further supported by similar proclamations issued by the Mexican Academy of Sciences (AMC) and the Mexican Society of Public Health (SMSP) earlier this year. In an effort to counter the strong ideological language of the constitutional reforms, all three professional associations seek to ground the abortion debate in medical evidence: that criminalizing abortion breeds unsafe abortion, and unsafe abortion threatens the well-being of women and society as a whole.

Dr. Raffaela Schiavon, director of Ipas Mexico, warmly welcomed  the statements by three of the most respected and recognized academic and scientific organizations in the country — organizations that also serve as official consultants for the Federal Ministry of Health. “It is essential,” she noted, “that public health problems be solved with public health policies, based on scientific evidences. It is essential as well that the medical community adopts a human rights perspective in order to address these problems.”

The AMC, which issued its statement in January, raises concern over the “unacceptable regressive phenomena that in recent months has been undermining political rationality in the country...” The criminalization of abortion, it reads, is, at the legal level, a violation of the principles of a secular state. At the scientific level, it continues, the amendments turn a “multi-faceted and complex modern concept of what is a human being” into an “overly simplistic, arbitrary, and uninformed definition of life.” Finally, the academy argues that at the practical level, the reforms are an “insidious maneuver with the potential to harshly and obtusely penalize the women of Mexico and the doctors involved, and as an underlying objective, to establish a method of legislation that does not consider the advances of science.”

The statement issued by SMSP lists several concerns for the public health of the country, including the spread of diseases like H1N1 and dengue, the use of tobacco and drugs, and environmental contamination. But the issue that tops the list states “that in terms of reproductive health a woman’s free decision should be respected, given that this is the fundamental element for solving the problems of Public Health related to reproduction.”

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For more information, contact media@ipas.org