Abortion rights gain ground in Latin America

Mexican bishops have threatened legislators, doctors, and women with excommunication. But on Tuesday, the Mexico City assembly is expected to pass a new law legalizing abortions.

If it does, it would put the capital of the world's second largest Catholic nation in the same league with Cuba and Guyana – the only countries in conservative Latin America that allow abortions in the first trimester, as the US does.

A similar bill has been introduced in Mexico's national legislature. If the relaxed abortion laws pass, they would mirror a similar move by Colombia toward partial legalization. Only in increasingly evangelical Christian Nicaragua has the abortion law become stricter. [Editor's note:The original version incorrectly stated which countries have moved toward partial legalization of abortion.]

"We think it's possible this initiative [in Mexico City] could be replicated across the country," says Fernanda Diazdeleon, a lawyer with the nonprofit Information Group on Reproductive Choice in Mexico City.

Yet where Ms. Diazdeleon sees a new panorama for women's rights, Jorge Serrano Limon, the head of the antiabortion group Provida, sees the potential for a country he hardly recognizes. "Today it's abortion; tomorrow it's euthanasia," he says. "It will be a chain that denigrates Mexican society."

Indeed, the country has seen the liberalization of a spate of controversial social issues in recent weeks. Mexico City began offering same-sex unions in March; the northern state of Coahuila pioneered it in January. On April 12, the Senate began discussing the legalization of euthanasia. And the Supreme Court ruled in February that soldiers who are HIV-positive cannot be expelled from the military. But the abortion debate has sparked the loudest outcry – and underscored the weakening influence of the Roman Catholic Church as well as the rural-urban divide in the country.

Rural areas oppose abortion

In the tiny villages surrounding Lake Patzcuaro in the agricultural state of Michoacan, life has hardly changed over the decades – even as Mexico City, five hours south, has become one of the world's largest megalopolises.

But the vote to legalize abortion in the capital for any reason has sent ripples among these communities in the home state of Mexico's conservative president Felipe Calderón.

"This is so difficult; it's a life," says Gabriela Rendon, as her two young boys gallop across her toy store in the town of Quiroga. "Things in the city are changing too much, and they change the whole culture of the country."

Mexico already allows abortion in the first trimester if the woman's life is in danger or in cases of rape and incest. The new bill was proposed by the leftist Democratic Revolution Party – the party of defeated presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who refuses to concede defeat to President Calderón – in the Mexico City assembly.

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