Thaindian News

Mexico City, May 29 (IANS/EFE) Activists from more than 40 civil organisations protested in Mexico City to demand that the federal government permit abortion nationwide as a woman’s right to decide about her own body.

“Deciding is not a crime, it is a right…we’re not reproduction machines, we’re women with the right to decide” were some of the slogans chanted by the close to 100 women protesting outside the federal health ministry.

Federal law states that interrupting a pregnancy is legal only if the mother’s life is in danger, if the foetus is deformed or if the pregnancy was caused by rape or an unauthorised artificial insemination.

If none of those conditions exist, abortion can bring penalties for the woman who authorises it and the doctor who performs it, except in the Mexican capital, governed by the left, where abortion is allowed up to the 12th week of gestation, a procedure that was legalized in 2007 and to which more than 54,000 women have had recourse since then.

Martha Juarez, spokeswoman for the National Pact for Life, Liberty and Women’s Rights - made up of more than 40 organisations - said that “thousands of Mexican women are denied their right to health as well as their sexual and reproductive rights, which should be theirs without exclusions or restrictions all their lives”.

According to the activist, the criminalisation of abortion has prevented trustworthy, up-to-date records from being kept on the number of interrupted pregnancies in this country and the frequency of complications and deaths from that cause.

A total of 15 state legislatures have anti-abortion laws, and all they have achieved “is an increase in the number of women jailed for interruption of pregnancy”, Juarez said.

“It’s not fair that many are in jail because of a national strategy by parties of the right, working together with the Catholic Church, to ban this right of women at any cost,” she said.

–IANS/EFE
rd