Mexico City Teen Dies From Legal Abortion as Supreme Court Weighs New Law 
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by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
February 22, 2008
Mexico City, Mexico (LifeNews.com) — As the Mexico Supreme Court considers a legal challenge to a new law in Mexico City that allows abortions up to 12 weeks into pregnancy, new reports indicate a teenager has died from an abortion. A 15-year-old girl died after an abortion practitioner failed to properly treat her.
According to the Mexico City daily newspaper El Universal, the girl, named Vianney, died on February 15 at Balbuena Hospital from a hemorrhage that occurred after a botched abortion.
The newspaper indicated there have been 6,132 abortions in the 10 months since the capital’s legislative assembly approved the abortion law last April.
El Universal quoted officials from the Federal District Health Department saying Vianney was suffering from acute anemia when she arrived at the hospital. Health authorities indicated medical officials did nothing about the girl’s condition and, when she began bleeding heavily form the abortion, her situation became grave.
The newspaper also indicated that the abortion practitioner did not do an ultrasound beforehand and medical officials eventually learned Vianney was 16 weeks pregnant — further along than the abortion practitioner realized or than the new law allowed.
Thus far, 272 teenagers have had abortions under the new law, the newspaper indicated.
Raimundo Rojas, the Hispanic Outreach Director for National Right to Life, talked with LifeNews.com about the girl’s death.
"This is an unfolding tragedy that will continue to spread like a cancer if the good people of Mexico do not act and react to this story," he said.
"A young woman has lost her life, nearly 6,000 children already slaughtered, and the abortion industry continues to insist that abortion is the panacea for the women of the Americas," he added.
The death comes as the nation’s high court is considering challenges from the National Human Rights Commission and the federal Attorney General’s Office, which say the new abortion law violates the Mexico Constitution.
The document offers an acknowledgement of the right to life of all people.
The high court began its latest term on January 2 and the case against the abortion law is slated as the first decision it will hand down.
Abortion, as it is in most of the nations in the Caribbean and Latin America, is illegal throughout the rest of Mexico and its federal Congress doesn’t appear likely to legalize abortion nationwide.
Most women pay nothing for the abortions at the public hospitals, artificially making abortion seem a better alternative, especially for poor women.
Mexico City officials say that about 75 percent of the abortions done there have been surgical in nature, with women in the rest using the dangerous RU 486 abortion drug that has already claimed more than a dozen lives worldwide and six in the United States alone.
