Mexico Sees Pro-Life Attorneys File Lawsuit to Overturn Mexico City Abortion Law
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
August 18, 2009
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — A group of pro-life Catholic attorneys in Mexico have filed a second legal challenge to the recent law in Mexico City that legalized abortions. The federal district’s legislative assembly, in April 2007, approved a bill that legalized abortion within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.
While legal abortions in very limited cases such as rape and incest occur in various parts of the country, Mexico largely prohibits abortions.
The Archdiocese of Mexico City’s weekly newspaper, Desde la Fe, said in April that 23,000 abortions that have been done since legalization and notes that at least 14 women have died from legal abortions in just two years.
A prior legal challenge filed at the nation’s top Supreme Court that pro-life advocates said was a partial victory because it did not establish abortion as a constitutional right that would affect all states and jurisdictions in Mexico.
Now, the College of Catholic Lawyers of Mexico has filed a legal complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The group contends the abortion law violates Article 1 of the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man.
They say the Mexico City law legalizing abortions “violates the human rights of the unborn and disassociates from them the term death, which seems to erase their status as human beings and does not recognize that their lives are being ended.”
In its editorial, the Catholic newspaper warned that the “immoral, unjust and intrinsically perverse” legal abortion law is disrupting “the consciences of all those involved,” and making it so the next generation of Mexicans see killing unborn children as a normal part of society.
The newspaper praised the efforts by the state legislatures of numerous Mexican states in the last few months to strengthen their own laws prohibiting abortions.
Jorge Serrano Limon, the head of the anti-abortion group Provida, told the Christian Science Monitor after the Mexico City vote that he’s concerned that if abortion is legalized that euthanasia will be next.
"Today it’s abortion; tomorrow it’s euthanasia," he says. "It will be a chain that denigrates Mexican society."
Raimundo Rojas, the Hispanic outreach director for National Right to Life, urges pro-life advocates to continue working to stop abortions in Mexico.
"The push for a world-wide ‘right to abortion’ never ends because pro-abortion forces strategically chose areas where pro-life laws are vulnerable. Places where left-leaning governments are in place are their favorite targets, due to the fact that as a rule, leftist governments are anti-church and very liberal on social issues," he told LifeNews.com.
"Pro-lifers in Mexico City have much work ahead of them, and they must take their fight to the streets. It is imperative for them to take this argument to the good people of Mexico City and in the strongest possible terms make them aware that abortion destroys," he added.
Related web sites:
Comite Nacional Pro Vida – https://www.comiteprovida.org
National Right to Life – https://www.nrlc.org
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