According to the National Catholic Register, more than 120,000 people in Mexico have signed a petition asking their Supreme Judicial Court to reaffirm that “abortion is not a right.” The pro-life organization, CitizenGo, launched the petition after a lawsuit over the constitutionality of the Mexican state of Tlaxcala’s abortion-reform law attempted to open door to abortion in the whole country.
CitizenGo said, “Declaring the law unconstitutional would entail a grave violation of the first of all rights, the right to life, and would be contrary to international treaties.”
The CitizenGo petition acknowledges that the Mexican court is “debating the exceptions in the penal code for abortion in the state of Tlaxcala.” It says, “Nevertheless, if eight associate judges vote to declare Tlaxcala’s law unconstitutional, the immediate effect would be to invalidate Tlaxcala’s abortion-reform law, and the secondary effect would be that the court’s ruling would be obligatory for all the judges in the country. As a result, in every state, any person could have an abortion by means of appealing for constitutional judicial relief from the penal code. The judges would be obliged to grant judicial relief, and nothing would protect the unborn child.”
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As LifeNews previously reported, in 2011 González Salas unsuccessfully petitioned the court to overturn pro-life laws in the Mexican states of Baja California and San Luis Potosi. Since the case dealt with whether a state can restrict abortion under the federal constitution in Mexico, the case had been dubbed Mexico’s “Roe v. Wade.” The decision declared that the state’s constitution did not conflict with the nation’s constitution, because the rights of the unborn have long been recognized in Mexican federal law.
Mailee Smith, an attorney from Americans United for Life said the following about the 2011 case: “We argued before the Supreme Court of Mexico that the Court should respect Baja’s amendment because it protects women from the physical and psychological harms inherent in abortion. With the Court’s decision, Baja can move forward to further protect both women and the unborn.”
The CitiizenGo petition is being sent to the president of the Mexican Supreme Court, Luis Maria Aguilar Morales; Supreme Court Associate Justice, José Fernando Franco González Salas; and the president of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto.
Here’s more:
The more than 120,000 signers of the petition reminded the court that “the right to life from conception is recognized in the International Covenant on Political and Civil Rights (ICCPR) of which Mexico is a signatory.”
Additionally, the U.N. Convention of the Rights of the Child establishes the child’s right to protection — in the ninth paragraph of the preamble, it is established that every minor holds the right to have his life protected, including before birth. In Article 6, Paragraph 1, it says that every child intrinsically has the right to life.
The Convention on the Rights of the Child further emphasizes that “the unborn child from the moment he is conceived must come under the protection of the law. If someone attacks a pregnant woman and she loses the child, the aggressor is punishable for the injuries to the woman and the death of the baby.”
Based on these legal precedents, the signers of the Mexican petition called on the court to affirm the right to life as it makes its decision in the Tlaxcala case.
“Respect our legal tradition, our constitutional accords, the international treaties that Mexico has signed and our principles and values as a nation,” they demanded, emphasizing, “The right to abortion does not exist.”
