The Mexican states of Guanajuato and San Luis Potosi will maintain their legal protections for unborn babies after lawmakers rejected efforts to legalize abortions this month.
Crux reports state lawmakers in Guanajuato voted against two pro-abortion proposals Monday, including one that would have allowed unborn babies to be aborted up to 12 weeks of pregnancy. The committee vote was 3-6 against moving forward with the measures to legalize abortion, the Yucatan Times reports.
Last week, state lawmakers in San Luis Potosi also rejected by a strong majority a bill to legalize abortions in their state, according to the report.
Both states are located in central Mexico.
Abortion laws vary by state in Mexico. Abortions are legal up to 12 weeks in Mexico City, but most states prohibit or widely restrict the killing of unborn babies in abortions.
Still, abortion activists are putting continuous pressure on the country to legalize abortion. In early March, they engaged in violent protests across Mexico, setting fire to a church, smashing windows, spraying graffiti on landmarks and more.
The hostilities continued this month as Guanajuato debated the pro-abortion proposals. According to Crux, someone spray-painted pro-abortion graffiti on Our Lady of the Light Cathedral, a Catholic church in the state.
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“As the Catholic Church, we express respect toward people and, what I ask of them, from those of us in favor of freedom of expression, (is) to be open and that we have a dialogue,” Archdiocese of Leon spokesman Father Marcos Cortes Muniz said in a statement. “Let us stay in our homes and remember that in the face of these attacks we have to respond with an attitude of peace.”
On May 26, pro-abortion feminists also vandalized “the Arco de la Calzada de los Héroes, a wall of the metropolitan cathedral of León, the PAN Municipal Committee building and other properties near the State Congress,” according to the Yucatan Times.
Later in the day, people with Provida (pro-life) groups cleaned the graffiti off of the cathedral of León, the report states.
Nationally, Interior Minister Olga Sanchez Cordero has been urging lawmakers to legalize abortions, but President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has been quiet about the issue, according to Crux.
Some states have pushed back against the pressure to legalize abortion by reaffirming unborn babies’ right to life. In 2016, the AP reported 18 of the 32 states in Mexico passed right to life measures, including state constitutional amendments recognizing that unborn babies deserve protections under the law. This includes the state of Veracruz, which approved a constitutional amendment to “protect life from conception.”
Opposition to abortion is strong in Mexico. March for Life events in the country have drawn hundreds of thousands of people together to stand up for the rights of unborn babies.
